Liberal or Conservative Part II

On January 15, I shared my thoughts about predicting a person’s leaning toward liberal or conservative bias based on his/her experience and life situation  The categories, sub-categories and points I used in  my model are:

●     Age:  50 or over, +10 points, under 50, -10 pts

●     Education:  college degree in liberal arts, political science, education or journalism, - 50 pts; college degree in engineering, business admin, science, + 50 pts.  All other levels of education and degrees, 0 pts.

●     Gender:  Male, +10 pts, Female, -10 pts.

●     Employment:  Government, -50 pts, education, -50 pts, unemployed, -50 pts;  all other, 0 pts.

●     Race:  Afro-American, -40 pts, Hispanic, -25 pts, caucasian, +10 pts.

●     Religion:  Catholic and most protestants, 0 pts, Fundamental protestants, +30 pts, Islam, -30 pts, Jewish, -40 pts.

To use the model, score a person on ALL sub-categories and add the points.  A negative score indicates a liberal bias and a positive score a conservative bias.  Did it work for you?  Your friends?

Remember, this is just based on my experience.  To improve this model, liberal and conservative would be defined and measured by a questionnaire.  Then the results of interviewing many people would be run through a multi-regression analysis to determine sub-categories and points.

This is not about Democrats or Republicans or how you vote.  This is about how you think and interpret your world and the news.

So what does all this mean?  Does this mean our thinking about liberal and conservative is based on our life situation rather than our great intellect?  Can we wipe out past experiences and change?  Have our emails and discussions ever changed the thinking of anyone?

Beats me.  I’m just an old man who likes to think about what I see around me.

Seasoned Man

stevelem117@gmail.com