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You are here: Home / Weird Science

Weird Science

by John Cole|  July 23, 20035:36 pm| 11 Comments

This post is in: General Stupidity

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By now everyone has heard of the Berkeley news release of a study that states the following:

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

Fear and aggression

Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

Uncertainty avoidance

Need for cognitive closure

Terror management

And of course, this gem:

Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way.

Yawn. Here is the original study and their response to a peeer crtique (which I can not find), both in .pdf format.

Original: Jost, J.T, Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W. & Sulloway, F. J. “Political conservatism as motivated social cognition”, Psychological Bulletin, Vol 129, 339-375., 2003

Response: Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W. & Sulloway, F. J. “Exceptions that prove the rule–using a theory of motivated social cognition to account for ideological incongruities and political anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas”., Psycological Bulletin, Vol. 129, No. 3, 383-393., 2003

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Reader Interactions

11Comments

  1. 1.

    Thomas J. Jackson

    July 23, 2003 at 10:26 pm

    Wanna bet these “scholars” voted for the communist party candidate in the 2000 elections. This is faily amusing till one discovers they are from Berkley.

  2. 2.

    click here for the Lonewacko Blog

    July 24, 2003 at 12:49 am

    Even more amusing is that this paper was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and, directly or indirectly, the public universities they work for, such as Berkeley, UMD, and NYU.

    Details on the funding are in the 7Meg paper and here, with some contact info.

  3. 3.

    Omnibus Bill

    July 24, 2003 at 9:23 am

    >>Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality

    Well, yeah. We believe that you shouldn’t change simply for the sake of change, and that while all men ought to be equal before the law, that equality of outcome shouldn’t be guaranteed, under any circumstances.

    If that lumps me in with Hitler, so be it.

    I don’t get that comparison to Mussolini and especially Hitler – Hitler was a leftist, a “National SOCIALIST”. If attacking Stalin and hating Stalinism makes him a right winger, then Harry Truman, Mao and Brezhnev are all right wingers too.

  4. 4.

    Sweet Lou

    July 24, 2003 at 10:24 am

    I’ll bite…

    I haven’t had time to do more than scan the original paper and the response, but as a conservative, it looks like they hit pretty close to the mark.

    Overall, I find conservativism to be a useful model of reality. Let’s take a look at the things they associate conservativism with:

    I equate fear of such things as:
    –death
    –social and economic deprivation
    –instability of the social system
    as a form of intelligence.

    A vigorous resistance to new ideas also benefits me, as it weeds out bad ideas (which are the majority of new ideas) and only lets the vigorous, healthy, good new ideas through. Too, even a good new idea is an idea we have managed to live without for thousands of years. Why rush to embrace it now? Let it start small and work its way up. That’ll teach it to show up late to work.

    I cannot speak too highly of low self-esteem. It has done me a world of good, and I recommend it unequivocally. Avoid people with high self-esteem. Besides being a menace to themselves and others, they are also, without exception, raging assholes.

    There is a good name for individuals who lack a certain degree of mental rigidity and closed-mindedness. That name is “sucker”. Their enhanced openness to experience allows them to enjoy the rogering they get because, in their tolerance for ambiguity, they didn’t read the contract. The increased cognitive complexity of their affairs, coupled with their reduced need for order and structure, means that everything they try to do turns into a mess, which is OK with them, because with their reduced need for cognitive closure, they don’t care if anything useful gets done anyway.

    My objection is with their lumping in Hitler and Mussolini and etcetera with conservatives. Hitler and Mussolini were the type of bright-eyed world-saving idealists that cause so much harm. Unfortunately, too many open-minded, mentally flexible asshats embraced those shiny ideas about reborn nations, genetic purity, and a new reich that would last one thousand years. Note the chord both men struck with young people, a group famous for its non-conservativism and open mindedness.

    Perhaps had people been less tolerant of the ambiguity over, say, what was going to happen to all those Jewish people, or rejected the cognitive complexity of the tortured reasoning used to justify national expansion, or, even been a bit more concerned about Nazi thugs undermining the stability of the social system and taking over the government, the 20th century would have been much nicer.

    Now, back to work. My fear of social and economic deprivation makes me want to keep my job.

  5. 5.

    John Cole

    July 24, 2003 at 10:32 am

    Read the studies- the real problem is reliance on old and outdated constructs that bear no semblance to reality. There are a number of methodological issues that need to be addressed.

  6. 6.

    Sweet Lou

    July 24, 2003 at 10:59 am

    John,

    I would argue that in addition to that problem, there is possibly a bias which might invite censure from their academic community.

    The authors have done a service by bringing the issue to light. Lack of appropriate scientific rigor in addressing the subject will reflect on the authors, not the subject. That is, to the extent they are grinding an axe, they will have their butt handed to them by their colleagues.

  7. 7.

    Tom

    July 24, 2003 at 12:23 pm

    “Read the studies- the real problem is reliance on old and outdated constructs that bear no semblance to reality. ”

    John, in Table 6 (Need for order versus Conservatism), there’s one correlation cited from 1973, and 20 from 1994 onward. I’m not seeing how you are concluding this.

    I’d say one problem with the study is that there isn’t a sufficient emphasis on the more economic-focused aspects of conservatism [e.g. Thatcherite/Gingrichite-type conservatism], not much data was cited on this (and all such data was from Poles), or conservatism beign embraced as a reaction to liberalism/leftism.

    As Sweet Lou said, most of the aspects they cite can be expressed as virtues, e.g. intolerance of ambiguity (“facts are facts. I can’t stand these liberals who can’t decide between right & wrong”), and system instability (“OK, you leftists say you can make things better if we change things radically; history and the second law of thermodynamics suggest otherwise”). Much of the rest are almost truisms.

    I can’t see why you folks on the Dexter side of the spectrum are so pissed at this.

  8. 8.

    John Cole

    July 24, 2003 at 12:39 pm

    I am not upset about it- I just think the research, other than being useful as a way to get press for some of the author’s pet constructs and as a way to self cite, is pretty much irrelevant.

    You are correct in your discussion of the attributes as virtues- in any personally construct, we are most likely to find those traits we identify with to be the most virtuous.

    The operationalization as well as the peripheral associations with conservatism in this article are rather weak- and while the author may have found significant correlations with many of the authoritian like constructs and the original operationalization of authoritarianism, that is not the same as isomorphism.

    I think my only real beef would be with the press release, which clearly was not by any of the authors of the study. That is why I cut and pasted from the press release and then gave the links for the actual study.

  9. 9.

    Sweet Lou

    July 24, 2003 at 1:23 pm

    Yes, the press release was a nasty bit of work with the standard “Aren’t Conservatives a bunch of knuckle-draggers” attitude.

    I’ll go further and state that I sensed that tone in the published article. I suspect those authors are going to come in for a bit of it from their peers, who probably don’t like that sort of attitude being blatently dragged into a professional journal. Looks from the second link you provided that has already started.

    Thus my longwinded defense of conservative traits, which I hope was not too much an imposition on your bandwidth.

    Tom: Dexter side of the spectrum?

  10. 10.

    Tom

    July 24, 2003 at 2:12 pm

    Sweet Lou:

    “I’ll go further and state that I sensed that tone in the published article. I suspect those authors are going to come in for a bit of it from their peers,”

    I imagine Jost, at Stanford’s B-school, isn’t going to get invited to get invited to any cocktail parties at Stanford’s Hoover Institute.

    “who probably don’t like that sort of attitude being blatently dragged into a professional journal. Looks from the second link you provided that has already started.”

    Actually, the Psych. Bulletin included all three: Paper/Rebuttal/Response. So it was pre-Press Release.

    Tom: Dexter side of the spectrum?”

    You are Dexter, I am Sinister.

  11. 11.

    M. Scott Eiland

    July 24, 2003 at 2:53 pm

    This reminds me of how a national magazine printed an article by a psychologist who had never met Barry Goldwater in which he concluded that Goldwater was nuts by doing a “scientific” evaulation of his public speeches. Same old liberal BS, different package.

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