Posted on 07/22/2003 6:48:32 PM PDT by Fred
Researchers help define what makes a political conservative
By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 22 July 2003
BERKELEY – Politically conservative agendas may range from supporting the Vietnam War to upholding traditional moral and religious values to opposing welfare. But are there consistent underlying motivations?
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
"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.
Assistant Professor Jack Glaser of the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and Visiting Professor Frank Sulloway of UC Berkeley joined lead author, Associate Professor John Jost of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and Professor Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland at College Park, to analyze the literature on conservatism.
The psychologists sought patterns among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books and conference papers. The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies.
Ten meta-analytic calculations performed on the material - which included various types of literature and approaches from different countries and groups - yielded consistent, common threads, Glaser said.
The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought - the resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo, they said.
The terror management feature of conservatism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views, they wrote.
Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism - an endorsement of inequality, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South S.C.).
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.
This research marks the first synthesis of a vast amount of information about conservatism, and the result is an "elegant and unifying explanation" for political conservatism under the rubric of motivated social cognition, said Sulloway. That entails the tendency of people's attitudinal preferences on policy matters to be explained by individual needs based on personality, social interests or existential needs.
The researchers' analytical methods allowed them to determine the effects for each class of factors and revealed "more pluralistic and nuanced understanding of the source of conservatism," Sulloway said.
While most people resist change, Glaser said, liberals appear to have a higher tolerance for change than conservatives do.
As for conservatives' penchant for accepting inequality, he said, one contemporary example is liberals' general endorsement of extending rights and liberties to disadvantaged minorities such as gays and lesbians, compared to conservatives' opposing position.
The researchers said that conservative ideologies, like virtually all belief systems, develop in part because they satisfy some psychological needs, but that "does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled."
They also stressed that their findings are not judgmental.
"In many cases, including mass politics, 'liberal' traits may be liabilities, and being intolerant of ambiguity, high on the need for closure, or low in cognitive complexity might be associated with such generally valued characteristics as personal commitment and unwavering loyalty," the researchers wrote.
This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes, the researchers advised.
The latest debate about the possibility that the Bush administration ignored intelligence information that discounted reports of Iraq buying nuclear material from Africa may be linked to the conservative intolerance for ambiguity and or need for closure, said Glaser.
"For a variety of psychological reasons, then, right-wing populism may have more consistent appeal than left-wing populism, especially in times of potential crisis and instability," he said.
Glaser acknowledged that the team's exclusive assessment of the psychological motivations of political conservatism might be viewed as a partisan exercise. However, he said, there is a host of information available about conservatism, but not about liberalism.
The researchers conceded cases of left-wing ideologues, such as Stalin, Khrushchev or Castro, who, once in power, steadfastly resisted change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism.
Yet, they noted that some of these figures might be considered politically conservative in the context of the systems that they defended. The researchers noted that Stalin, for example, was concerned about defending and preserving the existing Soviet system.
Although they concluded that conservatives are less "integratively complex" than others are, Glaser said, "it doesn't mean that they're simple-minded."
Conservatives don't feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions, he said. "They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm," Glaser said.
He pointed as an example to a 2001 trip to Italy, where President George W. Bush was asked to explain himself. The Republican president told assembled world leaders, "I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right." And in 2002, Bush told a British reporter, "Look, my job isn't to nuance."
The key to understanding this "study" is in a short phrase which describes what was done. It is "meta-analytic calculations." The article does not explain what that is. Since I took stats in the Ph.D. program at American University, I can supply that information.
Meta-analytic calculations means taking just the RESULTS, not the raw data, from a group of other studies, and running them through mathematical tests for statistical significance. When the raw data from the assembled studies are something highly factual -- such as rates of death from tuberculosis or rainfall per acre of arable land, such calculations can be valuable and useful.
However, when that process is used in politics, the results from the prior studies must be coded by the researchers' opinions as to what they mean. The obvious and stupid error in the coding of this meta-analysis appears in this article. The "researchers" coded Hitler and Mussolini as "conservatives" along with President Reagan. Apparently, the "researchers" didn't notice that the first two were both, as a matter of political intent, socialists.
In short, this is bullsh*t, and any competent reader of the "results" of this "study" could look at the process and know that. Furthermore, all of the characteristics except one applied in spades to Billyjeff Clinton, to his wife, Lady MacBeth, and to all of their assembled Kool-Aid drinkers. The only one that does not apply to them is "avoiding ambiguity." That group raised the use of deliberate ambiguity to an art form.
This is another proof, if any be needed, that those who have Ph.D.s and carry clipboards are just as capable of lying as the worst of politicians, or even more frightening, the worst of trial lawyers. This is JUNK SCIENCE.
Congressman Billybob
So what do you mean by "is" here? ;-)
You mean like homosexual research studies that begin with the premise that homosexuality is not a paraphilic disorder? Garbage in garbage out.
How about Meta-Analytic studies like Rind that begin with the caveat you can’t equate "wrongfulness" with harmfulness in sexual matters, but harmfulness cannot be inferred from wrongfulness in child sex abuse? If I wanted to prove pigs can fly meta-analysis is the way to go.
Here you have liberalism in a capsule. Non-judgmental is the sum total of their being. Liberals can not tell right from and wrong and have no desire to do so. Intellectual capacity is the ability to absorb and process information to get the benefit of the information absorbed. Does the phrase, "Those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it" mean anything to you? Chaos is the result of liberalism. All progress of man and society clearly rests on the shoulders of conservatives. Liberals are not only intellectually incompetent, they are determined to remain that way.
Eh...I've never been totally convinced that those Fascists were definable as either liberal or conservative, by the modern definitions of those terms.
The big problem here is that we are trying to use modern standards to define past political movements, and it doesn't work too well. As the Berkeley numnutzes pointed out, there were some very central features of Fascist policy (particularly Nazi policy) that would be by any reasonable definition conservative - emphasis on a "family values" agenda, nationalism (the "national" in National Socialism), and suchlike.
But then you have the problem that Hitler et. al were in some respects socialist, a distinctly liberal philosophy. On the other hand, Hitler was contemporaneously seen by some as a defender of capitalism and Western civilization against the Soviet Union; Hitler was certainly on record as despising Communism. In social policy, the Nazis could be classed as extremist conservatives - pushing the traditional family structure, to the point of actually awarding medals to women who bore lots of "Aryan" children, to their nationalistic Kultur. National Socialism also repudiated the philosophical underpinnings of the Enlightenment, the genesis of modern egalitarian liberalism (and Socialism, and Marxism).
The upshot of all this is - any attempt to label National Socialism or Fascism as exclusively conservative or liberals is intellectually dishonest, pointless and misguided. The phenomena defy the usual classification system. That, essentially, is the problem with this "study." It begins from a flawed premise, and with a bit of an axe to grind as well, I'm thinking.
Snidely
Here! here!
It's a wonderland. Alice would recognize it instantly!
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