Liberals love to obsessively talk about equality – but according to varies studies, that’s about all they do on the matter. When it comes to how people are actually treated, those with conservatives are the most likely to treat everyone equally, and don’t even see the need to endlessly discuss and make a religion out of something that is effectively common sense.
According to a summary of the findings published in the left-leaning Psychology Today:
- When it comes to personality measures, liberals appear more egalitarian than conservatives, in that they claim to value equality more.
- Despite liberals’ self-reported support for equality, they don’t treat groups more equally than conservatives.
- In a set of studies, liberals wished to censor written passages that portrayed low-status groups unfavorably more than identical passages that portrayed high-status groups unfavorably, whereas conservatives treated the passages more comparably.
- In a more naturalistic study on Twitter, liberals were more likely to amplify the successes of female and Black athletes than male and White athletes, whereas conservatives treated the successes of groups more similarly. In another set of studies, White liberals presented less self-competence to Black than White interaction partners, whereas White conservatives treated Black and White interaction partners more similarly. And in another set, liberals had stronger desires to censor passages that portrayed low-status groups unfavorably than identical passages that portrayed high-status groups unfavorably, whereas conservatives treated the passages more comparably.
- Other teams of researchers have found similar patterns in other domains. For example, people had more generous acceptance criteria for admitting Black than White candidates to an honor society, and this tendency was stronger among liberals. Whereas those high in social dominance orientation favored a White over a Black job applicant, the reverse tendency to favor a Black over a White job applicant was stronger among those low in social dominance orientation.
- Whereas those high on system justification (correlated with more conservative ideology) found jokes that target low-status and high-status groups similarly funny, those low on system justification (liberals) found jokes that target low-status groups less funny than those that target high-status groups.
The writer at Psychology Today does try to provide an excuse for these results, that “This doesn’t necessarily mean that liberals are not egalitarian. It might be that liberals prioritize equality of outcomes and view unequal treatment (at least for a time) as a means that attaining equal outcomes.” Translation: they’re discriminatory…. but for the “right cause”!
Elsewhere, research from Yale assistant professor of organization behavior Cydney Dupree in 2018 found that white liberals talk different to minorities than they do to other people in a manner that could easily be described as racist. White liberals tend to dumb down their vocabulary when speaking to minorities, while conservatives speak the same way to everyone. “It was kind of an unpleasant surprise to see this subtle but persistent effect,” Dupree said. “Even if it’s ultimately well-intentioned, it could be seen as patronizing.”
I’ll only disagree that it “could be seen” as patronizing. It’s just patronizing, period.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and de Blasio Ruined New York, Debunk This: Shattering Liberal Lies, and Spygate
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