An article that slipped through the net

It is part of the conventional religion among psychologists to believe that conservatives are the ones who are “authoritarian”. Joe Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers party just did not happen, you see. And like most Leftist beliefs, this one is impermeable to evidence. I have reported in the academic journals heaps of carefully conducted research showing the belief to be false but I was wasting my time of course. You can’t argue with something that people need to believe.

Still, every now and again, a piece of research pops up which questions the orthodox faith and one such article is: “Is political conservatism synonymous with authoritarianism?”, in The Journal of Social Psychology of Oct 2005, volume 145, issue 5, p571ff. by H. Michael Crowson, Stephen J. Thoma and Nita Hestevold. Their research is of course the usual rubbish that passes for science in psychology: No attempt at sampling, no awareness of what the questionnaires they use actually say, internally inconsistent indices treated as informative, negligible correlations reported as if they offered useful information etc. but it is still nice to see a challenge of sorts to the orthodoxy being put up. I would give a more detailed critique of what they did but I don’t want to discourage them too much. They should probably read this and this and this, though.

Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 02:46 PM in Psychology
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Comments:

Posted by John S Bolton on November 20, 2005, 08:33 PM | #

The left and the right would disagree on whether government must have every bit as much authority as necessary to force the rich to share. This reveals the left as authoritarian. When pressed, they cannot admit to there being any limit on the authority officials may need to exercise to suppress the selfishness of the rich, and specifically regarding the impulse to share with the poor. It is even, under one aspect, true by definition; the rich are those who do not share as much as they could, according to leftist usage. The left can be graded in intensity, according to what other considerations, and how many of them, they will alow to limit the authority of officials to force the rich to share. The moderate left allows practical objections to the effect of excess authority reducing the amounts of redistribution that are possible. The hard left wants no limits to offcial authority to redistribute, even when this means less is avaialble to the poor.

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