Sanity Squad psychs Psych Today
The lastest Sanity Squad podcast is up at Pajamas. The Squad takes aim at a recent issue of Psychology Today purporting to analyze the difference between liberals and conservatives. Well, Dr. Sanity, Shrinkwrapped, and Siggy analyze the analysis.
And even though I don’t do links all that often, the aformentioned blogs of my Squad colleagues are always well worth visiting.
[ADDENDUM: I’m planning a further post on the subject of the Psychology Today article.]
As always, very interesting. I love hearing the four of you identify the psychological evasions and defense mechanisms that animate leftists. It is a breath of fresh air to hear leftists appropriately disdained by having their obnoxious condescension unmasked. As always, much too short!
Woot!!
Neo, assume if you did do an over night switch. That would be a cult conversion, correct? And since the Left believes neo-conservatism is already a cult conversion… you see? They don’t believe it is real. They believe that you’ve been brainwashed, that you have been “Told” what to believe, that you didn’t come up with it yourself. If you came up with it yourself, wouldn’t they have to you know, listen to you as an equal? But if you were just a cult follower, Neo, your views may be brushed off as they brushed off your interview.
Besides. You didn’t really convert you know. That is the wrong word. It is more like an epiphany. To disagree with Siggy. You’re still a true liberal, as I first recognized. Meaning, you looked at your basic values of human rights and human dignity, and realized that you still believed in them. Your epiphany was that other folks that you thought were on your side, really weren’t.
It is not like you threw away the values of human dignity and came to the “dark side” of “let’s kill them all”. That is my role, not yours ; )
Personality traits, Neo? I think we’ve been converting your views a little here, heh. You may have once been of a certain personality, but I think a small part has changed. It would have to. War changes all of us, Neo, some small others large.
You are not a lunatic Neo, and yes we are right ; )
Hi Neo,
Its good clean fun to listen to your podcast, but you are probably taking the article way too seriously.
I think I’ve explained this before.
Leftists, liberals etc don’t really think fear is a bad motivator for political change, as long as they are the ones who use it.
The entire edifice of 20th century left – liberalism was built on fear of one type or another – starting with the Great Depression and the possibility of its repitition. If you listen to most of the rhetoric coming from the current congress, it will have elements of fear in it for almost all issues.
The simple fact is that fear sells. Its easiest to understand, its easiest to articulate, it has the highest motivator effect.
The only “problem” with using fear as a political weapon, is that at some point, an issue will come along which allows the conservatives to use it.
James
Btw, I said this before but the Left really isn’t in touch with their deep and darkest longings. So they do not recognize the fear in themselves, they lock it up and put it somewhere where they forget about it. But in doing so, it has made them slaves of their own repressed reactions and emotions, Neo. Even to the point of projecting their unwanted fears and aggression unto folks like you and Bush. You are the fearmonger, warmonger, and various other things they call you. Not they, they do not fear, they do not cause violence, it is you and only you. Because that is the only way their identity matrix is setup. It cannot be them who are afraid, because if they are, then doesn’t that mean they would have to deal with it? Attacking folks like you is much more fun, easier, and far less stressful than dealing with their own darkest demons of the soul.
Neo, true strength comes from facing your fears and knowing them for what they are, where they have come from, and which path into the future you wish to tread by overcoming that fear. By ignoring their fears, the Left has sublimated their conscious mind to the will of their unconscious mind. Pathetic really, such a fate reserved for weaklings.
Curiously enough, it is also why what Becker said is true. But his conclusion is not my conclusion. Because I think the Left uses fear mongering not because of a conscious desire to manipulate, although the top ranking Leftists like Mao and such are clever and cunning enough to do so, but because they are controlled by this fear and thus acts to propagate the demons of fear unto others. They do not control their actions, neo, and they do not expect any other people like terrorists, to control their actions when terrorists fear the United States.
Our review suggests that there is a relatively strong connection between dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, on the one hand, and various measures of political conservatism, on the other. The weighted mean effect size (r), aggregated across 20 tests of the hypothesis conducted in five different countries involving more than 2,000 participants was .34 (p < .0001).
“Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,”
Jost, John T.; Glaser, Jack; Kruglanski, Arie W.; Sulloway, Frank J., Psychological Bulletin, vol. 129, no. 3, pp. 339-375, May 2003
cited references: 43
Undermining the work of academics by attacking a pop mag’s lame interpretation is pretty low. Lower still is doing it anonymously while leaning on your status as a professional psychologist.
If you want to take them on, step up and publish a rebuttal. Good luck getting your paper published in a reputable journal, and good luck landing 43 citations.
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lol Keep it coming Neo.
So wait, let me see if I understand:
A researcher says that conservatives “have less tolerance for ambiguity.”
A conservative blogger says that “liberals are deranged” because of some blogs she read.
These two things don’t seem particularly equivalent, though there is always the possibility that this boils down to a “you’re a poop head, no you’re a poop head, no you are, no you,” ad infinitum.
It would seem far too many people are intimately familiar with poop.
oh god i have just had a really scary thought….please tell me that yrmadwnkr is not a mental health professional! I like the idea of him getting treatment….but giving….oh please no
Anon,
That stuff may be written by people in academia, but it is not academic work. It is tendentious pontification; as intellectual as a diversity workshop and completely absurd. The fact that journals exist to print such piffle is due to the fact that these people create these journals to publish these articles. And they cite one another, so that is how they end up with “43” citations. It’s just another goose step in “the long march.” I suppose you are also a big fan of SDO and RWA theory. If so, you are a bonified crackpot.
It would seem far too many people are intimately familiar with poop.
Having heard Siggy on the cast, you start to understand that his written style leaves out far more colorful renditions of his true meaning ; )
Anon, simply being ‘published’ is no measure of credibility.
Ask the authors of the Bell Curve.
See this.
http://www.ironshrink.com/articles/070116_political_conservatism_study_methodology.php
Sig, carl, and alf,
I tell people about this stuff (SDO, RWA, etc) and they tbink I am making it up (I’m faculty in analytical biochem, which requires data to publish). My particular favorites are the ones that have something like “the impact of SDO on conservatism and racism” in the title (note that the two “isms” are inseperable). The fact that this stuff exists in the academic world and has proliferated over the last 15 years speaks volumes about the state of academia.
Yes Brad, I understand you have a disdain for the methodologies of such studies, but if they are so clearly flawed that should make it easy for Neo-neocon to dispute them — ethically.
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“I tell people about this stuff (SDO, RWA, etc) and they tbink I am making it up”
I suppose, then, that you’d be perfectly willing to repudiate “Bush Derangement Syndrome” and the notion that liberals want the terrorists to win and for freedom to fall and for no more apple pies to be baked?
Anon, they are not studies and there is no methodology. “Definitions” are choosen and “data” is gathered to justify foregone conclusions. They are playing a criminally disingenuous game of partisan politics with taxpayer money. Surely you must see that a “study” that proves that your ideological opponents are scared, racist, and stupid is nothing but dung; and one can perform all the stats on dung one wishes, and still not change the nature of the dung.
Anon, another oversimplification.
Yes, it would be a nice world if one could just write a well-reasoned letter to the editor of semi-prestigious social science journals and have the whole edifice crumble. If you are willing to wait for the long haul of this type of unreasoning being discredited in my field, however, it is already underway. It will take another generation.
I have several times been part of psych research, though in relatively minor capacities. The definitions of concepts are often circular, and this work is an excellent example. “Dogmatism” and “intolerance of ambiguity” are actually highly variable in individuals from context to context. I am dogmatic in some settings, not at all in others. Despite the use of these tests as “tools,” many do not have any predictive value about behavior. I admit I do not know this test in particular. You might follow Dr. Sanity’s comments on the podcast, however. She is evidently quite familiar with the test and used in in real-world applications.
Neo, your SS stuff needs to be longer. They seem to be shortening…. Very bad mojo there.
I suppose, then, that you’d be perfectly willing to repudiate “Bush Derangement Syndrome” and the notion that liberals want the terrorists to win and for freedom to fall and for no more apple pies to be baked?
Oh, let’s not get carried away! Those are true. I don’t think liberals are too keen on motherhood either.
Thanks Brad, the irony is delicious.
Neo-neocon, below is a link to an editorial by John T. Jost, the lead author of “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition” (see above).
The editorial is Jost’s response to September 11, published on October 1, 2001.
Legitimate Responses to Illegitimate Acts
.
I went to that link and was quite disappointed. Not only was it a professor commenting on areas only tangentially related to his field (he is a researcher on organizational behavior, speculating on group psychology and foreign policy), he was commenting not very intelligently. It was vague, emotion-laden blather. Artful arrangements of previous prejudices.
Very revealing link, actually.
Yes, A very revealing link. Written at an undergrad level by a tenured clown. The irony is, in fact, delicious.
Anon, whoever you are, you would do well to take another path in your drive to discredit these people and their neocon views. Relying on pseudo-academic snake oil will bring you only laughter.
As a mathematician, I have a deep contempt of the whole world of modern “quantitative” psychology. This is, at best, self-deception, futile attempt to measure non-measurable “quantities”, which really are not quantities at all. Many times in my professional life I was invited “to do math” for some psychological study, and in final analysis it inevitably happened that quality of the data made impossible unambiguous interpretation. The very concepts of this “science” are so elastic and even fluid, that they positively defy any math rigor. By very slight manipulation, which is unavoidable for any formalization, you can shape your conclusions to any desired outcome. Does it mean that psychology is not a science? Certainly not in the sense in which physics, chemistry or even biology are. This is “humanitarian science”, that is more philosophy and art, and this is hypocrisy to pretend that in this field any “hard” facts independent on world-view are possible. This is another illustration and interpretation of Orwell”s statement that “any humanitarian is hypocrite”.
I can add some recent experience to this discussion. Two or three month ago in “Science” there was an article comparing men’s and women’s cognitive skills by comparing their respective IQ on a vast, ostensibly representative sample. Authors get two nice bell-shaped curves, so close to each other, that superimposed on the single graph they virtually coincided. But after cutting through three pages of dull technicalities, I burst with laugh. The whole trick was the definition of measured quantity. Such thing as intellect can not, of course, be quantified by single number. That is, when the procedure of measurement is defined, you get one of myriad of possible definition of what intellect is, depending on what type of task included into tests. Some deal with logic reasoning, some with pattern recognition, some with common sense and linguistic skills, and all are relative to “scores” that other people got on the same set of tasks. Every block contain many repetitive variation on the same theme. No wonder, that in such tests on any large sample a normal Gaussian distribution is obtained. The mean value is normalized to be 100 points; but really on different types of tasks different people get different results. Some are better in logic, some in geometry, some in arithmetic; proportion of different type of tasks is arbitrary, just as amount of time for every block. This arbitrariness means that any concrete “recipe” of the test is a definition of the measured quantity. Recipe by definition is adjusted so that the results were independent on sexual composition of the sample. If they are not, your recipe is turned down as “gender biased”. This means that in reality, the definition of intellectual capabilities by IQ is arbitrary chosen so it can not differentiate between the two sexes, and completely non-fit to study any real differences if they exist. But the next blunder in this study is even more egregious. Authors normalized experimental curves for male and female sub-samples by their respective standard deviations — for males by standard deviation for males, and for females by standard deviation for females! As every statistician knew, Gaussian distribution has only two free parameters — mean and standard deviation, so when you normalize it by both you have the only one possible result — The Normalized Normal Distribution! It simply can not be different for different samples, irrespective of the nature of the set under study, and this has not anything to do with psychology, men and women, and with any physical reality at all. This is statistical artifact — Central Limit Theorem. It neither proves nor disproves anything, except complete mathematical illiteracy (innumeracy?) of the authors and ideological blindness of editorial board of this, in the old days reputable journal (“Science”), which, after its hijacking by Leftist Donald Kennedy, became a laughing-stock and megaphone of Leftist Agitprop.
A point to consider in all this is that about 3/4 of the academics in social “science” departments self-identify as liberals, and this includes more than 4/5 in Psychology and Political Science. Such numbers make any “study” by such faculty that flatters their own ideological faith suspect just on the face of it. I think they also suggest that these kinds of departments are, at many institutions at least, really beginning to operate more as ideological indoctrination centers than as sources of legitimate scholarly, much less scientific, inquiry.
I listened to the presentation and I’d like to add my two cents. I think this ‘fear’ = conservatism / right wing / fascism thing needs to be dealt with at a deeper level rather than just responding to the arguments made in favor. It’s an absurd false concept and a broader treatment of where it came from might help dispel it IMO. I’d compare it to the left’s claim to be ‘pro peace’. In the 80s, several books dealt with the left’s claims of being the ‘peace’ faction from a historical vantage point dealing with the claim’s roots in socialist ideology (ie, as ‘capitalism’ required war to maintain the status quo, being anti capitalist = pro peace….) and Soviet funding of peace groups.. Which resulted in today the average American rolls their eyes when hearing from the ‘peace’ movement…. That’s all, attack the root meme… stop reacting to the propaganda (even if it is pseudo scientific propaganda about psych profiles…)…