Counterpoint: China Miéville’s gunshow.
Which is the name of my Steampunk Dead Kennedies tribute band.
This is what science should be about: trying to find ad hominems.
I think we should survey mens’ opinions on various topics while also measuring their penis length and girth, and counting the number of hairs on their chest.
Then we can find the opinions it’s valid for a true man to hold.
How do Scandinavians fit into todays thread on socialism?
In which I note that the words socialism and socialist do not appear even one time.
In other words, some Right leaning blogger or commentator has ignored the actual study that discusses personal interactions of Dominant vs Egalitarian approaches to life among individuals and substituted an interpretation of political leanings that has nothing to do with the study.
How quaint.
ETA: Yes, I recognize that the study begins with the word “sociopolitical,” but I wonder, given the nature of the medium, if “sociopolitical” has a specific meaning in the context of such studies. All of the further references throughout the study are of personal human interaction with no references to politics or economics in the larger community. In fact the phrase “sociopolitical egalitarianism” is always used as a single term as though it carries a specific meaning with no indication that there is any connection to politics. (The words politics and political are also absent from the entire abstract.)
The study says exactly the opposite. It’s saying that it’s weak men who favor rule by a strong state, one with lots of powers to take things from one person and give them to another. I have no idea whether the study is valid or not, but let’s not mischaracterize socialism as anything other than rule by the strong.
True socialism (as opposed to Social Democracy common in Europe) has been shown to only be possible in a one-party, totalitarian state. Given the choice, people always vote that system out.
That is an inapt analogy. If I have thirty guns, I can shoot, at most, two of them at once. If there are a hundred zombies on the move and twenty people at risk, it would very quickly become obvious to me that hoarding my guns is less effective in defeating the zombies than handing them out to the brainful.
FWIW their previous year’s study.
The hypothesis they were wanting to test:
The findings:
It was a borderline significance finding on “attractiveness” (defined by “Waist-to-chest Ratio and Rated Attractiveness”) and there were in fact no significant findings in regards to “formidability” (as defined by “Upper Body Size and Grip Strength”).
So this time they looked for different measures of “formidability” that might support their hypothesis?
Last time they found that male attractiveness correlated and strength did not and this time the opposite.
As they are honest enough to discuss in the conclusion of the more recent article:
Pretty confident that if they did a meta-analysis of just their own work they’d find no statistical significance at all.
In short, a pretty weak and conflicting body of work that does not support drawing any conclusions to speculate about.
The thread title, and the article the OP is pulling it from, are quite misleading. First of all, the study does not correlate anything to strength as such. The closest thing they use is “body formidability”, which they define as “taking the mean of shoulder [circumference], chest [circumference], bicep [circumference], grip strength, and arm/chest strength measurements” (after a normalization procedure). So this is a metric that gives 3/5 of its weight to bulk rather than strength. They report that this metric is highly correlated with “time in gym”, so in part it’s reflecting how much work men are willing to put in to look muscular, which, unsurprisingly, has been found to be related to a variety of personality characteristics in prior studies.
Secondly, they do not ask about socialism, ever. They use questionnaires for “Social Dominance Orientation” (example questions: “Inferior groups should stay in their place” and “Increased social equality is beneficial to society”) and “Support for Redistribution” (example questions: “High incomes should be taxed more than is currently the case” and “The government spends too much money supporting the unemployed”); they consider the latter a measure of support for egalitarianism.
Their reported findings are all over the place, but they report that, when looking at all subjects together, “body formidability” correlates with “Social Dominance Orientation” scores but NOT with “Support for Redistribution” scores. They do report that “body formidability” correlates negatively with “Support for Redistribution” among wealthy men only; the effect for non-wealthy men was not significant.
One conclusion that they offer:
“[…] the negative relationship between formidability and support for redistribution may be due to the fact that men who work out more are also more likely to oppose redistribution.”
Well if you look at Bernie Sanders or Karl Marx, you don’t this is a manly man.
More research is needed. How about some current presidents for data?
Jimmy Carter and Barrack Obama were very liberal, each were physically weak looking.
Meanwhile Ronald Regan and George Bush jr, were pretty in shape, healthy type of guys.
Trump is mostly conservative, in his youth he was an athlete, and pretty big guy.
I think I only continue to waste time on this board because I want to see an analysis like this posted and then every participant in the thread recognize how silly it is to continue to discuss the topic. More often than not, this type of completely damning analysis will be completely ignored.
In terms of the hypothesis the authors were wanting to test they were reasonable items to measure. Just not meaningful results in aggregate.
Indeed though what they tested and what their hypothesis was and how the linked media coverage is describing it have very little to do with each other.
In regards to men their hypothesis is that men who perceive themselves as relatively stronger and are thought of as better looking will show less “support for norms promoting equality” because in ancient times in particular such norms would erase some advantages they may have had.
If the collection of studies they did showed significant results on both perceived attractiveness and perceived formidability being associated with performance on the Dictator game and on measures associated with social equality then it would have been some slight support for their hypothesis.
Interesting though as to how such a single and weak study becomes embraced in a distorted fashion when some thinks it supports their own self-image.
:dubious:
I suppose if you subscribe to the “Little Lotta Theory of Body Mass = Physical Strength” then you would see a lard ass like Trump being a strong man.
Modern physiology, though, tends to disregard Harvey Comics-based science.
You have to consider the source of the article–Amanda Prestigiacomo writes for the Daily Wire, a Conservative website and the article itself cites no sources or even a correct title–and as ‘weak’ vs ‘strong’ are purely subjective terms with no way of measurement, I seriously doubt there is any validity to it at all if indeed it were actually a legitimate study or not. One seriously has to doubt
Sounds like some kind of alt-right beta-male bullshit.
There are bewildering variables in all this it seems to me. How are strong and weak defined, physically, mentally, via education, wealth? As has been mentioned already, the Scandanavian and northern European countries tend to be socialist or more leftist, depending on how one chooses to define these terms; and these are mostly very affluent societies; their populations are on the average physically large and tend to be athletic, which is to say maybe more properly, outdoorsy.
I do think that people who have defects (or “defects”, to be pc) are more socialist by inclination. This is a personal view based on my experience. Based on my reading, Franklin Roosevelt, crippled by polio in early middle age, is an excellent example of what I mean. Many people I’ve known who were physically smaller than average or lacking in athletic abilities have been more to the left politically. Chronic medical conditions are, again, based on observation and experience, contributing factors as well.
Yet a small, physically unimpressive person can get very rich without having to lift weights, and be quite edgy, competitive and free market oriented. Happens all the time. Then there are all those cultural factors that would likely favor, say, a sickly Mormon for conservative political views even if impoverished due to people of that faith tending to be to the Right politically. I know someone, a person I grew up with, who comes from a conservative, upwardly mobile family whoses siblings are quite well off and, expectedly, conservative, who himself suffers (terribly) from major mental illness, two, actually, bipolar and schizophrenia; and yet when lucid his political and social views are identical to those of the rest of his family.
There are so many issues that factor into why some of us are more to the Left, others to the Right, politically, I hesitate to generalize. I have no doubt that there is someone,–probably a whole lot of someones–who are similarly afflicted who are way to the Left politically.
I’ve also seen a phenomenon I call “camo conservatism”. People who are not well-suited for competition (whether it’s low physical prowess, not very bright, lazy, poverty, etc.) who (consciously or unconsciously) seem to have adopted right-wing beliefs in an attempt to hide their shortcomings.
A current example: people who are relying on government benefits, who decry the government spending money on said benefits.
To quote Roy Blount, Jr.: “In an actual system of limited government, like the Old West, Rush Limbaugh would be the fat boy who danced when you shot at his feet”.
Are you smoking powerful herb? Obama is one of the fittest, strongest Presidents in modern memory. He was certainly larger and stronger than “brush clearing” Bush the younger or 70’ish Reagan when POTUS.
So no.
How do the researchers square these findings with the fact that the reddest states in America also have, by quite a significant margin, the highest rates of morbid obesity?