When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Towards Victim’s Beliefs

These dynamics aren’t entirely new: As Musa al-Gharbi writes in an essay for American Affairs, the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives is a persistent social-science finding, visible across several eras and many countries. Meanwhile, the view that “my life is pretty good, but the country is going to hell,” which seems to motivate a certain kind of middle-class Donald Trump supporter, would have been unsurprising to hear in a bar or at a barbecue in 1975 or 1990, no less than today.

If conservatives and liberals have differing moral visions of what a good government is and what a good life is, what turned their relationship to mutually destructive?

In her emailed reply, Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right. She cited research that

found 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals. Being threatened by the world, in turn, correlated with support for the Muslim ban and building a US-Mexico wall. But if perceived threat were measured by endorsement of the statement “The U.S. is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” the results would likely look different — liberals, thinking of gun violence, may appear very high in threat perception.

I think that the reasons conservatives blame the victim have more to do with the belief that bad things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people than with binding values.

the values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals. It has been shown that binding values are associated with Machiavellianism, as well as victim derogation, blame and beliefs that victims were contributors for a variety of harmful acts.

A paper published in 2016 titled When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Towards Victims shows the effects of ideology on responses to descriptions of crimes.

Why Conservatives are Happier Than Liberals: A Psychological Implications for Liberalism, Conservatism and Other Social-Cultural Differences

A variety of factors may affect the evolution of liberalism and conservatism, as well as other social-cultural differences. The content of rules people made and how they enforced them are some of the things that affected social-political developments. Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the US historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.

Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:

It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are, that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world. If you think that the world is not just and you think of yourself as a moral person, then you’d feel obligated to change things.

I wondered why surveys say conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”

It is a combination of factors. Conservatives are more likely to be married and patriotic, all of which make people happier. They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals place politics closer to their identity, which makes it easy for them to be frustrated.

Some features of the woke version of liberalism may make people feel worse: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff suggest, wokeism is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that encourages the maladaptive mental habits of people.