Edit: review from adjacent thread
There are some shenanigans in this paper so far, like using regional statistics (conservative places) to generalize about very particular sociopolitical cleavages (conservative ideology) and failure to control for, or even acknowledge, more obvious independent variables such as local economy, infrastructure, and socioeconomics.
Conservative areas are poorer in most of the states, which do have worse health outcomes, so I think they just overtuned and excluded the poors.
I don’t really want to read that garbage to properly rebut it.
This is directly contradictory to other super obvious evidence. Like the fact that conservative states have much lower life expectancy.
I think there’s some tomfoolery with this study.
The paper doesn’t even prove that they are healthier due to a greater sense of personal responsibility. It only theorizes this sense of personal responsibility is a possible cause. As others have pointed out the study results could be explained simply by picking conservatives that are upperclass and have more time/energy/money to spend on being healthy.
Or stronger notions of what body types are compatible with the gender role they perceive.
Edited to clarify it’s what they perceive as their gender role. Ie the sexist notion that “it’s the duty of a husband to be strong, and the duty of a wife to be dainty”
“Personality and Individual Differences”? I wonder who publishes that… aaand it’s Elsevier.
I wonder if conservatives feel personally responsible for persecuting lgbtq folks or their role as staunch defenders of legalized pedophilia in the form of child marraige. Maybe the systemic and pervasive racism they’ve baked into our country and legal system? Oh that’s a feature not a bug?
This is such an amazing premise that seems to have absolutely zero grounding in reality. They should have tested the concept of “ignorance is bliss”, because there is a whole of that going around and I could see it as a legitimate reason why they may in a mental health capacity be healthier.
When you are aware of the realities of the world they can take a psychological toll. It does make for a weird combination when you look at their overall “everyone is out to get you so you should hate everyone not like you” mentality, but at least they aren’t worried about their countrymen pulling a civil war or any semblance of the realty of global warming or major health crisis like say a pandemic.
The idea that conservatives feel any capacity of responsibility for their political actions is just laughable. They would sooner shift blame than consider their ideology has any cracks. Faith doesn’t allow them to consider they might be wrong and any information to the contrary is just fake news.
Now hold on they need to go vote for a guy that used the pandemic to try to kill his political rivals voters and then lied about losing the election to spark a coupt attempt to attempt to overthrow the duely elected government. They feel so responsible for it they are doing everything to play it down and pretend it didnt happen. But also they are the most patriotic people and don’t forget that.
Publish date “2019” ya that makes sense. If this was the case before the pandemic it certainly isn’t anymore.
The methodology of this study isn’t very convincing IMO. Study 1 is irrelevant (self reported subjective data). Study 2 implys that a small sample size picking to use stairs instead of an elevator to go up one floor means one group is more healthy, this is meaningless IMO,. Study 3 just looks at which groups intend on quitting smoking, with the conservative group being more likely to be wanting to quit. I could jump to a number of conclusions from this that have nothing to do with “personal responsibility”.
Overall what a waste of my time.
Edit: I just went and looked at the Reddit comments on this post, they also tore it apart with some decent numbers showing how wrong the this is.
Conservative statistics have a higher level of bullshit because they have a greater sense of fabricating correlations not based on fact.
I wouldnt be surprised tbh.
Well you would be wrong, this study is clearly a farce.
Can u provide some evidance to ypur viewpoint please. Because an study regardless of accuracy or correctness still holds more weight in my books that some rando on the internet.
The primary weakness of this paper is its complete reliance on two extremely small and poorly-designed studies. The first was performed on Reddit with n = 194 Redditors who self-reported how healthy they were on a 9 point scale, how liberal/conservative they felt on a 9 point scale, and answered a series of questions to establish a personal responsibility score (PRS). The second was performed with n = 204 local students, mostly teenagers, recruited based on political party affiliation, whose healthiness was established only by how often they claimed to take the stairs.
You should be able to identify at least 6 major design flaws in the studies above, but in short the researcher not only failed to prevent but seemingly employed predictable biases, especially in regards to his measures of health, which were entirely self-reported. It should go without saying but just because some group of people tend to consider themselves better than others in some respect does not actually make it so, especially when it comes to popular vanity metrics. Yet that is precisely what this paper claims.
As to contrary evidence: you typically won’t find a paper published in any serious journal whose thesis is so close to “ideology A is better.” Eschewing scholarly impartiality on politically charged topics is generally frowned upon. Doing so in exchange for publishing and/or favor with wealthy patrons has always been possible, and while increasingly prevalent in recent years, it is primarily the realm of conservative academics if only because it causes a greater stir (shares, citations, impact factor). Even using the loaded phrase “personal responsibility” in a political context, and equating it to the term used in health literature, marks this as a rather obvious insider piece not subject to the typical quality controls. So, it’s unlikely you will easily find an equivalently obnoxious antithesis like “conservatives are less fit,” “liberals have better dental hygiene,” or what have you. But does that mean conservatives are healthier?
No. We can confirm this a variety of ways, since exposure to any social science will routinely surround you with high quality evidence to the contrary, but here is where I would start:
- With high statistical significance, positive health outcomes are strongly correlated with education.
- Yet, education is inversely correlated with political conservatism in nearly every developed nation in the world with high magnitude and significance.
If I could live forever on the premise of I never, ever, stop talking, I would spend all my time nitpicking every conservative point that is skewed to make it look like their opinion is right. However, I have a life to live, so I cannot go over it point by point. All I have to say here is that when I was looking over the study and its sources when I felt like posting, I could not take the data presented in good faith because it seems overtly clear that it is a biased study.
So as much as I would like to, I would just have to point you to the other comments here regarding Elsevier’s history of “scientific journals” and other peoples qualms about the study.
So u will provide an opinion with nothing to back it?
Welcome to the Internet, I guess?
