Political Psychology Links, 10/21/2025
Lyman Stone on marital status and conservatism; Josh Zlatkus on the fundamental attribution error; Greg Lukianoff on gender, ideology, and tolerance; Helen Andrews on same
Lyman Stone digs into survey data.
About half of all conservatives are heterosexual married people, and homosexual people of any status are <5% of conservatives. On the other hand, we can see that literally 1-in-4 extremely liberal people are homosexual or bisexual (btw, I’m just using the GSS category labels here), and among all liberals combined less than 1/3 are married heterosexuals…
Being extremely liberal produces like 8 TIMES the risk of saying your marriage is not too happy as being extremely conservative!
…Conservatives top out saying “Children are the greatest joy in life” and “Parenting is a very important job.”
Liberals top out… everything else. Liberals are likelier to say it would be better never to be born. Liberals are more worried about passing on bad genes. Liberals are likelier to say children are a burden. Liberals have more negative views of their own parenting (sadly, this view is probably empirically justified). Liberals are likelier to say parenting is complicated and stressful. Liberals are likelier to say past traumas influence their parenting and likelier to report mental health barriers to parenting.
Perhaps the main argument:
To the extent you are moved by particularistic loves of your kin, you really are “performing conservatism.”
Progressives are stereotypically cosmopolitan. You are supposed to care about the oppressed, wherever they are. It’s low-class to care more about your own family, community, faith group or country.
So it is understandable that conservatism and particularism would tend to go together. We can be agnostic about causality. For this discussion, we can also be agnostic about which is the preferable moral outlook.
humans over-index on personal rather than situational differences, a bias that is perhaps amplified in the helping professions. This tendency is so common that it has a name: the fundamental attribution error.
In reality, humans are more alike than different, and what compels us to act differently is mostly the different scenarios we find ourselves in. Each of us can be understood as a human in a particular situation, with a history of particular situations.
Men are, on average, significantly more tolerant and less censorious than women. By contrast, while political affiliation makes people more biased towards speakers on their side, it affects their overall willingness to let speakers speak, regardless of ideology, very little. However, regardless of party or ideology, men are significantly more tolerant than women, so much so that the gender difference dominates the ideology difference. This effect is even more acute in the extremes: men are over 3.5 times more likely than women to be “perfectly tolerant” of opposing views — meaning they would definitely allow any campus speakers, including those they disagree with.
…And while left-wing women are stereotypically seen as being uniquely censorial, the reality is that this tendency applies to all groups of women, regardless of ideology.
And what has happened to college campuses as the proportion of women has risen? Of course, just by saying this, I can expect to get unsubscribes from women.
I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power. I think people will be surprised to discover how much of our current feminization is attributable to institutional changes like the advent of HR, which were brought about by legal changes and which legal changes can reverse.
Because, after all, I am not just a woman. I am also someone with a lot of disagreeable opinions, who will find it hard to flourish if society becomes more conflict-averse and consensus-driven. I am the mother of sons, who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world. I am—we all are—dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life, and we will all suffer if they cease to perform the tasks they were designed to do.
substacks referenced above:
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> "For this discussion, we can also be agnostic about which is the preferable moral outlook."
But generally, I don't believe we can, because one outlook seems life affirming and sustainable while the other seems to be rank nihilism.
If you click through the fundamental attribution error link you can go on to the Ultimate Attribution Error. Something that may have mattered more in the course of history at various times and places. And which may have some interesting implications with regard to the current Pied Pipers of the internet that wish to tell everyone else about groups they aren't a part of and often have mostly data free insights on. Even with data it would seem that often the modern theologian is still very concerned with rooting out heresy.
"the tendency for persons from one group (the ingroup) to determine that any bad acts by members of an outgroup—for example, a racial or ethnic minority group—are caused by internal attributes or traits rather than by outside circumstances or situations, while viewing their positive behaviors as merely exceptions to the rule or the result of luck. Conversely, ingroup members will overestimate the effects of their own perceived internal attributes—for example, intelligence—and underplay situational forces when evaluating their successes, and they will place more emphasis on external factors when explaining their failures or faults." - https://dictionary.apa.org/ultimate-attribution-error