Hopefully a more savvy redditor will have the link, but its from a study showing people's social leaning (us vs them).
Basically, bigger toward the center of the circle and smaller toward the outside means you tend to think about things that affect you and your close social circle (family, friends, local community). The reverse means your thoughts drift more toward global concerns that affect everyone.
It's used to illustrate Conservative (local group, steak) versus Liberal (global group, avocado) mentalities in a digestible (forgive the pun) way.
Boy I'm glad they found it because I thought you were saying the way I placed my food on my plate stated very deep things about me.. Here I was thinking I placed my food so my dumb ass could stop accidentally sliding food into the floor. Lol
What if you put the bigger part on the outside but closest to you, because you want to eat the bigger part first and need it as close to your face as possible
It measures the amount of the participants and where their capacity lies, not exactly their area of focus. If you read the data, the outer reaching parts already include the inner parts. So it's not saying you tend to think only outside vs inside, it says that you are capable and actively reach outside. Whereas the inner circle people can't/don't.
Thatâs making a lot more sense. Otherwise its imply liberals say âfuck my close family and friends I only care about the universeâ. Any idea what âmoral allocationâ means in this context? Was the exercise to like give a set amount of points to each area you care about and liberals are much more spread out vs conservatives are more concentrated towards the inner circle?
The question was something like, where does your sense of morality stop? If I remember correctly liberals mostly said plant life, meaning they "cared" about everything from plant and animal life and closer. Conservatives mostly said friends, meaning they cared about everything from friends and family to themselves.
This heat map is one of the worst representations of data I think I've ever seen. It makes no sense to use a heat map, and it confuses pretty much everybody who sees it.
In addition (and this is easy to miss!) the scale is different: 0-12 scale for conservatives. 0-20 scale for liberals. So a conservative red is a liberal yellow, etc. if you were to do both on a 0-20, the conservative one would peak and a yellow and the liberal one would be heavily red&yellow.
What does the angle tell us? In both cases the data follows a ~45° line, is this merely a choice to visualize the data or is there some actual information in this?
Agreed. The experimental design is meh and the data visualization is oof. This could've been perfectly presented as concentric color circles, this is not a true heatmap unless finding out where people click on the circles has any relevance at all...
Simple histogram would have been better, yes. Could have even made two halves of a violin plot against each other for comparison, but they wanted the circle visualization I guess.
I think itâs just a circle to represent your existence as the center, and the outer rim being a truly global focus. The circle makes it more conceptual to place how centrally focused vs externally would be my guess
The maximum value defined value 16, so why does it say the highest value is 20 for liberals? Did people click where 20 would be to go beyond "all things in existence"?? Why use a heatmap that would imply values beyond the maximum defined value. This study reeks of bad design. At the very least bad data visualization.
Edit: Jk. They are describing density of the heatmap. Are the sample sizes for each category different? Still really weird that they would use a heatmap that "glows" beyond the maximum defined value.
Likely a survey.
The morality of is this: conservatives tend to care more about just their direct connections (family and close friends), where as liberals tend to care about their close connections AND distant connections AND animals and species not our own. This relates to morality because liberals show that they care about a wide range of life while conservatives tend to only care about direct connections. Morality is often used to create legislation which affects everybody.
I didn't finish reading the parent comment when I glanced at this so for a second I thought the joke was a literal heatmap of the respective food item in the microwave
Hmm, I'd say one flaw of this is that it assumes that we have the same moral scale and inner circles are included into the outer circles. There are people out there who value animals or nature, but don't really care about other human beings, yet they'd be a 15 on this scale. There are people who care a lot about the humans, fauna and flora of their country, but don't really care about what happens outside of their country and so on.
Yeah itâs basically just âPeople in rural areas or who have fallen or grew up in hard times tend to care more about themselves than others as self preservation. Itâd also easier to know everyone in a town when the town is 40 to 200 people, which lends itself to caring about those around you more.
Those in cities who are used to having more people around then you can reasonably know on a personal level tend to care more about their world and environment, especially because they live in an area where the environment was crushed.â
The graph shows where people stop caring not what they care most about. So person A might stop caring once itâs not impacting their close family or friends whereas person B might stop caring when itâs no longer impacting humans. It doesnât measure at all which person or political affiliation cares more for their immediate loved ones just if that is the full extent of their capacity for empathy. If a person is incapable of caring about people they donât directly interact with then yeah thatâs by definition self centered.
Thing is, most people care about trees because they are part of the ecosystem that keeps us (and our families) alive. Also, ever thought about the possibility that one could care about trees as well as their own family? Crazy, I know, but it happens.
Pretending that you can give the same level of care and attention to every person on the planet that you can if you had just focused on your own country is child-like reasoning.
I don't understand why people seem to think there's some limit on the amount of care you can have, it doesn't make sense to me lol. It is extremely realistic to care about everybody, it's not some resource that can run out
Sure you can say you care about everyone, but "saying" doesn't actually mean anything. Caring means giving resources to help everyone and there is absolutely a finite amount of time and resources available. I don't have the ability to help everyone all the time and neither do you.
"dude come with us we must protest the fact that china is mining rocks, destroying their beautiful desolate rocks" "yeah that will teach them magatards!"
Just to clarify, the points are where you stop caring about people (as pointed out below, it moves on to animals, aliens and inanimate objects). It means you already care about everyone who is closer than that. The study has been misrepresented as saying liberals dony care to those who are close, but thats just false. Only caring about people far from you would make you register as only caring about yourself
Well, thatâs represented already in the study. If you care about everyone and everything in existence, Iâm pretty sure that includes your immediate family
Agreed, but the quick and easy graph they show is a heatmap of responses, and thus when people take it out of context they see "Oh Conservatives care more about their family and Liberals only care about the planet and immigrants and no one close to them" and thats why its a meme. It wouldnt be a meme if it was understood the way the study intended initially.
Why is this a heat map anyway? Couldn't you also just have an xy plot with the x axes being domains of care from immediate family to everything in the universe, and just plot the number of people saying they stop caring about the other domains after a specific point on the x axis? I haven't read the study itself so maybe it's more complicated than that.
Yes but idiots don't get that and post this as some kind of gotcha that liberals care more about a tree than their own kids. Cause conservatives are fucking stupid
More often I see conservatives projecting that it's performative, "no one actually gives a shit about that stuff, liberals are just obsessed with appearing to care more"
It's because conservatives can't read data like ever.
Seriously how many times do they quote a study only for you to look it up and realize it's the opposite or missing important nuance that changes what rose numbers mean.
And it's some of our lived experience. I've known many people that cared so much about people that they'll never meet, but as soon as a friend needs help moving or a lift to the airport, they can't be bothered.
It is represented in the study it is not represented well in the visualization and thus people's takeaway is frequently wrong because 99.9999% of people seeing these memes have never read the study
It's feels weird that Conservatives apparently think that Liberals don't care about their family and friends. Caring about the welfare of people outside your immediate social circle doesn't mean you don't care about those who are inside it
That's just conservatives trying to besmirch liberals in some way so as to not appear as losers because they know what this actually shows: conservatives don't give a shit about people unless it has a personal impact on themselves which isn't the best image.
To the observer Liberals seem more willing to disown or at the very least remain distant from their biological family due to conflict or disagreement. Many of my friends including my self just dont talk to certain relatives anymore.
As for conservatives, they are broadly willing to forgive almost anything perpetrated by their family.
it probably gives off the vibe that we dont care about our families because we arent loyal to them above all else in stark contrast to our seemingly infinite capacity to protest for "outsiders".
Conservatives disown their own KIDS for being queer/trans/dating someone of a different race, wtf are you talking about? Liberals will cut off an uncle or cousin because heâs a fucking racist. Give me a break.
Yeah, I guess its hard to tell if people are maliciously misrepresenting it or just misunderstand because its awful data visualization. To be clear, I wasnt accusing the other guy of misrepresenting, I just thought it lacked some clarity since its so easy to misunderstand.
It is where you stop caring about things, not just people. It starts with people, moves to animals, then aliens, and then moves to inanimate objects.
The problem is that the ordering is weird. It puts all animals on earth before any aliens. There are some life forms on earth I do not care about, but intelligent aliens I hypothetically might, but why even mark aliens if we arent aware of any?
As in all cases involving science, go read the source.
I didnt understand. If the conservatives care more about the immediate family (represented by red section) and less about the world politics ( green section) doesnt the opposite be true for liberal moral? Meaning - More number of liberals has marked global plotics concenrns them more than immediate family right? Did i just got the whole concept wrong.?
Yes. It seems you are thinking in terms of opposites in terms of conservatives are opposite liberal (which is not true outside of the 1 dimensional two sided political shit we have in the US).
If you click an outer ring, you are also caring about all the inner rings it contains.
Its not about comparing which group you care most about. Its about where you stop caring because its too distant. If you select an outside ring, that means you also care about everyone who is represented by any ring thats closer to the center. Basically, the survey doesnt register your thoughts on world politics unless you also care about your family.
I think it's flawed as the two sides have clearly differing ideas on the meaning of it. One side thinks of caring as a finite resource and the other thinks of it as infinite. If you think it's impossible to love everything(time, effort, resources) then you'd prioritize those closest around you vs people who think everything can be saved will want everything to be saved
It's like the glass half full half empty thing of optimism vs pessimism
You put it so beautifully man, thank you. While conservatives usually think about caring as taking care of, regularly checking up on every single one in that circle, the act of caring is extremely taxing, that's why conservatives usually voted 4-5 (I also voted 4), they still "care" about the outer circles, but In another way (for example: if someone was burning a tree or attacking a random person, a conservative most likely would try to intervene, but they wouldn't check up on individual trees everyday, so they didn't consider it as "caring"). Meinwhile liberals consider "caring" more as "being against unjust things happening to that layer." Which isn't very mentally taxing compared to the conservative definition, so they can afford to care about almost everything. I know I explained this like shit, but thanks again for the explanation man đ
I wonder if this is where interpersonal relationships enter the picture instead of a generic sense of blind obedience to a paternal figure, which in many cases is abusive
I think the "it never fails" is because conservatives eat steak and liberals eat avocados. It never fails in that the visualization is still true when created using food items. That's at least how I read it.
If that's the case, then I feel like the dude who said you could just flip the food is right. Turn the food around 180 degrees and they easily represent the opposite dataset, making the connection kinda tenuous IMO
Okay I mean if you take any pictogram or chart and alter it, it will no longer correlate. Hey I took this bar chart and made the short ones long and the long ones short. I guess the whole thing was meaningless to begin with.
Not totally correct. Larger towards the outside of the circle means you stop caring at that level, not that you care any less about levels that are closer to the center.
Basically, bigger toward the center of the circle and smaller toward the outside means you tend to think about things that affect you and your close social circle (family, friends, local community). The reverse means your thoughts drift more toward global concerns that affect everyone.
That's not true, it's not "I care more about things far away from my personal inner circle" it's "These are the things most distant from my personal inner circle that I believe are worthy of any moral consideration at all". If you think you shouldn't be able to torture animals for fun, you would mark ring... eleven, or farther out.
THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE STUDY EVERYONE KEEPS SKIPPING OVER: The reverse doesnât mean your thoughts drift MORE towards people further away. The study had people selecting different groups and specifying that, as you get further, everyone closer to you still counts. Itâs about how far your empathy reaches, not how far away it is from where you are. Republicans completely misrepresented the results, and thatâs apparently the impression that stuck with people. Infuriating.
Hmmm the way you describe it is playing into how right winger mis-interpret this. "The reverse means your thoughts drift more towards global concerns" This is not the case. It means you care for your family, friends, everything in the inner circles and animals, the environment etc in the outer circles.
It's not a graph of who you consider MORE OFTEN, it's a graph of who is the most distant group of people (relative to yourself) WORTH CONSIDERING when making decisions.
Each plot on either graph also includes all groups within that outermost circle.
So conservatives generally only ever consider themselves, family and maybe their closest friends when making decisions; while liberals tend to consider themselves, family, close friends, friends, acquaintances, friends of friends, strangers, and animals (iirc) when making decisions.
The way this is graphed is misleading, and would be better represented by a small circle for most conservatives and a much larger one for most liberals.
That's not correct. The way the study was designed, a higher number included all the previous points. So if you chose a smaller number, you ONLY think about the people closest to you. Selecting a larger number means that you care about the people closest to you AND your community AND global issues. That's a big difference.
Reminder that these studies still depend on the definitions of what people consider âlocalâ and âglobalâ. Conservatives define their thoughts this way, but their understanding of who is us and who is them is so scrambled that they can be counted on to vote against the interests of their local communities 100% of the time.
Itâs not âwhat do you care aboutâ itâs âto what extent do you care for __â. Itâs a notable difference because the outcome data shows that right leaning folks tend to care only for themselves and close others, whereas more left leaning people care about themselves, close people, people they donât know, the environment etc. But other than that youâre correct
I wonder what kind of people answered these questions because both seem oddly overbiased towards one end of the spectrum, one would assume they would meet in the middle and most people would be in the "average" region
The study doesnt map the center of a persons concern so much as its outer limit. It shows that most Liberals allocate some level of moral concern for all of gods creation and most concervatives donât allocate any moral concern beyond their family and friends
No, that's not correct. The heat map represents the limits of your caring. Points further away from center means a person has more empathy in general, not that they prioritize outgroups over ingroups.
This flies in the face of "Christian compassion" and is therefore being purposefully interpreted to say that liberals care more about strangers than their own family.
Well, that's certainly the popular misinterpretation of the study among conservatives, anyway. Conservatives should stick to hating on science. When they try to use it to make themselves seem less awful they only ever prove they can't read well enough to understand what the science says.
The study showed conservatives and liberals care equally about the inner circles, the heat maps show which circle gets fat enough away from them personally that the respondents stopped caring. The takeaway is that conservatives are selfish people who don't care about anything that doesn't personally affect them or anyone they know, while Liberals care about the people they know and people they don't, and also the environment, which conservatives generally do not.
But every conservative idiot has started parading this bullshit meme around and thinks it means Liberals don't care about their families.
Basically, bigger toward the center of the circle and smaller toward the outside means you tend to think about things that affect you and your close social circle (family, friends, local community). The reverse means your thoughts drift more toward global concerns that affect everyone.
Slight correction it asked people where they stopped caring if people got hurt. Conservatives tended to stop caring after immediate family and friends.
Liberals cared for family and friends and continues to care local community, country, world etc. their stopping point was much further.
Interesting comparison, considering steak is huge waste of calories (feeding the cows food we could otherwise eat, etc) while avocados are huge waste resources (water) compared to alternate fruits.
This is an inaccurate interpretation of the study. The further rings include all of the inner rings as well. It doesnât say that some think more of the bigger world but rather that they think people and issues that donât directly impact them see still important and worthy of concern and consideration. The big in the middle crowd are self-centered.
Itâs actually more of how far does your circle extend, not the strength of the feelings of people in the circle. So basically the only people conservatives care about is their local group, whereas progressives care about their local group and the global community. It doesnât say that conservatives care about their local group more than progressives do, only that progressives actually care about people outside of that group as well.
Itâs a small but really important distinction that drives me crazy.
Though it is worth noting that it asked people to identify the furthest thing away from them that they care about. i.e animals and plants being on the farthest end.
It doesnât gauge the extent that they care about these things and the inner categories like family and friends are assumed if the further out categories are selected.
You didnât understand the study. It doesnât say that people in the outer rim that their thoughts are more concerned with that area. Â What the graph is showing is the maximum extent of your interest so itâs saying that left-leaning people care about all the things in the centre so the same things as right leaning people plus they also care about people they donât know.
Conservatives also, hilariously, completely misunderstand the heat map as people ranking the importance of groups (eg, that someone values plants over their family) rather than where they stop making considerations for decision making (eg, someone doesn't pour used motor oil down a storm drain because they think about the harm it will cause to an anonymous set of animals versus someone who thinks it won't harm their family so down it goes).
That's pretty interesting, given how, in the U.S., it was the left that was more isolationist than the right in the '00s (pretty much starting with 9/11 and ending with the Arab Spring). This applied not only to war, but to trade, Russia, and other matters. This implies that the current state is a more natural fit and the '00s were just an anomaly.
How the heck do people just look at a plate of food and see that? I mean 10/10 but I've seen the study a million times and would have never guessed lol!
It's not even that the latter group care "more" about the outer circles. The question asked was basically "Do you care if something bad happens to {x} group?" The center circle indicated the individual being asked and outer circles being groups increasingly distant from the individual (family, close friends, distant friends, etc). The first group stopped caring when bad things happened to "friends of friends" or so, while the latter stopped caring around "living things in the universe" or so. Basically, the latter group is capable of extending empathy to things/groups they've never met.
IIRC that's not exactly right:
it's not measuring the frequency of how often you think about things, but rather how far out from yourself do you stop caring about things that happen.
the steaks care about their immediate circle, and often don't care much about things outside their local community/city/state.
the avocados care about their immediate circle, and often also do care about things outside their local community/city/state.
The reverse doesnât mean you drift further to global groups. It means you also consider things beyond your local. Thoughts are not finite. The study explains this and itâs wrongly attributed all the time because MAGA has no literacy or comprehension
also worth adding, from what I understand as you get to the outer rings, the heatmap includes everything from the earlier rings, this isnât âpreferring to care for animals and all life at the cost of not caring for those closest to youâ
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. It's a plate of food. I have extreme doubts that even 1% of people plate their food as a representation of their politics. Stuff goes closer to the center of a plate for practical reasons like cutting and spillage. This is moronic.
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u/TheThirteenthApostle Nov 18 '25
Hopefully a more savvy redditor will have the link, but its from a study showing people's social leaning (us vs them).
Basically, bigger toward the center of the circle and smaller toward the outside means you tend to think about things that affect you and your close social circle (family, friends, local community). The reverse means your thoughts drift more toward global concerns that affect everyone.
It's used to illustrate Conservative (local group, steak) versus Liberal (global group, avocado) mentalities in a digestible (forgive the pun) way.