Some of the far right conservatives that I have encountered have truly left me wondering if these folks weren't simply mentally ill. Not in a raving lunatic sort of way, but rather a seriously unbalanced way. Their fear of anyone or anything different or "other" was irrational. As was their extreme need to (i) feel superior about themselves (e.g., a need to see others as unworthy sinners) and (ii) have an exact certainty that by checking off certain boxes on their list of "God's rules" they would go to Heaven. Anyone different and/or any uncertainty is enough to send them into psychological overload. An article in The Atlantic looks at homophobia and the mental/emotional attributes of homophobes and conservatives more generally. The take away? That these people DO have mental issues. Here are excerpts:
[Homophobia] It’s a term that’s still too useful to abandon. Social psychologists have mounds of research on the role that emotions like fear and repugnance play in distorting our assessments of reality—that is, in creating bias. For starters, they’ve found that conscious reasoning is a much newer human capacity—evolutionarily—than gut feeling, and that the brain often deploys reasoned thought to rationalize feelings we already have. Rather than justifying a position—like, say, opposing gay marriage—based on how we actually feel, we often dream up non-existent dangers. Indeed, scientists have shown that our brains developed fight-or-flight mechanisms to help us avoid danger before our rational, deliberative machinery even perceives the threat.
Interestingly, researchers at Cornell and Yale (including Atlantic contributor Paul Bloom) have also shown that conservatives, on average, experience stronger levels of disgust than liberals do, and that an overall sensitivity to disgust correlates with anti-gay sentiment. “Our data show that disgust and politics are linked most strongly for issues of purity, such as towards homosexuality,” the authors explain.
Even more strikingly, researchers have found that people with negative views of gay people are prone to overstate the risks that gay rights pose. In one study, psychologists at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University measured subjects’ emotional dispositions and their risk preferences, giving them separate scores for each. When the two sets of variables were correlated, they found that “fearful people expressed pessimistic risk estimates and risk-averse choices.”
It’s no surprise that fearful people would be risk-averse. But this research showed not just that such people avoid risk but that they exaggerate it—in consistent and predictable ways. Researchers concluded that certain emotions, such as fear, activate “a predisposition to appraise future events in line with” whatever the person dreaded to begin with. In other words, fear makes people lose perspective on what the odds of danger really are. These visceral feelings often bypass consciousness, so we’re not even aware of what we’re feeling.
Haidt says people consult their feelings to help them decide what to believe. This sounds fair enough at first blush, but we’re not just talking about values here. Moral intuitions change the way people see the world around them. When your perceptions of reality are refracted through strong feelings, that’s a recipe for bias. It explains the “harms” arguments about gay rights, and why they persist even though there’s no factual information to back them up.
Using a process called Implicit Association Tests, Yale’s Paul Bloom and his colleagues documented a gap between how people say they feel about gays and how they actually feel. Researchers at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project dug deeper, exploring the role of rationalizations against same-sex parenting. Most opponents of gay parenting claimed their position was based on concern for the well-being of children raised by gay couples. But when given convincing evidence that kids with gay parents fare as well as others, very few changed their minds. Their brains sought to avoid the cognitive dissonance of holding beliefs that conflicted with their emotions.
In one of the few areas of life that allows for true, rational deliberation—the courtroom—this is exactly what’s being found. Recent rulings striking down gay marriage bans have found that those laws were rooted in prejudice, making them impermissible under the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court reached the same conclusion last June when it struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. The law, said the Court, was “motived by an improper animus” and its purpose was to impose “a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages.”
[O]ften-cited fears—that it will trample religious freedom, cause distractions in the lockerroom, harm kids and families—have no empirical basis.
[U]nderstanding these rationalizations—both the predictions of harm, and the insistence that prejudice is not a factor—is different from accepting them at face value. In fact, as states like Arizona struggle to find logical explanations for anti-gay laws, it’s clearer than ever that bias, and not reason, is the motivating force behind them.
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