Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.

Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?

  • @ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    I have had plenty of conversations with people irl. Most of the them with people who are to the right of me on the political spectrum. What I found in the conversations that were fruitful, was that our disagreement on larger issues, such as economics or personal freedoms, tended to stem from disagreements on smaller issues. To paraphrase my friend, “We are using the same words, but they all mean different things.” It seems to me that there are some elementary differences between progressives and conservatives that change how we rationalize the larger issues. That’s how the two groups can, based on the same information, come to two different conclusions.

    That being said though, I think Fox News and other conservative news channels have created information silos. Not everyone who is conservative has necessarily had access to the same body of facts and evidence that progressives have. I think a good portion of people who are stuck in those silos would change their views if they had a more balanced news diet.

    • @oxjox@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      research subjects who considered themselves conservative tended to have larger amygdala, the section of the brain in the temporal lobes that plays a major role in the processing of emotions. Self-defined liberals, meanwhile, generally had a larger volume of gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain associated with coping with uncertainty and handling conflicting information.

      https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/are-your-political-beliefs-hardwired-108090437/

      • @ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Political neuroscience is an interesting field. I remember hearing about similar studies years ago on podcasts. A quick google revealed the field has had numerous studies done in the last year alone.

        I don’t feel that this section inherently contradicts what I am trying to say and perhaps is intended to be supporting evidence. The fact that the differences between conservatives and liberals can be measured means that the disagreements stem from a real place. However, the article mentions that this does not mean agreement is impossible. It means that the two groups need to be approached differently with the same information.

        Andrea Kuszewski, a researcher who has written about political neuroscience, would rather put a positive spin on what it could mean for politics. She says this kind of knowledge could help open up communication, or at least ease hostility between the country’s two major political parties.

        “Each side is going to have to recognize that not everyone thinks like them, processes information like them, or values the same types of things,” she wrote last week. “With the state our country is in right now, I don’t think we have any choice but to cowboy up and do whatever needs to be done in order to reach some common ground.”

        Do you mind elaborating on the intention of sharing the quoted section of the linked article? I don’t want to assume and I want to engage with what you mean.