Posted on 03/23/2005 9:13:20 AM PST by Clint N. Suhks
Two things libs can't understand:
1) The U.S. Constitution
2) The difference between right and wrong
I was crushed like a bug. But at least I can laugh about it.
"You don't find many lefties in the Engineering profession, where problem solving is a way of life."
Yes.
The study of cold facts, hard sciences versus the study of warm touchy feelings, the soft sciences. :-)
AWESOME! Thanks for finding that! That's so good it's worth saving for posterity. Maybe I'll post the whole thing later.
Sounds fairly basic to all human existence.
I bought groceries this week to avoid future uncertainty. I'll bet the psychologists did the same thing.
POINT-BY-POINT!!!!
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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?
Sure. In those two examples, defeating communism in the first and avoiding the fate of the Roman Empire in the second.
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 (a universal theme, even among lefties, or I should say, especially among lefties)
Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity (the implication being that leftists don’t believe in anything very strongly, and they would be proud of that if they could be sure about it)
Uncertainty avoidance (conservatives prefer to know what the deal is than to not know)
Need for cognitive closure (we do like to resolve things and move on rather than dwell on them and become addicted to “process” at the expense of real problem-solving)
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.
What does that mean other than that psychological factors are capable of contributing to stuff that happens in the mind? My tagline (What are intellectuals for but to complexify the obvious?) has never been more relevant.
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.
Blah, blah, blah…
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.
Hand-picked, no doubt…
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.
They would have found the same “constant common threads” dumping a Scrabble board on the floor.
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 status quo is not always a bad thing. Change for the sake of change is a rather silly philosophy. Besides, we see more resistance to change when it is actually needed among lefties than conservatives (SEE: SOCIAL SECURITY, UNITED NATIONS, MORAL RELATIVISM).
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.
Unfortunately for these professors who are resistant to change from moral relativism and double-standards, it is far more than mere “cherished world views” that are threatened by Islamo-fascists, who ironically have even less in common with their “cherished world views” than with conservatives.
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.).
A stupid, transparent, insulting attempt to confuse in the readers’ minds racism with mere recognition of the obvious fact that not everyone will be the same height and weight, or have an equal level of talent at everything. But such simple recognition robs these change-resistant professors of another fix of wallowing in “process”, hand-wringing, and moral ambiguity.
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, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.
And an orange can be described the same way as a turd – both are smaller than a breadbox, both contain carbon, etc. But that doesn’t mean that you should eat both.
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.
‘Elegant’? Poop in a silk sack is still a sack of poop.
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.
More postmodern, deconstructionist hooie used as an “elegant” way of calling names, e.g., conservatives are dumb, paranoid, social Luddites.
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.
Again I dispute that notion. If that were true, we wouldn’t see so much resistance to reform of Social Security, of the U.N., and of the anti-semitic paradigm of the Peace “Process” in Israel.
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.
What conservative is against applying the Bill of Rights equally to everyone? Liberals want to give these Victim Groups rights no-one else has.
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."
This after stating that conservative beliefs are pretty much false, irrational and unprincipled.
They also stressed that their findings are not judgmental.
BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!
"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.
Gee, ya think?
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.
Ah, back to the thinly veiled insults. I knew it couldn’t last…
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.
This information that discounted reports of Iraq buying nuclear material from Africa by a guy who by his own admission did no investigating and instead sat around in cafes drinking tea has since been proven false. Joseph Wilson is a liar, as is his wife. And the administration’s views on this were based on British intelligence, not the source Wilson based his lies on. So yeah, I have a hard time tolerating that kind of ambiguity.
And where was this famous ambiguity on the part of liberals on Wilson's side? Did they ever for a second suggest that Bush might still be right -- or did they seek, immediate, certain "cognitive closure" that Bush was a liar?
"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.
Gee, ya think? Part 2…
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.
Liberal professors don’t like to deconstruct liberalism. Besides, there is plenty written about liberalism, but it’s written by conservatives who apparently don’t count. Where is the “uncertainty”?
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.
That's right, conservatives have nothing in common with good people -- only with dictators left and non-left. We'll make them responsible for Stalin and Castro, not Charlie Chaplin and Danny Glover.
Although they concluded that conservatives are less "integratively complex" than others are, Glaser said, "it doesn't mean that they're simple-minded."
We’re just less indecisive and are not addicted to confusion and ambiguity.
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.
No, we will concede ambiguity when something is genuinely ambiguous, like the motivations on why someone puts on their left shoe first instead of their right. But we will not pretend that 2 + 2 might equal 5, depending on how you feel about it or what your skin color is.
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."
What was the context you uprooted those quotes from? Again the trademark embracing of “uncertainty” of Western lefties disappears when they deal with conservatives, who they see as 2-dimensional cartoon villains that should stamped out like a disease. Suddenly they are “more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white” when the topic shifts to Republicans.
Okay, my turn to psychoanalyze. Liberals are so resistant to certainty, especially on moral issues, because it means they might have to confront the possibility of God’s existence. If morality really is transcendent, the implication is not that its source really isn’t just zeitgeist or arbitrary social contracts but something more…timeless, beyond the limits of the lifespan of a man or even a civilization. If not by man, thenby what or whom…? To be accountable to some superhuman entity, whatever form it might take, is just a little too scary.
Moral certainty must be stamped out so that the party can continue guilt-free…
1) The U.S. Constitution
2) The difference between right and wrong
You forgot economics.
Hey, Zhang! Your tagline has somehow been picked up and quoted at http://freedomkeys.com/intellectuals.htm
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The One-Nut Theory This paper provoked outrage among conservatives (that is, real conservatives, not the mass-murdering left-wing Communist dictator kind) and dismay among scientists who had hoped that the field of psychology, with its still-tenuous association with harder sciences like neuroscience and biology, had finally shed its unsavory image as the science of rolfing, R.D. Liang, penis envy and Jungian mysticism. With this stumble, the APA has bypassed R.D. Liang altogether and headed toward the realm of Lysenko and Stalin's "insane asylums" for political prisoners, where political belief determined diagnoses and conclusions. The idea of Hitler and Stalin as "conservatives" is as nuts as the thesis that conservatism--or for that matter liberalism or totalitarianism--is the product of a set of specific shared psychological traits. The satirical columnist Doug Powers wrote on www.worldnetdaily.com that "Joe Stalin snuffed out some 20 million human lives, but then again, he had both testicles, so he was twice as nuts as Hitler. As far as I can tell, the only thing these men have in common is that they've all been compared to each other by faculty dweebs from Freetime University." The authors' political agenda is made clear by their other statements. Jack Glaser of UC Berkeley said, "[Conservatives] are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm ... 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 need for closure." |
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Unscientific Psychology benefits little by delving into politics. It receives enough scorn and opprobrium for its past association with Freudian psychiatry, which was based on the unproven and untestable belief that subconscious conflicts (which are subjective, idiosyncratic, and unquantifiable) can be resolved by achieving insight into their causes. Behaviorists and neurophysiologists worked long and hard to bring psychology into line as a science based on objective empirical research and dispassionate measurement. Of course, Thomas Szasz and others have long argued that psychology and psychiatry are a form of politics, and that even schizophrenia, because its diagnosis is based on behavioral observations and not biochemical measurements, is at least partially a political and social construct. There's much to be said for this point of view. But the field of psychology also has vitally important insights to offer. By dabbling in politics, Jost et al. threaten the credibility of real behavioral scientists. So let's set the record straight on American liberalism and conservatism. Liberals are the party of collectivism and redistribution of wealth. They give things away, even at times to our enemies and to dictators, with the hope that giving things to them will reform them, inducing them to change. By giving things to and compromising with adversaries, liberals hope to make the adversary emotionally feel more favorably toward them and more disposed to do what the liberals want. From this point of view, conservatives often appear heartless and stingy. Liberalism is also associated with collectivism because in order to ensure that things are given away, centralized control is needed in the form of higher taxes and large social programs. Liberalism views the economy as something that needs to be managed so that resources can be distributed in an egalitarian manner by the government. To ensure that the government has more control, American-style liberals strive to weaken the individual by undermining the traditional cohesive bonds within society, such as the family, religion, and moral values. Modern liberals also try to weaken the nation-state to promote control by trans-national organizations, and are generally opposed to a strong national defense. Conservatives are the party of self-reliance and individualism. They believe that people don't value what they have unless they earn it for themselves. To them, liberals often appear weak and appeasing. They also believe that becoming dependent on the government or supranational organizations constitutes a loss of liberty. Conservatives believe that an adversary usually acts for practical reasons, such as a wish to acquire resources or power, rather than for emotional reasons such as personal likes or dislikes, and is therefore unlikely to be dissuaded by appeasement and generosity. Conservatism views the economy as an organic, self-organizing entity that functions best without central control, and requires only an occasional tweak to prevent injustice and prevent inequality of opportunity. American-style conservatives strive to strenghen the country economically by encouraging private initiative and tend to support traditional values. Note that "resistance to change" (or "fear of change" as Jost would put it) is not included in this definition. If willingness to change were what distinguished conservatives from liberals, you could argue, only half-jokingly, that everyone would eventually become a conservative. Whenever a liberal began to feel a little bit conservative (by random chance, or just by having a bad day), that person immediately would become resistant to changing back. Over time, that person would become more and more conservative; but no one could ever become less conservative. Of course, many people do resist change; but these are found on both sides of the political spectrum. In the simplest terms, American conservatives value equality of opportunity or chance to succeed, while liberals value equality of the result. There may be many reasons why people select one philosophy over the other; but trying to correlate personality traits with ideological beliefs is doomed to failure because it ignores certain basic facts:
However, to consider these sets of beliefs as extremes of a simple unidimensional parameter that reflects undesirable personality traits is no less inflammatory than asking what unsavory personality traits cause a person to believe in, say, global warming. Such a question would poison the global warming debate, just as the paper of Jost et al. acts to poison the important political debates in this country. In fact, the core values of liberals and conservatives are largely orthogonal, not opposite, in many respects. Polarization and unidimensionality arise mainly when members of one party view the other as interfering with the realization of their values; but unidimensionality is not an inherent characteristic of political views, only of a naive interpretation of them. The authors' statement that the "core dimensions" of conservatism are "resistance to change and acceptance of inequality" also betrays a superficial understanding of the reasoned political beliefs held by both conservatives and liberals. Nothing proves this point better than the sometimes dramatic shifts in political opinion as people observe the favorable and unfavorable outcomes of various policy initiatives in the real world. The possibility that, just perhaps, the researchers themselves may not have the most nuanced understanding of political philosophy, however, appears to have eluded many of the workers in this field. Given the radical reordering of the existing world order for which these Berkeleyites blame contemporary conservatives, the idea that American conservatives resist change must provoke enough cognitive dissonance to induce a George F. Will-scale migraine. Neither liberals nor conservatives deserve to be compared with the likes of mega-murderers like Stalin or Hitler. By imposing their political views on their research, the authors drag the field of psychology into the muck of politics. Politics is the realm of speculative opinions, vicious name-calling, unsubstantiated insinuations, and wild flights of hyperbole; but these are not a part of science. Science is all about stealing ideas, vicious name-calling, depriving others of credit, and wild flights of unsubstantiated speculation. Totally different.
-- from http://entropy.brneurosci.org/psychobabble.html |
Let's see, liberals were in power from 1932 to 1994, and there is no sufficient database on liberals?
On the ruling prejudice of the 20th century?
Yeah, right!!
I read it and the other articles written by the author. If he isn't a freeper, he ought to be.
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