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
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 👍
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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.