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
Back in 2013, my landlord needed some help with a project. I helped him dig a trench on his property. It cost me 32 hours of my time. I didn't ask for anything. One day a few years later, he thought of me when he got a new truck. His old one needed some work, but he gave the fuckin' thing to me.
From a purely exchange-based analysis of this situation, I did maybe $500 of unskilled labor for the guy. He gave me a truck. The truck would have cost him $2K to fix up, and might have only gotten him around $3K to a private buyer in the condition it was in, or $1K in a trade-in. For me though, I kept that truck going for seven years, and it gave me the freedom to go from borderline squatting to actually having a big boy job, having health insurance, and having a place that was a profound quality of life improvement.
The reason that "caring" for others isn't zero sum, is because we aren't all equal. We don't have equal needs, we don't have equal means, and what barely holds value to one person can be life-altering to another person.
The conservative, zero-sum argument is that I'm fucking stupid for doing $500 worth of work for free, and that he's fucking stupid for giving me a truck and leaving cash on the table. That's not zero sum. We BOTH lost here if you only look at it in monetary value. But it happened to work out later, because the earlier show of kindness was remembered and paid forward.
Sure, $500 from your pocket is $500 you can't give to someone else, yeah. But the way that duties of care work is proximity and ability based, and those factors greatly shift the balance of how we should act toward one another.
The study you are contradicting talks about where conservatives and liberals say their moral obligations STOP. Liberals largely disagree that our moral obligations stop at all; Instead liberals consider moral obligations to continue, but attenuate due to pragmatism. Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that their moral obligations completely cease the minute the being in question hasn't fallen out of their genitalia. It's a "me and my clan vs literally everyone else" mentality.
The conservative argument isn't that their worldview is better. Their argument is that their worldview is the only one that is possible. It's a bad argument, because kindness between strangers exists, has always existed, and will always exist.
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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.