A recent study explored how liberals and conservatives in the US evaluate a person based on their Facebook posts. The results indicated that both groups tended to evaluate ideologically opposite individuals more negatively. This bias was three times stronger among liberals compared to conservatives.

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Would be interested in more studies. The one conclusion i took from this that is definitely supported is that there is definitely political bias in who you want to work with on both liberal and conservative people.

link to open research https://osf.io/vqw5u/

This study was done at BYU, participants sourced from amazon mechanical turk. anyone who's attention check questions were not passed were dropped.

The instructions were framed as teaching a machine learning algo how to make judgements based on facebook meme posts.

interestingly, the liberal meme example and the conservative meme in the study documents, are the same images, with an upset emoji over trump for liberals instead of a happy emoji over trump. both say "commander in chief" I personally didn't even notice the difference, as it was a giant trump picture and tiny emoji. I think more study needed here with better representation of memes. also the themes studied were donald trump vs socialism, which i am going to immediately question the choice of those two themes. one further indication of more study needed, this study only had them rate 1 example page of a conservative and one example page of a liberal. they tried to select the best of the 4 trump/anti-trump and 4 socialism/anti-socialism memes with a prescreening. these were memes they made up themselves, and could be exposing their own biases. the effects of the choice to manufacture memes was not studied.

The study measured reaction times, and willingness work with someone, the questions attempt to measure this, and also collect data about if you like trump or not if you rate yourself conservative.

to draw conclusions about the study:

this was a small study, the reactions were calibrated for Donald Trump and Socialism as stand in for left/right. I believe this is the critical flaw, as it should be polarizing politician vs polarizing politician, not polarizing politician vs polarizing idea. 

The use of mechanical turk is interesting, could be this provided better variety of responses, could be it provided worse . they attempted to at least weed out non-attentive responses.

the study attempts to control for biases and overall not the worst I've ever seen, but certainly not the best. this is the reality of social science though, careful study of the questions themselves and impact on the surveyed person is needed which appears to not have been done. 

Was I reading this wrong? They basically compared Trump memes vs Socialism memes? I don’t really think that’s a fair comparison. I think I lean pretty in the middle but even I would judge someone with Pro-Trump memes as more negatively. Maybe choose two ideas vs a person and a whole economic and political philosophy.

This would be enough for me to reject this as a reviewer (emphasis mine):

The researchers created four Facebook pages, two presenting a person with a conservative ideological attitude and two with a liberal ideological attitude. In each pair, one page featured memes, and the other contained text. The conservative pages included pro-Donald Trump and anti-socialism content, while the liberal pages featured anti-Trump and pro-socialism content.

Would like to know more about the specific memes and text people reacted to. The article makes it sound like it could be more about how people respond to Trump than how people respond to traditional liberal or conservative views. In my own bias, someone supporting Trump invokes a very different reaction than a reasoned conservative argument.

Who could have guessed that?

I judge people by their Facebook posts based on the logic used, capitalization, grammar, and while the occasional typo is acceptable, spelling.

I don’t know why this seems like such a controversial result just being on reddit alone more people just call all republicans facists without second thought

This bias was three times stronger among liberals compared to conservatives.

Maybe it's not so helpful to pretend both groups have ethically equivalent beliefs.

Mturk surveys are garbage

I’m looking at you REDDIT

Looks the stronger bias is showing in this thread .

..Came for people's opinions and civil discussions, stayed for the endless sea of deleted replies..

I would negatively view anyone who still uses Facebook for memes

Regards of your political views, it’s self destructive to put them on social media.

You’re not going to change any minds, but you’re going to severely hurt your reputation and status with a large number of friends, acquaintances, and peers

And then of course I haven't been on FB in years, which suits me just fine.

reddit when a study calls out conservatives: :)

reddit when a study calls out liberals: we need to do more research into this

I'm just weary from seeing most domestic terrorists supporting a specific political group.

Mods any explanation as to why every top comment was removed? Basically only one I still see is by u/Parking-Let-2784 which goes against Comment Rule 1.

Why is every comment except staunchly pro-liberal ones deleted? I feel like that proves the point of the post no? And I’m left wing, just seems weird.

The owners of America need the workers fight amongst themselves in order to maintain control.

I would be interested to see the connection between this and the confidence each side has in their ideology and their ability to convince the other side that they are correct.

Conservatives seem to see those on the left as being naive and that they will come around to their way of thinking eventually. You can see it in their classic argument that, "You'll get more conservative as you get older." I'd also argue you can see it in their rampant conspiracy theories. They may have less bias because they figure it's just a matter of time anyway.

Meanwhile, I suspect those on the left are much less confident in their ability to get conservatives to come around to their way of thinking so are more hostile.

The irony of the mods censoring posts in r/science that might believe, maybe, JUST MAYBE, the college built and established by whacko extremists that are---in fact--- conservative by SCHOOL REGULATION, might have some biases that aren't scientific.... that's pretty crazy to me.

So you could say that liberals are way more politically biased individuals than conservatives.

Its hilarious to see how defensive people are getting over this.