Trying to escape death through cryonics is not a left/right thing

Leftwingers and rightwingers have psychologies that are profoundly different in some ways. One way we might expect they’re different is in relation to the fear of death. A variety of literature on Terror Management purports to show either that fear of death drives us toward the political right or that fear of death polarises us towards more extreme forms of our current beliefs. Since we will all die, politics and other big cultural projects become strategies for managing the fear of death. For those especially prone to these fears, death sculpts what they believe.

Suppose that the left and the right do differ in their stance towards their mortality as one version of the terror management hypothesis suggests. We would expect to see different attitudes towards cryonics on the left and right. Cryonics is the freezing of dead bodies in the hope that one day they might be unfrozen and cured of their ailments. Think not Disney on Ice but Walt Disney on Ice. Which way would this effect go? I’m not sure. On the one hand, we can imagine the fear of death causing conservatives to leap into cryonics. On the other hand, we can imagine those who try not to think about their mortality avoid cryonics. What seems unlikely is that the fear of death could be a profound shaper of politics, yet would have no net effect on orientation toward cryonics.

I had a dataset of people who had answered questions about Cryonics- readers of Scott’s blog who had filled out a supplementary survey.

If you believe you shall be resurrected by God, cryonics loses much of its allure. Also, if you believe you are going to be resurrected by God, on average you will be to the right, thus religion complicates things. To deal with this, I look at only non-spiritual atheists and their attitudes towards cryonics. I don’t think control structures would be appropriate here. I imagine the relationships might be extremely complex and multifaceted. It’s best, as far as possible, to take religion out of the picture.

In short, I found there was no difference of any practical significance. Those who said yes or probably yes to: Could you imagine electing to undergo some biostasis procedure at the time of your legal death? Were one-tenth of one point further to the right on a 1-10 scale of political affiliation, or one-twentieth of a standard deviation, compared to those who said no or probably no. This is a difference small enough that even were it statistically significant, I wouldn’t care about it.

Nor was the standard deviation practically or statistically significantly different (1.78 for the pro-cryonics group, 1.9 for the anti-cryonics group). This suggests that political polarisation is not too different between the groups.

There were two significant differences I noticed. Libertarians were more likely to be pro-cryonics (169/657 said yes or lean yes, versus 55/331 who said no or lean no). I have two explanations here, one flattering to libertarians and the other not. The flattering explanation is that libertarians are more open to new things. The unflattering explanation is that libertarians tend to be at the center of their mental universes in a way that makes them extra eager to escape death. Finally, our tiny sample of Marxists (N=22) was significantly less likely to choose cryonics. The effect was just on the edge of statistical significance, but I suspect it is a real effect. Marxism encourages thinking about history at a bigger scope. At this scope, one’s own immortality seems less significant- especially if one has to purchase it!

Null results are never fashionable in science, yet I do think there is something profound about this. Left-wingers and right-wingers are different in numerous ways. Presumably, those interested in cryonics are also extremely different from those not interested in cryonics in countless ways. Despite this, and a large sample (N=988), there was no detectable entanglement between these two axes of variation among people, even though each, in its way, goes to the core of what it means to be human, and reshapes our existence. We contain numerous, separate kinds of gestalt differences, and though they tangle around each other and interact in shaping behaviors together, there is enough psychological space for them to vary independently.