Study: MAGAts Score High On Malevolence, Low On Compassion

 

For anyone who's paid attention to the people populating the MAGA cult, this shouldn't come as a big surprise, but they're not like us:

A new psychological study has found that people who report favorable views of Donald Trump also tend to score higher on measures of callousness, manipulation, and other malevolent traits—and lower on empathy and compassion. The findings, based on two large surveys of U.S. adults, shed light on how personality traits relate to political beliefs, including support for Trump and conservative ideology. The research was recently published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Malevolent personality traits—sometimes called “dark” traits—include tendencies such as manipulativeness, callousness, narcissism, and a lack of empathy. These traits are often captured by concepts like psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, which together reflect a general disposition toward exploiting or disregarding others for personal gain.

People with stronger malevolent traits may be more comfortable with aggression, dominance, or cruelty and less likely to value fairness or kindness. These tendencies are associated with lower levels of affective empathy (concern for others’ suffering) and, in some cases, higher levels of dissonant empathy (enjoyment of others’ pain). In contrast, benevolent traits reflect the opposite—a disposition marked by compassion, humanism, and a belief in treating others with dignity and respect.

The researchers conducted the study to better understand the psychological traits that underlie political ideology, particularly support for Donald Trump and conservative beliefs. Prior work had already linked conservative ideology with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance, but the researchers hypothesized that malevolent personality traits might also play a role—especially given Trump’s rhetoric and behavior, which often display dominance, callousness, and disregard for social norms.

They were especially interested in whether support for Trump was associated with higher malevolent traits and lower empathy, and whether benevolent traits might predict a more liberal or non-authoritarian outlook. The study aimed to clarify how these personality dispositions relate to political beliefs and what this might reveal about the deeper psychological dimensions of ideology.  [snip]

The findings consistently showed that people who identified as politically conservative—and especially those who rated Trump’s presidency highly—were more likely to score higher on measures of authoritarianism, social dominance, and malevolent personality traits.

In the first sample of men, all three predictors — social dominance, authoritarianism, and psychopathic tendencies — predicted conservative ideology and favorable views of Trump, but only for white participants. Among men of minority status, psychopathic traits were not significantly related to political ideology. This suggests that the psychological pathways to conservatism may differ based on racial or ethnic identity, possibly due to different experiences with social power and marginalization.

Support for Trump was also associated with distinct patterns in empathy. Compared to those who did not support Trump, Trump supporters reported lower affective empathy (less emotional concern for others) and higher dissonant empathy (greater enjoyment of others’ suffering). These differences held even after controlling for age, education, and racial background...

There's more at the link, including methodology and more detailed descriptions of the findings.

We're not psychologists but we adhere to the school of "if it walks like a duck..." political analysis. If someone can see and hear what the Malignant Fascist has done and said over the course of his life, in and out of politics, and experienced the 4 years of hateful dystopia of his first term and still vote for him -- well, that tells us something.  That something is what this study validates, which is "you are who you vote for."

The question is, how did so many people get that way?  We don't have answers to that, but it could involve 100- plus years of right- wing media (newspapers, then radio, then television, then cable, then social media), and the charlatans preaching hate from the pulpit, and the wealthy ultra- right benefactors supporting it all that have twisted and poisoned generations of Americans.  It's also somewhat of an indictment of our politics and institutions that this festering grew to the point its reached today, where our democracy is in mortal danger from this cult and its malevolent leader.

(Photo: Spencer Platt/ Getty Images)