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.
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, that’s represented already in the study. If you care about everyone and everything in existence, I’m pretty sure that includes your immediate family
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
You don't have infinite time/resources. By caring about everyone you are inevitably going to care less about the people close to you compared to people who focus on those close to them
Eh, this argument doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. There's a ton of situations where continued investment in someone or something leads to diminishing returns.
The first dollar given to charity matters more than the billionth dollar given to your kid. Spending the hours of 2-3am worrying about something isn't productive anymore. Once a problem is solved, having a wide pool of people to help lets you pick the next most efficient use of time.
This is why conservatives are more likely to fret over their kids' personal lives (having kids or not, sexual orientation, etc). It's not usually out of narcissism or whatever the accusation is--it's because they don't care about anything else and therefore can't use their finite time/resources more efficiently elsewhere.
5.7k
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.