so for those who don't know what DHS is referencing, it's an academic study the New Right has grabbed onto about how liberal moral universalism flows outwards while conservative moralism flows inwards in terms of priority
Replies
It’s very much telling on themselves that they think “I get my opinions from people outside my family and social circles, like from experts and stuff” is the worse option.
aug 26, 2025, 7:51 pm • 1 0 • view
Just an endless parade of Bobby Bouchers endlessly regurgitating all the objectively stupid shit their mama told them about the world.
aug 26, 2025, 7:55 pm • 1 0 • view
So they’re just saying conservatives care about their in-group and liberals care about their out-group? Is that all it is? They needed a paragraph of jargon and heat maps to show that?
aug 26, 2025, 7:41 pm • 3 0 • view
I’m so fucking angry that I know about this now. And it’s an official DHS communication. This is so stupid. Why is everything so stupid.
aug 26, 2025, 7:43 pm • 3 0 • view
Honestly I’m starting to become conservative in that I think some people can’t be trusted with liberal arts educations.
aug 26, 2025, 7:45 pm • 1 0 • view
aug 26, 2025, 7:32 pm • 59 0 • view
omfg rotfl wtf lkfjalkdsfjadjsfalsdfa heat map of what? 🤣
aug 27, 2025, 4:59 pm • 0 0 • view
How exactly does this "study" measure any of that?
aug 29, 2025, 1:15 pm • 1 1 • view
The right has made a meme showing that liberalism is altruistic and conservatism is selfish?
aug 26, 2025, 7:30 pm • 59 0 • view
The (deliberate? are they just stupid? none can tell) misinterpretation they make is that they think liberals care about other people *above* their inner circle - like we think foreigners are more important than family - instead of going "we should care about these people *too*"
aug 26, 2025, 7:38 pm • 58 4 • view
Also, unless I'm reading the study wrong, it pretty much says liberals understand a better universe means it gets better for their family too (at marginal cost!), while conservatives do not understand they're part of a whole, and tend towards shortsighted decisions at higher costs.
aug 26, 2025, 9:45 pm • 3 0 • view
What's funny is, conservatives will bitch and moan about how we're helping "foreigners" when we should be helping "our own"....and then vote to hurt Americans. In reality, conservatives don't care about anything or anyone outside themselves, to be a conservative is to be a sociopath.
aug 26, 2025, 7:55 pm • 19 1 • view
Not to mention his wife and kids are American citizens too. But they certainly don't care about that either.
aug 26, 2025, 8:05 pm • 4 0 • view
what is the data being visualized there? datapoints from media stories? FMRI plots? opinion polls ?
aug 26, 2025, 7:57 pm • 2 0 • view
The results of a survey that asked how far out your empathy extends (just yourself, your immediate family, extended family, neighbors, etc.). The survey found that self-identified conservatives' empathy does not extend as far as liberals'.
aug 26, 2025, 8:31 pm • 3 0 • view
When it came out there was a meme in far-right circles that misinterpreted the higher *density of people* saying "my empathy extends to animals and plants 'n' such" meant liberal people were saying that their empathy for plants was higher for plants than for their family.
aug 26, 2025, 8:31 pm • 3 0 • view
"Leftists should stop alienating Normal People with words like structural inequality." Yep. That's sincere.
aug 26, 2025, 7:37 pm • 18 0 • view
Jesus fucking christ
aug 26, 2025, 7:25 pm • 22 0 • view
Seems like that guy did have some clear opinions about which of those diagrams he thought was preferable, yeah.
aug 26, 2025, 7:32 pm • 13 0 • view
No no, man, the parable of the Good Samaritan is misinterpreted. Just ask JD Vance.
aug 26, 2025, 7:39 pm • 8 0 • view
Ahh, you know this is the first time I’ve ever seen this explained, thank you. Twitter turned into such an insular Nazi space that I would come across that image and have no idea what it meant other than the context that it was some Nazi shit bc Nazis we’re posting it
aug 26, 2025, 7:44 pm • 4 0 • view
Looming fascism aside, this is such a weird way for the original study to gather and present data
aug 26, 2025, 7:24 pm • 16 0 • view
it mostly just seems a graph of: how not to do data visualization.
aug 26, 2025, 8:24 pm • 7 0 • view
I want off this ride
aug 26, 2025, 10:43 pm • 0 0 • view
So wait, does this mean they think because I care about people, my opinion shouldn't matter? I guess that's in line with the "empathy is a vice" framing of the Republican party.
aug 26, 2025, 9:10 pm • 1 0 • view
ah yes of course another one for the “how the fuck do you even begin to explain this to normal people” pile
aug 26, 2025, 7:22 pm • 135 3 • view
They’re too critically online 😭
aug 26, 2025, 7:23 pm • 39 0 • view
that aside, from one cadence to another, hello
aug 26, 2025, 7:24 pm • 11 0 • view
Literally the only way you can explain the true depravity of the modern GOP is by being as chronically online as they are
aug 26, 2025, 7:37 pm • 7 1 • view
"simply repeating the straight reporting of what is happening in the executive branch makes you sound like you have lost your mind." bsky.app/profile/jame... "struggling to explain without sounding like a lunatic" "media's issues--objectively reporting sounds biased because fucking batshit crazy"
aug 26, 2025, 8:05 pm • 5 1 • view
...what is the position on the circumference supposed to represent
aug 26, 2025, 7:51 pm • 30 0 • view
I think everyone is missing your question about what the clockwise/counterclockwise skew indicates, as opposed to the distance from center
aug 26, 2025, 8:05 pm • 5 0 • view
I know what you're asking (along the circumference vs along the radius) and I have never been able to figure it out. Really just needed to be violin plots.
aug 26, 2025, 7:57 pm • 1 0 • view
My guess is that the weird little inconsistencies in the shape is the result of using a Cartesian grid for the heat map, so values are being interpolated in some way to grid points.
aug 26, 2025, 8:00 pm • 0 0 • view
Then there's clearly some smoothing going on as well. It's a disaster of a plot overall, so terrible that the most powerful government in the world is using it as proof of the complete opposite conclusion the paper reaches.
aug 26, 2025, 8:03 pm • 0 0 • view
How much you value something. The centre represents self, the outmost ring - basically all life
aug 26, 2025, 7:53 pm • 3 1 • view
Ok but what does a deviation from 1 o’clock to 3 clock in the same ring represent? The heat maps aren’t symmetric on a radius
aug 26, 2025, 7:56 pm • 7 0 • view
Which is to say, with no y axis labeled, why isn’t this just a bar graph?
aug 26, 2025, 7:57 pm • 1 0 • view
No idea. Didn’t create the study.
aug 26, 2025, 7:58 pm • 0 0 • view
No worries. Was just clarifying what I think his question was about. ie in/out makes sense, what does left/right mean?
aug 26, 2025, 8:06 pm • 0 0 • view
looks like they had them physically click on a number on the circle so the heat map partly represents how accurate people are at clicking on numbers lmao (don't know how fair I am being. one of the authors is Jonathan Haidt so I also don't care)
aug 26, 2025, 8:12 pm • 17 0 • view
Data set includes X and Y coordinates, so it’s literally just where people clicked lmao. Bona fide chart crime lmao
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 7 0 • view
Ahh, so the angle represents where they put the numbers, and people fat fingering there instead of counting circles, cool lol
aug 26, 2025, 9:02 pm • 1 0 • view
I was prepared to find it very interesting that people tend to click on that line
aug 26, 2025, 9:07 pm • 1 0 • view
also cannot emphasize enough that I'm not a pro at reading these studies, I would be being more cautious if it wasn't Haidt (and if I didn't think Haidt's whole scholarly deal was "Liberals value equality, conservatives also value rank bigotry, so conservatives have richer moral thinking"
aug 26, 2025, 9:09 pm • 1 0 • view
insane lol
aug 26, 2025, 8:57 pm • 12 0 • view
also I'm not at all sure how this is possible, but the conservative and liberal circles have *different color scales*, so it seems as though the liberals have at least as much allocation or whatever to the center as the conservatives, the authors just colored them different because hey, dataviz
aug 26, 2025, 8:16 pm • 3 0 • view
To the best I can tell, it seems to be literally just where participants clicked on the chart, so the data points are clustered around where the numbers were written. It’s absolutely a bad way to depict this data
aug 26, 2025, 8:27 pm • 4 0 • view
How far removed from one's person a given subject is willing to extend empathy/care. So like, if you're very close to the circle, all you care about is your family. Farther out: your friends, and then farther out still your local community, people from other countries, animals, "the earth" etc.
aug 26, 2025, 7:54 pm • 1 0 • view
Essentially how far do out you allocated your empathy, the thing is the they misread the chart in a basic way to conclude that liberals have *more* empathy for like birds than their own kids or whatever
aug 26, 2025, 7:55 pm • 29 0 • view
Leaving aside that it’s from a survey of like 100 people, the question expressly said the “outer” numbers are inclusive of the “inner” numbers
aug 26, 2025, 8:02 pm • 26 0 • view
100 people is a decent sample size.
aug 27, 2025, 7:58 am • 0 0 • view
i wanna see the power analysis they based the sample size on
aug 27, 2025, 8:11 am • 1 0 • view
For a survey of American political tendencies in aggregate?
aug 27, 2025, 12:05 pm • 4 0 • view
So in essence, they were asked to draw a circle around the things that matter. Anything outside the circle doesn't matter. The circle can be as big as you want, (no cost for including everything in the universe if you want!) and conservatives decided to draw a tiny one.
aug 27, 2025, 1:34 am • 7 0 • view
Right, like it’s a chart of conservative sociopathy, though it’s also like one weirdly worded question from one survey of 100 people
aug 27, 2025, 1:39 am • 10 0 • view
I have to say that I find it a little bit hard to believe that liberals value their friends and rocks equally.
aug 27, 2025, 12:26 am • 0 0 • view
The probability of this admin starting to put 14 words on US currency is > 0
aug 26, 2025, 7:58 pm • 4 0 • view
It is incredible that they need to prove that they're justified in only having compassion for a few people, as opposed to compassion for everyone. They don't understand that the GOAL is to love all, it's not a scientific norm. It's like they just don't want to do any work.
aug 26, 2025, 7:53 pm • 3 0 • view
This is so stupid. If you care about people, animals, and an ecosystem, you are going to need some plants.
aug 26, 2025, 7:43 pm • 3 0 • view
What is the angle supposed to represent, is this another one-dimensional result that someone tried to make more interesting?
aug 26, 2025, 7:35 pm • 11 0 • view
I think the reason for it being rings is to show that each encompasses the other. I would guess that whoever was writing this couldn't get a good concentric heatmap to render in Matplotlib or ggplot2 so they compromised and just did it in a line.
aug 26, 2025, 11:35 pm • 4 0 • view
so to me it says liberals have empathy and care about others, while conservatives only care when they, and people they know personally, are affected. That's already been obvious.
aug 26, 2025, 7:55 pm • 8 0 • view
Conservatives think the only thing that matters is what they can personally control.
aug 26, 2025, 7:44 pm • 0 0 • view
Need a “Jesse Singal follower” tag but for weird psych papers somehow connected to Jonathan Haidt
aug 26, 2025, 9:11 pm • 3 0 • view
first of all, what the actual fuck. second of all, is this attempting to say that conservatives are more selfish and liberals are more selfless? if so, no shit.
aug 26, 2025, 10:50 pm • 0 0 • view
So what they’re saying is that we should drive the conservatives into the ocean because they cannot be saved
aug 26, 2025, 11:59 pm • 1 0 • view
Love a comms professional that knows how to narrowly communicate to .0001% of people
aug 26, 2025, 7:51 pm • 1 0 • view
So like the idea is “liberals are bad because they have empathy” i guess (normal behavior)
aug 26, 2025, 7:30 pm • 60 2 • view
It's probably the gardener kid or one of his butt boys.
aug 27, 2025, 2:04 am • 0 0 • view
They’re literally just doing comms for internet chuds. Although, canonically, they misread the graph as the concentric circles INCLUDE all the subordinate circles rather than prioritizing them.
aug 27, 2025, 1:51 am • 1 0 • view
Exactly. They're pwning themselves and don't even realize it.
aug 27, 2025, 6:51 pm • 1 0 • view
dawg
aug 26, 2025, 7:31 pm • 101 0 • view
it is genuinely wild how everyone in GOP comms is basically some kind of neonazi now
aug 26, 2025, 7:32 pm • 333 30 • view
They'd better say their prayers when the time comes...
aug 26, 2025, 11:14 pm • 0 0 • view
More evidence that advertising does in fact work
aug 26, 2025, 7:46 pm • 0 0 • view
Everyone in leadership is, so it’s only natural. Also, they probably would have been original Nazis as well. And not the obligatory kind, but the SS kjnd.
aug 26, 2025, 7:57 pm • 1 0 • view
that Pareene piece was insanely prophetic
aug 26, 2025, 7:50 pm • 58 3 • view
That and the one about the national guard administering covid shots as a sign that we'd effectively destabilized our own regime
aug 26, 2025, 8:54 pm • 0 0 • view
Forgot about that piece
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 0 0 • view
link?
aug 26, 2025, 7:50 pm • 17 0 • view
www.splinter.com/charlottesvi...
aug 26, 2025, 7:57 pm • 9 4 • view
www.splinter.com/charlottesvi...
aug 26, 2025, 7:51 pm • 56 7 • view
i miss pareene
aug 27, 2025, 12:28 am • 5 0 • view
Um, is he gone?
aug 27, 2025, 1:25 am • 2 0 • view
he just isn’t writing anymore, that I’m aware of
aug 27, 2025, 1:30 am • 5 0 • view
hang on a titch, do I correctly understand that the supposed own here is "here is scientific proof that we're selfish"
aug 27, 2025, 7:17 pm • 21 0 • view
Big "evangelicals trying to shame Catholics for believing in charity" energy
aug 27, 2025, 7:23 pm • 1 0 • view
Not only that they're selfish, but that their selfishness is righteous, even divinely ordained
aug 27, 2025, 7:21 pm • 14 0 • view
ah yes they're avoiding "the sin of empathy"
aug 27, 2025, 7:21 pm • 4 0 • view
yes
aug 27, 2025, 7:18 pm • 11 0 • view
aug 27, 2025, 7:19 pm • 4 0 • view
i miss his writing constantly
aug 26, 2025, 7:53 pm • 7 0 • view
Horrific-level wild, yes.
aug 26, 2025, 7:53 pm • 0 0 • view
Wouldn't be surprised if it's literally still just the one guy. It's painful to nerdshame but 100% the type of nerd that posts sounds-smart stuff from bullshit LessWrong-style conservanerd forums that he has no genuine understanding of. bsky.app/profile/robe...
aug 26, 2025, 7:58 pm • 7 1 • view
OOPS! All Groypers!
aug 26, 2025, 8:27 pm • 2 0 • view
aug 26, 2025, 6:45 pm • 0 0 • view
Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel
aug 26, 2025, 7:44 pm • 7 0 • view
Conservatism creates a low-trust society
aug 26, 2025, 8:24 pm • 1 0 • view
Why in God's name is this chart in a circle? What does the angle mean? These people are such fucking idiots.
aug 26, 2025, 8:14 pm • 1 0 • view
Holy spit why have i never seen this before
aug 27, 2025, 1:24 am • 0 0 • view
Why do Liberals have ~2x the “moral allocation” (whatever the fuck that is) as conservatives, judging by the wider range of values and larger area to integrate over? No I’m not going to read this paper.
aug 27, 2025, 12:16 am • 0 0 • view
I see a fundamental flaw. The right and conservatives lack morality
aug 26, 2025, 10:54 pm • 0 0 • view
Grotesque. Anti-Christian. Also I don't think it's true that liberals have greater affection for rocks(?) than their families.
aug 26, 2025, 7:53 pm • 7 0 • view
the graph is (intentionally?) misleading; it represents max distance from what people care about
aug 26, 2025, 8:04 pm • 1 0 • view
Right, and the study isn't saying that. The outer circles include the inner circles. So if you land on the outer most circle you care about rocks and everything else too. It's a bad graph.
aug 26, 2025, 8:04 pm • 7 0 • view
The DHS social media team are out and out Nazis. This is hardly the worst thing in the last few months.
aug 26, 2025, 7:36 pm • 5 1 • view
what’s dumb is you want people in power to not focus on their immediate peers, that’s literally how cronyism happens, god i hate these morons.
aug 26, 2025, 8:01 pm • 4 0 • view
Oh cool. Putting the appearance of objectivity on something that definitely cannot be graphed. Excellent.
aug 26, 2025, 7:21 pm • 35 1 • view
American Century of humiliation already here Don’t worry though - China ended up fine after fighting 2 wars and going through the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution I’m sure we will end up doing just as well
aug 26, 2025, 7:33 pm • 6 0 • view
So if I understand the concept correctly what the chart is showing is the maximum level that each group of people extends “universalism“ to. It just means that liberals are more likely to believe in a broader “universalism” than conservatives
aug 26, 2025, 7:31 pm • 39 1 • view
Yeah, but conservatives completely missed what it meant (maximum level) and thought it was saying that liberals *don't* have empathy for those closer to them.
aug 26, 2025, 7:37 pm • 55 4 • view
they miss a lot of things until it affects them directly or those close to them.
aug 26, 2025, 7:57 pm • 9 0 • view
Yeah, but it fits with the fundamentally antisocial conservative mindset. Where every transaction and relationship is zero sum so that any empathy extended to the world beyond your most immediate relations is done at the expense of those inner circles.
aug 27, 2025, 10:58 am • 1 0 • view
exactly, and that's a good thing.
aug 26, 2025, 7:56 pm • 0 0 • view
Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle published: 26 September 2019, Nature really interesting that so many Conservatives don't understand that the Liberal heat map includes everything inside it, not the priority of concern www.nature.com/articles/s41...
aug 27, 2025, 7:27 pm • 1 0 • view