In the article “Why American conservatives and individuals from traditionalist cultures may share a preference for group uniformity.” Bettache and Chui (2019) pointed out that some cognitive processes of American conservatives are similar to those of individuals from more collectivist and non-Western societies, and both conservative and collectivist values may have evolved as a reaction to a history of outside threats. When faced with external threats, conservatives are often willing to sacrifice self-determination and autonomy to preserve collective interests.
However, after reading this article, I have a question on why America’s conservatives are still rejecting a vaccine that effectively reduces the lethality of the new coronavirus and claims that the government requires them to be vaccinated against their wishes. As Gelfand et al. (2011) mentioned, sociocultural closeness results from a society’s historical exposure to repeated external threats (e.g., war or pathogen epidemics). Conservatives are often willing to give up their right to self-determination for the sake of collective safety and interests. But during the new crown epidemic outbreak, an amazing phenomenon has occurred. The Republican Party, the representative party of American conservatism, has shown strong opposition to vaccines (Durkee, 2021). They refused to be vaccinated, though they knew that other frail people’s protection could be achieved after widespread vaccination and proposed that vaccination is personal freedom and should not be forced by the government. This seems to contradict the conservatives as mentioned above’ preference for suppressing individual needs for the collective good. However, the collectivist countries mentioned by the author are mainly some Asian countries, such as China, India and so on. Except for the impact of objective conditions such as insufficient vaccine supply, there has not been a large-scale anti-vaccine movement. From the perspective of vaccination rate, the vaccination rate of China and India is still much higher than that of the United States.
This strange phenomenon contradicts the article’s conclusion that both American conservatives and Asian collectivist states are rooted in closer social ties and are willing to sacrifice self-determination to protect the interests of the group. Conservatives in America began to oppose policies that might protect the interests of groups and began to think about things in terms of self-determination. Is this because in recent years, the social psychology of American conservatives has been influenced by factors such as political stance and political propaganda, and American conservatives have become no longer simply given up the right of self-determination for collective interests? Just as Malka, Lelkes, and Soto (2017) mentioned that America may have less to do with psychology and more to do with national history, political party structures, political discourse, and the media system, in fact, the combination of economic and social beliefs in America’s conservative ideology may be an outlier from a global perspective.
Reference
[1] Gelfand, M. J., Raver, J. L., Nishii, L., Leslie, L. M., Lun, J., Lim, B. C.,. . . Yamaguchi, S. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332, 1100–1104. 10.1126/science.1197754
O – Z in the second. In alternating fashion, individuals in one group will write a post about the week’s
reading(s) on the Sunday before class (ideally, by early afternoon); all individuals in the other group will pick one post of their choosing, and respond to it before 4pm on the day of the class. (In other words: in Week 2, the A – N group will write the initial post, and the O – Z group will pick one of the first group’s posts to respond to; in Week 3, the O – Z group will write the initial post, and the A – N group will respond,
etc.) The initial posts can take the form of a question, a critique, or a further development of something the author(s) wrote. Make sure to write about at least one of the required readings. The posts should be at least one full paragraph in length, but can be as long as required to develop the point.
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