[satellitecat]

On it being "worse" and liberals being unafraid in the way psychopaths are -- it could be that they are unafraid of things that can't hurt them, like the "scary" staged photo in the article. Maybe if they used realistic pictures, they'd get an actual response. And of course a picture of something scary and something actually scary is quite different.

Makes me remember when I found a video online of a guy getting attacked by a lionesss. At first I thought it was fake or that the guy would get away, but when I realized it was real and saw him getting more and more tired of fighting the lioness off, I started feeling sick.

So a different takeaway could be that conservative-types are scared of imagined or suggested dangers or that liberal-types are better at discriminating between real and fake dangers. So I think it's more about the way the imaginations of the people work.

[ScottBurson]

This is a very interesting comment. I'd love to see a followup study addressing the hypothesis that "liberals" place more emphasis on, and are better at, discriminating true threats from the appearance of threat than "conservatives".

Such improved discrimination wouldn't necessarily have been evolutionarily adaptive, it seems to me. First, there's the risk of false negatives: you might incorrectly dismiss a real threat. Second, such discrimination takes time that might be better spent fleeing (or whatever).

I can see that the optimal strategy might be to maintain a dynamic balance in the population between "discriminators" and "reactors". "Reactors" might get killed less often, but without a certain number of "discriminators" in the population, the tribe (or whatever) would fail to maximize its utilization of the environment and thus not compete well against neighboring tribes.

[humanrebar]

The thesis of the blog post wasn't that liberals are psychopaths. It was this:

"You can blame the general news media for being lazy and/or retarded. But the authors of the study are directly to blame for purposely skewing the results to the conclusion that conservatives are cowards.... When you write something, you must be aware of how people will read it. Since it is very obvious how this study will be taken, it is the authors' responsibility to prevent it from happening. Notice that they did not, anywhere write the equally plausible possibility that liberals inexplicably exhibit much less fear than would be expected"

[satellitecat]

I know, just that they behave similarly to the pictures shown. My point was just that I think the reason liberal-type people don't react to the image can be either that the images themselves are not dangerous, or that the images do not depict actual scary situations (the model with the spider on her head is not actually scared or in danger).

(Whereas a psychopath, lacking empathy, would not react much to even real images)

[unclebucknasty]

>it could be that they are unafraid of things that can't hurt them

This was exactly my thought. It is actually unreasonable to be afraid of a photograph.

I would imagine that all people are subject to unreasonable levels of fear in various situations, but this does seem to show that conservatives may experience higher levels of unreasonable fear.