Hypnosis is real. I think there’s a lot of cognitive or emotional behavior that can be viewed as derived from (mild?) self-hypnosis. I’ll bet this is a major field of psychology, but using some terminology (“super-ego”?) other than “self-hypnosis.” What is the terminology?
Studies have shown strong differences between liberals and conservatives in their cognitive and emotional responses. I’ve copied some random excerpts on this topic below, but one simple trait may be often overlooked: Loyalty. Most of us are loyal to our family, but for liberals non-family has to earn trust. Many other people (conservatives) OTOH once they’ve extended loyalty to some person or cause, will not give up that loyalty. Once they’ve invited Trump into their hearts, they will not reject him: His behavior is irrelevant.
I’ve observed this tenacious loyalty among people who are not obviously “conservative” but who come from a certain culture. I’d be curious to read any studies of this loyalty character, or if it can relate to the “super-ego(?)” I mention above.
Miscellaneous correlations, politics to mentality:
[QUOTE=Andrea Kuszewski]
Recent converging studies are showing that liberals tend to have a larger and/or more active anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC—useful in detecting and judging conflict and error—and conservatives are more likely to have an enlarged amygdala, where the development and storage of emotional memories takes place. More than one study has shown these same results, which is why I felt it was worth investigating.
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When there is a flow of ambiguous information, the ACC helps to discern whether the bits of info are relevant or not, and assigns them value. People with some forms of schizophrenia, Paranoid Type, for instance, typically have a poorly functioning ACC, so they have trouble discerning relevant patterns from irrelevant ones, giving equal weight to all of them. Someone can notice lots of bizarre patterns—that alone isn’t pathological—but you need to know which ones are meaningful. The ACC helps to decide which patterns are worth investigating and which ones are just noise. If your brain assigned relevance to every detectable pattern, it would be pretty problematic. We sometimes refer to this as having paranoid delusions. You need that weeding out process to think rationally.
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[QUOTE=various]
Decades of research have shown that people get more conservative when they feel threatened and afraid.
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On the memory test, the same 120 scenes were presented along with 120 new scenes and participants were to respond whether a scene was old or new. Results on the memory test showed that negative scenes were more likely to be remembered than positive scenes, though, this was true only for political conservatives. That is, a larger negativity bias was found the more conservative one was. The effect was sizeable, explaining 45% of the variance across subjects in the effect of emotion.
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Liberals focus on the future more than the past, while conservatives focus on the past more than the future.
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Brain responses to a disgusting image are sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual's political ideology.
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Threats of terrorism make everyone less liberal — researchers found this was especially true in the months after 9/11. During that time, the US saw a conservative shift, and Americans displayed increased support for military spending and for President George W. Bush.
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... we find that conservatives tend to emphasize the intrinsic value of actions during moral judgment, in part by mentally simulating themselves performing those actions, while liberals instead emphasize the value of the expected outcomes of the action. We then demonstrate that a structural emphasis on actions is linked to the condemnation of victimless crimes, a distinctive feature of conservative morality.
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“The educated moral relativism worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the way 50 percent of America thinks, and stereotypes about out-of-touch elitist coastal Democrats are basically correct,” sighed the snarky Web site Gawker.com as it summarized [Haidt's] studies.
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