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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32920 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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I doubt the effect exists if one balanced for that first.

Maybe! There are certainly confounders galore. There have been a variety of attempts to do as you've suggested, or make other, similar adjustments. The most recent one I'm aware of is here. From the abstract:

First, we examine whether the conservative-liberal divide in self-assessments of mental health remains once we control for a wide variety of demographics, socioeconomic factors, and recent life experiences. We find that accounting for these alternative explanations reduces the gap by about 40%, but that ideology remains a strong predictor of mental health self-reports. Second, we conducted an experiment where we randomly assigned whether people were asked to evaluate their mental health or their overall mood. While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives. One explanation is that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term. Another possibility is that ideological differences persist for some aspects of mental well-being, but not others.

I just can't help but notice that studies along these lines keep showing up, and keep generating the same kind of response. The 2023 study showing greater depressive affect in leftist teenagers, for example, generated dozens of think-pieces explaining that this was probably just a result of differences in self-reporting, or level of political engagement, or "hey maybe these kids should be depressed, if they're even remotely aware of how terrible things are." But as one of the more thorough essays (archive link to an American Affairs article) I've found on the matter suggests:

The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives is one of the most robust patterns in social science research. It is not a product of things that happened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the available data reach. The differences manifest across age, gender, race, religion, and other dimensions. They are not merely present in the United States, but in most other studied countries as well. Consequently, satisfying explanations of the gaps in reported well-being between liberals and conservatives would have to generalize beyond the present moment, beyond isolated cultural or geographic contexts, and beyond specific demographic group

...

[But the] implications and applications of these realities remain wide open to interpretation.

While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives.

Isn't this just a replication of hedonic adaptation? No matter how good you have it, most people feel "average" most of the time.

Mental health isn't really related to how someone's mood. Mental health is a measurement for how well a person can respond appropriately to life's challenges and has a good working model of the world. Even something like a "mood disorder" is one where there is a disconnect between actual life circumstances and the person's state of mind or feeling. If someone was feeling miserable because of actual life circumstances - say they're locked in a basement and getting tortured, no one would consider that a mood disorder. And a mood disorder also covers feelings of elation caused by BPD, feelings of anger, etc.

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