American Liberals and Conservatives Think as If from Different Cultures

Political conservatives in the United States are somewhat like East Asians in the way they think, categorize and perceive. Liberals in the U.S. could be categorized as extreme Americans in thought, categorization and perception. That is the gist of a new University of Virginia cultural psychology study, published recently in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Additionally, the study indicates that thought styles–whether analytical or holistic–can be changed through training, enough so to temporarily change political thought and the way a person might vote.

“We found in our study that liberals and conservatives think as if they were from completely different cultures–almost as different as East and West,” said study leader Thomas Talhelm, a U.Va. doctoral candidate in cultural psychology. “Liberals and conservatives categorize and perceive things differently, just as East Asians and Westerners look differently at the world.”

According to Talhelm, political conservatives in the United States, generally, and East Asians, particularly, are intuitive or “holistic” thinkers, while Westerners, generally, and American liberals, in particular, are more analytical thinkers.

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“On psychological tests, Westerners tend to view scenes, explain behavior and categorize objects analytically,” Talhelm said. “But the vast majority of people around the world–about 85 percent–more often think intuitively–what psychologists call holistic thought, and we found that’s how conservative Americans tend to think.”

Holistic thought more often uses intention and the perception of whole objects or situations, rather than breaking them down to their parts–such as having a general feeling about a situation involving intuition or tact.

Analytic thinking styles tend to look at the parts of a situation, and how they work together toward the whole. This involves “slicing up the world and analyzing objects individually, divorced from context,” Talhelm said.

Studies show that analytical thinkers predominate in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies (termed “WEIRD” societies in 2010 by a team of cultural psychologists at the University of British Columbia). But they make up only about 15 percent of the world’s population.

So in a WEIRD society, such as the United States, analytically thinking liberals are “extreme Americans,” Talhelm said, in the sense that they are particularly disinclined to think in the style of a vast majority of the rest of the world, including their holistic-thinking conservative countrymen.

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