[postflopclarity]

seems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)

[seff]

I feel like the obvious answer this topic is circling is that the left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet), while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.)

I think this is bait because it's the sort of thinking that 'feels right' without thinking too hard about it.

[watwut]

> while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.)

Not true. Right idea of family valuea is not about empathy and does not have much elements of empathy. It is more about establishing hierarchy and punishing you if you step put of it.

It is not even like they would be more emphatic toward disabled close ones. They dont extend empathy toward abused or sexually harassed female familly member or kid. Or to gay familly member.

Inward focus of the right is toward the members of they political and social group.

> left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet)

Left do cares more about planet, but also toward close ones that need help. A lot of leftist activism is motivated by personal experiences and experiences of close ones.

[skeledrew]

> It is not even like they would be more emphatic toward disabled close ones. They dont extend empathy toward abused or sexually harassed female familly member or kid. Or to gay familly member.

From a biological/evolutionary standpoint, that's the correct approach. Anything that reduces - chances at - reproduction or makes the population less fit is an issue that makes said population tend toward extinction.

[NietzscheanNull]

> From a biological/evolutionary standpoint, that's the correct approach.

I believe the science disagrees on this point. In the case of humans, adaptations that contributed most to our success as a species are a constellation of pro-social traits that enabled us to cooperate in organized fashion in relatively large numbers (which empathy plays a major role in mediating).

Evolutionary fitness is not always meaningful at the level of the individual, particularly in social animals. IIRC, there are a number of species in which individually-disadvantageous (i.e. purely altruistic) behaviors are conserved, despite their apparent adverse effects on individual fitness.

[skeledrew]

Humans being social animals doesn't detract from the point at all. Here, it's particularly regarding the small subsets that aren't "fit" from a Darwinian perspective. For example a homosexual is unfit because they will almost never reproduce to pass on their genes (adoption doesn't count), and so it would be disadvantageous to the group (again, from a Darwinian perspective) to "waste" any resources (even empathy) on any unfit individuals. Conversely a serial rapist would be very fit as they aggressively seek to pass on their genes.

And we see it playing out globally: as groups become more socially conscious (aka "woke"), their TFR decreases. Just look at a world map showing TFR, and overlay that on one showing "wokeness" by nation. European nations are generally the most woke in the world, and have a generally low TFR. African nations are generally the least woke in the world, and have a comparatively high TFR.

[cryzinger]

Agreed, although one thing I'll grant is that these days it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals, who obviously skew conservative, and there's not really a counterpart to that on the left. So even if families are getting smaller in general across the political spectrum, could it be that the outliers are imbalanced?

[WarOnPrivacy]

> it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals

It's possible this has changed but I would name Catholics and Mormons as topping the large family demographics in the US (although in 2015, Pew disagreed¹ with my assertions about Catholics).

Does this challenge your overall point about conservatives? I'm not sure.

It is my experience that a rise in Evangelicals' political power is eventually followed by returns to their historical disregard/animosity for Catholics² and Mormons³. Being on the receiving end of serial demonization can shove folks away from the ideologies that generate it.

¹ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/americas-cha...

² https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/peter-thiel-antichrist-remarks-pop...

³ https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/07/02/how-pete-hegseths...

[mike_hearn]

With academic social studies you can usually assume they've controlled for the basics like that, especially if the conclusions are unfortunate for the left which always means rigor gets ramped up significantly. They're working from large scale surveys and controlling for simple confounders is easy.

Sure enough:

> Arpino & Mogi explored mechanisms behind this reproductive pattern, finding that extreme right individuals were 4–5 percentage points more likely than centrists to intend having a child within three years. This effect persisted after controlling for religiosity, education, and income

You can just grep papers for "control" to check this sort of thing, as terminology is quite consistent.

There are big differences between left and right in fertility (=how many children you choose to have, in demographic discussions) and this isn't at all a controversial claim in social studies. The question is not does it exist or is it confounded but why does it occur - or if you really want, what underlying factors strongly correlated with leftism are the true cause. You can think of that as confounders if you like.

[postflopclarity]

I don't know if I'd call this an "unfortunate" result or not. it's neither good nor bad, just a thing.

Arpino & Mogi are different authors that wrote a different paper that I didn't read. _This_ paper does not appear to have controlled for much at all in its primary contribution of analysis of US GSS data, and all the conclusions reached appear to me to be purely observational.

Another nuance is that since their analysis consists of filtering to people already over 40, and then asking about political leaning, there is no way to infer anything about causal association of left - vs - right ideology and fertility. For example, "having children makes you more right wing" is an equally plausible explanation for this data as "being right wing causes you to have more children" (or maybe neither of these statements are true at all, and it's caused by a variety of other confounding factors).