Plausible theory? Or total BS? You tell me

[wysimdnwyg]

I have two friends (OK, one of them is my Mom, but for the sake of this discussion, I will refer to them both as friends) who enjoy sending out e-mails. And I mean mass e-mails, to half the people in their address book.

Both have had a history of forwarding every POC (piece of crap) message they get, if it says to do so, i.e. chain mail. I have repeatedly debunked messages about missing children, prizes for forwarding the message (like the continuous Disney and MS awards) and surveys of all kinds. After doing this for a long time (several months in each case, amounting to dozens of Replies-to-all explaining the fallacy and, in many cases, including a link to Snopes.com, I encountered two distinct reactions.

The first reaction was one of understanding and agreement that too many of these things going around have no basis in fact, and should not be forwarded. This friend was appreciative of my diligence and now examines Snopes on her own, prior to forwarding messages like this.

The other reaction was one of disgust, frustration and anger. For this friend, the thought that I would reply-to-all and renounce her propaganda/forwarded BS was unfathomable. She IMed me and angrily asked if she should stop e-mailing me altogether. After explaining that I have no problem with her e-mailing me, but she should understand that many of her forwarded messages are BS, we finally came to the understanding that she would stop sending those, and only send me e-mails that are of her own creation.
Today, I received two messages from her. One was a Dr. Phil personality quiz (that of course stated that the recipient must forward it to everyone they know), and the other was about a missing child (totally fake, per Snopes).

One of these friends is a democrat and is very liberal (likes Kucinich a lot, voted for Kerry). The other is hard-core conservative. We do not discuss politics any longer so as to avoid the arguments.

Can you guess which one is which? And could this be an example of a larger theory, or are these isolated incidents?

[grannylib]

1. I think this kind of thing is a good example of the larger theory...

Liberals tend to take things on a case by case basis, weighing facts and evidence and circumstance. RWers tend to be more knee-jerk and defensive, as they have to be since truth is rarely on their side.
I see it all over. And RWers do seem to be far more easily swayed by propaganda for some reason.

[MsUnderstood]

3. I had a forwarding frenzy yesterday at work

One person forwarded some stupid joke that said forward to 10 people or get in trouble (she picked 10 people from work to forward the message to)

I decided not to bother responding with a please dont message.

1 hour later I got the same message (except it had several more fW: in the subject line) from another coworker. Still frustrated, still I deleted and ignored.

20 minutes later I got the message! I know that if I respond with "stop forwarding crap" I will be taken off the list and the forwarding will go on.

Sometimes you can't help people.

[TlalocW]

2. Not isolated but...

I don't think politics play into it. My mom's a democrat, and it's taken a while, but I've gotten her to stop sending out the obvious crap about missing children, forwarding emails to get prizes, etc. She still is a bit of a spammer with the cutesy-wutesy prayers and daily affirmation stuff though.

TlalocW