Sep 30 2008
The Real Story
It appears that democrats and republicans differ in their values. This seems almost ho-hum ordinary, common-sensical, yet intruiguing. Consequently, upon spying the article title, Republican And Democratic Values Compared, I was drawn to it.
In the article I discovered that while republicans are the moral equivalent of three-headed monsters, democrats have the ethical development of slime-mold. Actually, I didn’t. That was a joke.
What I did encounter was a few nuggets of information such as this:
Sheldon, a professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Science, found Republicans to be consistently higher on the extrinsic value of financial success and lower on the intrinsic value of helping others in need.
However, at the very foot of the article, and I hope most readers read past the title and into the body and progressed to the end of the piece, I found this quote by the author of the study:
“The one thing that struck me the most was that the value differences were rather small – really, people were more alike than different, in that almost everybody favored intrinsic values more than extrinsic values,” Sheldon said.
That, to me, is the bigger story. And yet it is a much less glamorous story, a much less exciting story. We tend to focus on the sexy differences and yawn in response to, even look past, the similarities between individuals, groups of people, even between animal species.
Sometimes the real story hardly seems noteworthy but is important nonetheless. Additionally, when small differences are exaggerated we can unknowlingly promote a skewed vision of the world.
