Does leaning left politically make you a more prosocial person?
(phys.org)4 points by PaulHoule 17 hours ago | 4 comments
4 points by PaulHoule 17 hours ago | 4 comments
perrygeo 14 hours ago | root | parent |
I'm not sure Extroversion/Introversion is related to prosocial behavior in any direct way. Prosocial always refers to cooperation, fairness, and acting on behalf of society as a whole. IOW prosocial is the opposite of self-interested, not the opposite of shy.
We know that psychopathic, anti-social people (ie the dark triad types) score very high on extroversion. They direct their energy outwards to manipulate others - the polar opposite of "prosocial".
Shy introverted people low on the extroversion scale also demonstrate lower prosocial behavior on average, mostly through avoidance.
The most introverted and the most extroverted people are thus equally likely to engage in anti-social behavior (though qualitatively different, both ends of the spectrum are looking out for #1)
marcus0x62 16 hours ago | prev | next |
> When prosociality was measured using self-report trait scales, the picture was considerably clearer in favor of a substantive link between prosociality and political orientation: All but one of the 50 correlations considered were meaningful (i.e., r≥ |.10|), and all these correlations were in the same direction. That is, participants with a stronger left-wing orientation reported higher levels of trait prosociality.
Given the subject matter, this seems completely unsurprising and almost completely meaningless: left-leaning participants claim to be more pro-social.
> When prosociality was measured in economic games, we only found a few meaningful correlations with political orientation, mostly for SVO. Except for one indicator of political orientation (i.e., economic political orientation), higher (i.e., more prosocial) levels of SVO were associated with greater preference for left-wing ideologies and parties. However, effect sizes were small throughout, reaching a maximum of r = –.15. In turn, none of the other behavioral (game-based) measures of prosociality yielded consistent relations with political orientation. Also, the sample size-weighted average correlation of political orientation with prosocial behavior across all games employed failed to reach our predefined criterion of a meaningful effect (r < |.10|). Overall, these findings replicate previous research, which likewise showed most consistent links between political orientation and prosocial behavior when the latter was operationalized through SVO (Balliet et al., 2018; Chirumbolo et al., 2016; Sheldon & Nichols, 2009; van Lange et al., 2012).
When measured with even a little indirection? The effect all but disappears.
carlosjobim 16 hours ago | prev |
Logically it should. Leftists are dependent on other people for their sustentation, while rightists can be self sufficient. When was the last time you heard about a socialist living alone in a cabin or on a boat.
LinuxBender 15 hours ago | next |
Not everything has to be mapped to a political affiliation. In this case I believe a more appropriate mapping would be to a combination of personality type, psychological profile and upbringing as to how extroverted vs introverted one may be.