Take this survey to learn if you have a hierarchical or interconnected worldview

A short article in the June 2023 issue of Scientific American (I'm behind in my magazine reading) had a fascinating title that applies to religiosity just as much as to politics, in my view. If that link doesn't work for you, here's a PDF file of the article.
Download Many Differences between Liberals and Conservatives May Boil Down to One Belief | Scientific America

The article gives examples in the political realm.

In most of our studies, we also asked people to share their political party preference and to rate how liberal or conservative they consider themselves. In an early study focused on well-being, I noticed a surprising relation between people's beliefs and how they answered these two questions. Belief that the world was dangerous was not as linked to party or ideology as past research—including some of our own—said it should be.

We conducted nine more studies with nearly 5,000 participants, mostly Americans, to make sure we had it right. These studies pointed away from the “dangerous world” belief as the core difference between liberals and conservatives and toward a different primal called hierarchical world belief. That primal, we found, was 20 times more strongly related to political ideology than dangerous world belief.

People who score high in hierarchical world belief see the world as full of differences that matter because they usually reflect something real, inherent and significant. Such individuals often separate things of greater value from things of lesser value. You might imagine that to them the world looks full of big, bold black lines.

In the opposite view—held by people with lower scores for this belief—differences tend to be seen as superficial and even silly. For those with this perspective, the world is mostly dotted lines or shades of gray. (To reiterate, primals concern tendencies only. Even people with a strong hierarchical world belief see some lines as arbitrary.) In our work, this primal was high in conservatives and low in liberals.

Most types of hierarchical thinking that have been studied, such as social dominance orientation, concern preferences about how humans should be organized. But hierarchical world belief relates to how people think the world actually is—regardless of what they'd like to see. In addition, this primal applies not only to human groups but to everything, including plants, other animals and inanimate objects. For people high in this belief, the universe is the kind of place where lines matter.

One reason our discovery is exciting is that it hints at ways to work through specific political deadlocks. For example, consider debates around LGBTQ+ topics. Conservatives may feel that the line separating men and women is natural and innate—a big, bold line—whereas liberals may see that distinction as more superficial and culturally based. Welfare payments and policies, too, might be seen through a hierarchical lens, with some assuming that lines between rich and poor often reflect meaningful differences in people's work ethic, talent, morality or value to society.

The line relevant to the abortion debate is perhaps conception. Conservatives believe this line marks the beginning of human life and thus matters a great deal. A nonhierarchical perspective would be that life emerges incrementally across many thresholds.

I see hierarchy versus interconnectedness as applying to religion also. For example, Buddhism and Taoism are decidedly non-hierarchical, viewing reality as being inherently unified with interconnections among its seeming parts.

Fundamentalist Christianity, or any fundamentalist religion, sees reality as being headed up by the Big Man Upstairs, God, who delegates authority to entities lower in the cosmic organizational chart: incarnations like Jesus, godly saints, gurus, church leaders, and so on. 

Questioning authority in a hierarchical religion, or political organization, is strongly discouraged. And also punished. But Buddhism embraces the saying, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Metaphorically, of course. 

The article says:

We find instead that the main difference between the left and the right is whether people believe the world is inherently hierarchical. Conservatives, our work shows, tend to believe more strongly than liberals in a hierarchical world, which is essentially the view that the universe is a place where the lines between categories or concepts matter. A clearer understanding of that difference could help society better bridge political divides.

We discovered this by accident. My team was undertaking an ambitious effort to map all the most basic beliefs that people hold about the world we share. We call these tenets “primal world beliefs,” or “primals” for short. Primals reflect what individuals think is typical about the world—for instance, that most things are beautiful or that life is usually full of pain and suffering. We suspect these beliefs hold important implications for people's mental health and well-being.

You can learn what your own primals are by heading to this web site. There's three surveys you can take: a 99 question one, a 18 question one, and a 6 question one. I took the 99 question survey, then the 18 question survey. The 99 question survey has more detail on the hierarchical front. Here's my overall result (the scores range from 0 to 5):

I got a very high score, 5.0, on the Interconnected primal. Not surprisingly, I got a correspondingly low score on the hierarchical primal, 1.2.

Regular readers of this blog also won't be surprised by my low score in the Alive section as to whether the world is Intentional, 0.8. However, I find the world highly Interesting, 4.5, Worth Exploring, 4.0, and Meaningful, 4.75. The meaning just comes from me, not a higher power or the universe. 

The 18 question survey is a bit easier to understand, having only four primals. Here's how my very low score on Alive was described in my result report. I'd be interested in how other people score on this primal. My guess is that the more supernaturally-inclined visitors to this blog are, the higher their score on Alive will be.

 

Comments

[sant64]

Your categorization of Eastern vs. Western religion strikes me as far more romantic than factually accurate. Read the early history of Buddhism and you'll find it was extremely hierarchical from its very beginnings. Moreover, all the Buddhist organizations, be they Tibetan, Japanese, or whatever, are every bit as hierarchical and authoritarian as the Catholic church.

I do though think you're correct when you allude that the salient difference between conservatives and liberals is on the matter of authority. "Authority bad, freedom good!" has ever been the core value of liberals. But taking that ethos as an absolute would be a mistake. That's because it's common for those agitating against authority to be clamoring for, not their autonomy as they might claim, but their authority over others.

Feel like you're a woman trapped in a man's body? You've always been free to go to Macy's and buy a dress and makeup, but instead, you want to take away others' freedoms of privacy and fair play in sporting arenas.

Feel like meat is murder and the world should be vegan? It's not enough to be vegan, you also work to progressively outlaw non vegan agriculture.

Think EVs are neat? Your political party doesn't just encourage EVs, but progressively outlaws the ownership of gas-powered vehicles. They protest they're not authoritarian but are just concerned for the planet, so your car must go. And your gas stove.

They may say their hearts bleed and they're fighting for the oppressed, but the end result is always the same: Invariably, they are acting to take control over you and the world.

And so, let's not kid ourselves, authoritarianism is literally everywhere. Equally present in all political parties, equally present in all major religions, equally present in believers and atheists.

[Brian Hines]

sant64, I disagree with your assertion that Buddhism is as hierarchical as the Catholic church. So do the authors of this study that divided major religions into hierarchical and autonomous, which maybe is a better term than my "interconnected," though to me they get at the same thing. See:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10360949/

The Muslim and Christian Catholic/Orthodox religions were classed as hierarchical, with Christian Protestant anti-hierarchical, and Buddhism/Hinduism as non-hierarchical. The study looked at the relation between corruption and hierarchical religion. Excerpt:
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Religion plays a significant role in influencing corruption levels [26,[29], [30], [31], [32], [33]]. While all religions encourage good moral conduct and ethical behavior, studies show that different religions are associated with varying levels of corruption. Notably, countries whose primary religions are hierarchical religions such as Catholic Christianity (Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Islam, tend to have higher corruption levels, particularly in comparison to Protestant Christian countries [21,30,[34], [35], [36], [37]]. Supporting this claim, [30] found that corruption levels are lowest in countries with a Protestant majority and highest in countries with an Orthodox Christian majority.

[Appreciative Reader]

Just did the 99-question thing. I got Good 2.65 (Safe 2.45, Enticing 2.89, and Alive 1.86).

Afraid I don't really know what that means! Later when I'm free, I'll read up the explanations, and what exactly they're trying to measure here.

[Appreciative Reader]

Check out your scores, and glanced through the explanations immediately following (in your post). Those Neutral Primal numbers seem kind of important, right? So this is what I get: Acceptable 2.5, Changing 3.2, Hierarchical 1.0, Interconnected 4.0, and Understandable 3.0.

(I do get the gist of what this is all about, and kind of get what my scores indicate; but, like I said, I'll need to sit down and read through the explanations in your post, and in more detail on the website, later when I've time.)

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Interesting survey. It would be interesting to see both one's own scores, as well as the averages (I think they do provide that as well.)

Cool, thanks for posting.