I've only skimmed, it's entirely possible that certain psychological characteristics predispose people to political conservatism, or that conservatism fosters certain psychological (personality) traits, sure, why not?
"The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat."
To which I say: So what?
You don't need a psychologist to tell you that. Justification of inequality is too loaded though. Conservatism is about preserving the established practice, hence, "to conserve" it has been about conserving inequalities at some points, but that is sorta besides the point, where the establishments are fair/just, conservatism (in a perfect world) is as much about conserving those -- if we abstract conservative and liberal from a moral framework.
Political power (liberal or conservative) stresses at least this much resistance to change: nobody wants to give up power. And, this much adherence to change: everyone woud like to get power. All politics is concerned with finding a way to manage uncertainty and threat, sometimes through negotiation, sometimes through force.
Even if we accept everything in that study, mebbe it's good, mebbe it isn't, the immediate interesting response becomes to submitt "liberal politics" to the same/similar tests.
That is, of course, if you can find any real liberals anywhere (ie Democrats are not really "liberal" any more than Republicans are really "conservative" )
Liberalism, you may find, does not really exist most of the time, just power 'conservation' (establishment) and 'acquisition' (or protest.)
But again, I have more of an amoralists view of politics than most people.
Man, a genius like me ought to be something more important! hahahah...
"The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat."
I wouldn't even call that right there conservatism. Conservatism does not justify inequity. It simply claims folks who make different decisions end up with different results. That inequity is called freedom to live as you want with the consequences.
Managing incertainty and threat, I suppose one could say that resorting to established practices is an attempt to do this, but is that not human nature? Or does everyone go around reinventing the wheel all day everyday.
Likewise if anything, I would say that conservatives have been resistant to change for the sake of change. However they have endorsed change when a good result will occur. For example Republicans voted for the civil rights bill in higher percentages than Democrats. Conservatism forced Lincoln to hold the United States together via a civil war when others were content to let the slave states and their slaves go it alone.
Say for example though the misfounded belief that a single mother can do the role of two parents. To say one cannot be two is not "resistance to change." It is clear logic. It doesn't have to be a gender issue either. No one would dare suggest a man could be a mother and father as well as a man and a woman. Yet it is controversial to suggest the opposite.
Now the study mentions this about tolerance of inequity.
Quote:
The left favours greater equality, while the right sees society as inevitably hierarchical?
Notice the spin in there. Total equality would be communism. (bad, bad word) So the left appears to favor greater equality. What is the definition of greater equality. Likewise it says the right sees the world as inevitably hierachical. Is there anyone here who believes that the world will one day be totally fair and equal with no dispute regarding anything?
Likewise where is the middle ground and the judgement of the left? How can one want MORE equality, but not state how it is accomplished, what level is acceptable, why can they still tolerate some hierachical aspects of society and have that be "ok."
Now consider this...
Quote:
In at least some of these cases, what appears to be a desire for change is really ?an imaginatively transfigured conception ofthe past with which to criticize the present? (Muller, 2001, p. 2625). There are also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power, steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism, such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro (see J. Martin, Scully, & Levitt, 1990). It is reasonable to suggest that some of these historical figures may be considered politically conservative, at least in the context of the systems they defended.4 (Kemmelmeier, 1997), Italy (Chirumbolo, 2002), England (Kirton, 1978; KoIm, 1974; Nias, 1973; Rokeach, 1960; Smithers & Lobley, 1978; Tetlock, 1984), Canada (Altemeyer, 1998), and Israel (Fibert & Ressler, 1998; Florian, Mikulincer, & Hirschberger, 2001). many
So now communism is conservatism? If someone uses egalitarianism to establish a police state, they are... conservative?!?!
Is there anyone way that conservatism doesn't end up blasted? Even Castro is a conservative according to these folks.
Likewise what about liberal ideologies that appeal to natural or organic earth/nature? Or mention matriarchial societies, primative societies with views or belief they view as better than our own. Is that not an appeal to an idealized past? When they "yes, but when man lived upon the planet and had no impact upon nature, that was a better way to live." (Ignoring that we could never support 6 billion people that way nor did we have the life expectancy we do today, etc.) Would that not be the same traits people say conservatism is using when they say "Those Republicans just want us all to be Ozzie and Harriet in the 50's again."
This study... is all over the place. It is the equivalent of a hit/smear piece.
I'm a research psychologist and although personality psychology is not my thing - it's cognitive psychology - I review papers submitted to journals like this all the time. Having read it (it's easy to find on the internet), I have a few comments.
1. This wasn't original research. It was a summary of other research. Nothing published in this particular journal - Psychological Bulletin - is original research. It's a journal where lots of other studies are summarized in order to make large areas of research more easily digestible. That fact makes it harder to argue that these authors came up with some kind of biased research because they're liberals. You could blame the entire field of personality psychology, though, or at least all the researchers that these authors used. But not these particular authors, who simply summarized what others have found.
The basic criticism of this paper seems to be that these obviously liberal Berkeley academics came up with this theory because they hate conservatives, or at least think that it's neurotic to be a conservative.
First, actually only two of the four, neither of them the lead author, were from Berkeley, and I believe two of them are from Business Schools, not Psychology Departments. And neither I nor anyone else knows anything about their political beliefs. They might be more liberal than conservative, but my guess is that they're like most people (not like us political types here on AI), and they have relatively unsophisticated political views.
Second, none of the personality dimensions they talk about are "mental illnesses" or "neuroses." However, I'll admit that several of them do seem to be the more negative side of the dimension - openness to experience is probably better than being closed to it, tolerance of ambiguity is probably better than intolerance, etc. I guess my answer to that is: why do they find that these personality variables (which were definitely not invented to study conservatism) are associated with relatively higher, rather than lower, conservatism? They used a ton of measures of conservatism, including several self-identification measures (i.e., "Are you a conservative or a liberal? I'm a conservative."). For conservatives who don't like that, what personality failings do you think liberals have - gullibility? Emotionality? Lack of IQ? I'll do the study. I've got a million undergraduates and an army of graduate students at my disposal. Let's do the research. I'm up for promotion in a few years anyway. I'm actually serious about this. I've always been interested in political psychology. Maybe I can do the research and get on O'Reilly.
2. They define conservatism as having two core elements: a) preference for the status quo and resistance to change and b) an acceptance of inequality.
I personally think this is a pretty unsophisticated view of conservatism. I think most American conservatives believe that we need to change a lot because things are screwed up, we've lost our traditional values, our taxes are too high, government is too big, whatever. Who wants more change in the American political system, conservatives or liberals? I'm not sure. There are lots of changes that both want, I'd guess. They do take a pretty global view of things, because they include may studies from all over the world, not just in the US.
The acceptance of inequality is probably more accurate. Don't conservatives dislike the notion of wealth redistribution? Of new civil rights laws? I would like to hear a conservative argue against this, because it seems to make sense to me.
3. I think they do make too easy of a transition from authoritarianism to conservatism. They deserve to get criticized for that. Conservatism has a libertarian component (as does liberalism) that makes it hard to argue that the two are equivalent. And in fact they do use a scale called "Right Wing Authoritarianism" as one of their scales of conservatism. It seems to me that this is the most legitimate criticism of the paper. Perhaps most of the measures of conservatism are too negative, they pick up on "mean conservatives" rather than nice conservatives, and that's why all these bad personality traits are associated with it.
In order to counter that, I'd be interested in hearing what conservatives believe encompasses conservatism. If you had to come up with a measure of true conservatism, what would it look like?
4. That business about how Reagan, Limbaugh, Hitler, and Mussolini were all linked by these authors is hogwash. They were not linked at all. Reagan and Limbaugh were not mentioned at all in the original article, and Hitler and Mussolini were mentioned as dramatic exceptions to their general definition of conservatism. What most people on the internet have been arguing about regarding this paper was discussed by these authors, i.e., basically that there are authoritarians on both the left and the right.
Quote:
Relations between resistance to change and acceptance of in-
equality.
Although we believe that the two core dimensions of
political conservatism â??resistance to change and acceptance of
inequalityâ??are often related to one another, they are obviously
distinguishable. Vivid counterexamples come to mind in which the
two dimensions are negatively related to one another. For instance,
there is the â??conservative paradoxâ? of right-wing revolutionaries,
such as Hitler or Mussolini or Pinochet, who seem to advocate
social change in the direction of decreased egalitarianism. In at
least some of these cases, what appears to be a desire for change
is really â??an imaginatively transfigured conception of the past with
which to criticize the presentâ? (Muller, 2001, p. 2625). There are
also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power,
steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism,
such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro (see J. Martin, Scully, &
Levitt, 1990). It is reasonable to suggest that some of these
historical figures may be considered politically conservative, at
least in the context of the systems they defended.
In any case, we are not denying that liberals can be rigid
defenders of the status quo or that conservatives can support
change. We assume that historical and cultural variation in polit-
ical systems affects both the meaning of conservatism and the
strength of empirical associations between the psychological and
ideological variables we investigate. To take one fairly obvious
example, it seems likely that many left-wingers in totalitarian
communist regimes would exhibit mental rigidity and other psy-
chological characteristics that are often thought to be associated
with right-wingers in other contexts. To be sure, social scientists in
the West have undersampled these populations in developing and
assessing their theories.
Despite dramatic exceptions, the two core aspects of conserva-
tism are generally psychologically related to one another for most
of the people most of the time (Muller, 2001).
What happened is that one of the paper's critics mentioned those individuals together, and in an editorial response to that critic (not in the paper itself), these authors quoted the critic.
Two of the authors of the paper wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post that was published as an editorial.
Quote:
In the May issue of Psychological Bulletin, we published a review that statistically summarizes dozens of studies conducted over 50 years dealing with psychological differences associated with left- vs. right-wing thinking. Based on this literature, we found that the likelihood of adopting conservative rather than liberal political opinions is significantly correlated, among other psychological dimensions, with a sense of societal instability, fear of death, intolerance of ambiguity, need for closure, lower cognitive complexity and a sense of threat.
Apparently without reading our original articles or attempting to contact any of us, many commentators and syndicated columnists, including Ann Coulter and Cal Thomas -- George Will [op-ed, Aug. 10] apparently read but misunderstood our work) -- assumed that such a psychological analysis of ideology entails a judgment that conservatism must be abnormal, pathological or even the result of mental illness. The British media seem to have settled on the highly stigmatized and equally inaccurate term "neuroses." All of this reflects a crude and outdated perception of psychological research.
Historically, some of the better known psychological analyses of right-wing thinking, especially the famous Adorno et al. volume on "The Authoritarian Personality" (1950), assumed that anti-Semitism and racial intolerance were consequences of faulty parenting styles and traumatic childhood experiences. The German psychologist Erich Jantsch in 1938 had described liberalism as morbid. We part ways with these and other theories based on a "medical model" that ranks political orientations on dimensions of abnormality. All the variables we have reviewed pertain to normal cognitive and motivational functioning. We would argue that all beliefs have a partial basis in one's needs, fears and desires, including beliefs that form one's political ideology. Our research has identified several factors that seem to underlie the propensity to find conservative vs. liberal thought systems appealing.
It's wrong to conclude that our results provide only bad news for conservatives. True, we find some support for the traditional "rigidity-of-the-right" hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity -- all of which may be liabilities in mass politics and other public and professional domains. Because we assume that all beliefs (ideological, scientific and otherwise) are partially (but never completely) determined by one's needs, fears and desires, we see nothing pathological about this process. It is simply part of what it means to be human. Our "trade-off" model of human psychology assumes that any trait or motivation has potential advantages and disadvantages, depending on the situation. A heightened sensitivity to threat and uncertainty is by no means maladaptive in all contexts. Even closed-mindedness may be useful, provided one tends to have a closed mind about appropriate values and accurate opinions; a reluctance to abandon one's prior convictions in favor of new fads can be a good thing. The important task for social scientists is to identify the conditions under which each of these cognitive and motivational styles is beneficial, rather than touting one or the other as inherently and invariably superior.
Our findings highlight the importance of situations and historical factors that can produce political shifts by affecting psychological needs pertaining to uncertainty and threat. The need to achieve closure and to resolve ambiguity, for example, are heightened under conditions of destabilizing uncertainty (for example, with the outbreak of terrorism, economic turmoil or political instability). Thus our research is best understood as addressing the cognitive and motivational bases of conservatism (and liberalism) rather than the personalities of conservatives (and liberals).
We readily acknowledge that identifying the motivational underpinnings of a belief system does not constitute a valid argument in a political debate any more than it does in scientific debates. What counts is the cogency of the political arguments and the degree to which they fit with independently verifiable facts and reasonable assumptions. When the dust settles on the current debate, we hope that these important messages will be seen as the real focus of our research.
Arie W. Kruglanski is distinguished university professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. John T. Jost is an associate professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Business. This article was written in collaboration with Jack Glaser and Frank J. Sulloway, both of the University of California at Berkeley.
So, there we have it, Liberals are wishy-washy slobs . . . . what else is new
is my excepting that as much a testimony of the correctness of the "catagory" as the Conservatives' reaction to their catagory is a testemony of the correctness of its description?
Comments
"The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat."
To which I say: So what?
You don't need a psychologist to tell you that. Justification of inequality is too loaded though. Conservatism is about preserving the established practice, hence, "to conserve" it has been about conserving inequalities at some points, but that is sorta besides the point, where the establishments are fair/just, conservatism (in a perfect world) is as much about conserving those -- if we abstract conservative and liberal from a moral framework.
Political power (liberal or conservative) stresses at least this much resistance to change: nobody wants to give up power. And, this much adherence to change: everyone woud like to get power. All politics is concerned with finding a way to manage uncertainty and threat, sometimes through negotiation, sometimes through force.
Even if we accept everything in that study, mebbe it's good, mebbe it isn't, the immediate interesting response becomes to submitt "liberal politics" to the same/similar tests.
That is, of course, if you can find any real liberals anywhere (ie Democrats are not really "liberal" any more than Republicans are really "conservative" )
Liberalism, you may find, does not really exist most of the time, just power 'conservation' (establishment) and 'acquisition' (or protest.)
But again, I have more of an amoralists view of politics than most people.
Man, a genius like me ought to be something more important! hahahah...
"The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat."
I wouldn't even call that right there conservatism. Conservatism does not justify inequity. It simply claims folks who make different decisions end up with different results. That inequity is called freedom to live as you want with the consequences.
Managing incertainty and threat, I suppose one could say that resorting to established practices is an attempt to do this, but is that not human nature? Or does everyone go around reinventing the wheel all day everyday.
Likewise if anything, I would say that conservatives have been resistant to change for the sake of change. However they have endorsed change when a good result will occur. For example Republicans voted for the civil rights bill in higher percentages than Democrats. Conservatism forced Lincoln to hold the United States together via a civil war when others were content to let the slave states and their slaves go it alone.
Say for example though the misfounded belief that a single mother can do the role of two parents. To say one cannot be two is not "resistance to change." It is clear logic. It doesn't have to be a gender issue either. No one would dare suggest a man could be a mother and father as well as a man and a woman. Yet it is controversial to suggest the opposite.
Now the study mentions this about tolerance of inequity.
The left favours greater equality, while the right sees society as inevitably hierarchical?
Notice the spin in there. Total equality would be communism. (bad, bad word) So the left appears to favor greater equality. What is the definition of greater equality. Likewise it says the right sees the world as inevitably hierachical. Is there anyone here who believes that the world will one day be totally fair and equal with no dispute regarding anything?
Likewise where is the middle ground and the judgement of the left? How can one want MORE equality, but not state how it is accomplished, what level is acceptable, why can they still tolerate some hierachical aspects of society and have that be "ok."
Now consider this...
In at least some of these cases, what appears to be a desire for change is really ?an imaginatively transfigured conception ofthe past with which to criticize the present? (Muller, 2001, p. 2625). There are also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power, steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism, such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro (see J. Martin, Scully, & Levitt, 1990). It is reasonable to suggest that some of these historical figures may be considered politically conservative, at least in the context of the systems they defended.4 (Kemmelmeier, 1997), Italy (Chirumbolo, 2002), England (Kirton, 1978; KoIm, 1974; Nias, 1973; Rokeach, 1960; Smithers & Lobley, 1978; Tetlock, 1984), Canada (Altemeyer, 1998), and Israel (Fibert & Ressler, 1998; Florian, Mikulincer, & Hirschberger, 2001). many
So now communism is conservatism? If someone uses egalitarianism to establish a police state, they are... conservative?!?!
Is there anyone way that conservatism doesn't end up blasted? Even Castro is a conservative according to these folks.
Likewise what about liberal ideologies that appeal to natural or organic earth/nature? Or mention matriarchial societies, primative societies with views or belief they view as better than our own. Is that not an appeal to an idealized past? When they "yes, but when man lived upon the planet and had no impact upon nature, that was a better way to live." (Ignoring that we could never support 6 billion people that way nor did we have the life expectancy we do today, etc.) Would that not be the same traits people say conservatism is using when they say "Those Republicans just want us all to be Ozzie and Harriet in the 50's again."
This study... is all over the place. It is the equivalent of a hit/smear piece.
Nick
1. This wasn't original research. It was a summary of other research. Nothing published in this particular journal - Psychological Bulletin - is original research. It's a journal where lots of other studies are summarized in order to make large areas of research more easily digestible. That fact makes it harder to argue that these authors came up with some kind of biased research because they're liberals. You could blame the entire field of personality psychology, though, or at least all the researchers that these authors used. But not these particular authors, who simply summarized what others have found.
The basic criticism of this paper seems to be that these obviously liberal Berkeley academics came up with this theory because they hate conservatives, or at least think that it's neurotic to be a conservative.
First, actually only two of the four, neither of them the lead author, were from Berkeley, and I believe two of them are from Business Schools, not Psychology Departments. And neither I nor anyone else knows anything about their political beliefs. They might be more liberal than conservative, but my guess is that they're like most people (not like us political types here on AI), and they have relatively unsophisticated political views.
Second, none of the personality dimensions they talk about are "mental illnesses" or "neuroses." However, I'll admit that several of them do seem to be the more negative side of the dimension - openness to experience is probably better than being closed to it, tolerance of ambiguity is probably better than intolerance, etc. I guess my answer to that is: why do they find that these personality variables (which were definitely not invented to study conservatism) are associated with relatively higher, rather than lower, conservatism? They used a ton of measures of conservatism, including several self-identification measures (i.e., "Are you a conservative or a liberal? I'm a conservative."). For conservatives who don't like that, what personality failings do you think liberals have - gullibility? Emotionality? Lack of IQ? I'll do the study. I've got a million undergraduates and an army of graduate students at my disposal. Let's do the research. I'm up for promotion in a few years anyway. I'm actually serious about this. I've always been interested in political psychology. Maybe I can do the research and get on O'Reilly.
2. They define conservatism as having two core elements: a) preference for the status quo and resistance to change and b) an acceptance of inequality.
I personally think this is a pretty unsophisticated view of conservatism. I think most American conservatives believe that we need to change a lot because things are screwed up, we've lost our traditional values, our taxes are too high, government is too big, whatever. Who wants more change in the American political system, conservatives or liberals? I'm not sure. There are lots of changes that both want, I'd guess. They do take a pretty global view of things, because they include may studies from all over the world, not just in the US.
The acceptance of inequality is probably more accurate. Don't conservatives dislike the notion of wealth redistribution? Of new civil rights laws? I would like to hear a conservative argue against this, because it seems to make sense to me.
3. I think they do make too easy of a transition from authoritarianism to conservatism. They deserve to get criticized for that. Conservatism has a libertarian component (as does liberalism) that makes it hard to argue that the two are equivalent. And in fact they do use a scale called "Right Wing Authoritarianism" as one of their scales of conservatism. It seems to me that this is the most legitimate criticism of the paper. Perhaps most of the measures of conservatism are too negative, they pick up on "mean conservatives" rather than nice conservatives, and that's why all these bad personality traits are associated with it.
In order to counter that, I'd be interested in hearing what conservatives believe encompasses conservatism. If you had to come up with a measure of true conservatism, what would it look like?
4. That business about how Reagan, Limbaugh, Hitler, and Mussolini were all linked by these authors is hogwash. They were not linked at all. Reagan and Limbaugh were not mentioned at all in the original article, and Hitler and Mussolini were mentioned as dramatic exceptions to their general definition of conservatism. What most people on the internet have been arguing about regarding this paper was discussed by these authors, i.e., basically that there are authoritarians on both the left and the right.
Relations between resistance to change and acceptance of in-
equality.
Although we believe that the two core dimensions of
political conservatism â??resistance to change and acceptance of
inequalityâ??are often related to one another, they are obviously
distinguishable. Vivid counterexamples come to mind in which the
two dimensions are negatively related to one another. For instance,
there is the â??conservative paradoxâ? of right-wing revolutionaries,
such as Hitler or Mussolini or Pinochet, who seem to advocate
social change in the direction of decreased egalitarianism. In at
least some of these cases, what appears to be a desire for change
is really â??an imaginatively transfigured conception of the past with
which to criticize the presentâ? (Muller, 2001, p. 2625). There are
also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power,
steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism,
such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro (see J. Martin, Scully, &
Levitt, 1990). It is reasonable to suggest that some of these
historical figures may be considered politically conservative, at
least in the context of the systems they defended.
In any case, we are not denying that liberals can be rigid
defenders of the status quo or that conservatives can support
change. We assume that historical and cultural variation in polit-
ical systems affects both the meaning of conservatism and the
strength of empirical associations between the psychological and
ideological variables we investigate. To take one fairly obvious
example, it seems likely that many left-wingers in totalitarian
communist regimes would exhibit mental rigidity and other psy-
chological characteristics that are often thought to be associated
with right-wingers in other contexts. To be sure, social scientists in
the West have undersampled these populations in developing and
assessing their theories.
Despite dramatic exceptions, the two core aspects of conserva-
tism are generally psychologically related to one another for most
of the people most of the time (Muller, 2001).
What happened is that one of the paper's critics mentioned those individuals together, and in an editorial response to that critic (not in the paper itself), these authors quoted the critic.
In the May issue of Psychological Bulletin, we published a review that statistically summarizes dozens of studies conducted over 50 years dealing with psychological differences associated with left- vs. right-wing thinking. Based on this literature, we found that the likelihood of adopting conservative rather than liberal political opinions is significantly correlated, among other psychological dimensions, with a sense of societal instability, fear of death, intolerance of ambiguity, need for closure, lower cognitive complexity and a sense of threat.
Apparently without reading our original articles or attempting to contact any of us, many commentators and syndicated columnists, including Ann Coulter and Cal Thomas -- George Will [op-ed, Aug. 10] apparently read but misunderstood our work) -- assumed that such a psychological analysis of ideology entails a judgment that conservatism must be abnormal, pathological or even the result of mental illness. The British media seem to have settled on the highly stigmatized and equally inaccurate term "neuroses." All of this reflects a crude and outdated perception of psychological research.
Historically, some of the better known psychological analyses of right-wing thinking, especially the famous Adorno et al. volume on "The Authoritarian Personality" (1950), assumed that anti-Semitism and racial intolerance were consequences of faulty parenting styles and traumatic childhood experiences. The German psychologist Erich Jantsch in 1938 had described liberalism as morbid. We part ways with these and other theories based on a "medical model" that ranks political orientations on dimensions of abnormality. All the variables we have reviewed pertain to normal cognitive and motivational functioning. We would argue that all beliefs have a partial basis in one's needs, fears and desires, including beliefs that form one's political ideology. Our research has identified several factors that seem to underlie the propensity to find conservative vs. liberal thought systems appealing.
It's wrong to conclude that our results provide only bad news for conservatives. True, we find some support for the traditional "rigidity-of-the-right" hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity -- all of which may be liabilities in mass politics and other public and professional domains. Because we assume that all beliefs (ideological, scientific and otherwise) are partially (but never completely) determined by one's needs, fears and desires, we see nothing pathological about this process. It is simply part of what it means to be human. Our "trade-off" model of human psychology assumes that any trait or motivation has potential advantages and disadvantages, depending on the situation. A heightened sensitivity to threat and uncertainty is by no means maladaptive in all contexts. Even closed-mindedness may be useful, provided one tends to have a closed mind about appropriate values and accurate opinions; a reluctance to abandon one's prior convictions in favor of new fads can be a good thing. The important task for social scientists is to identify the conditions under which each of these cognitive and motivational styles is beneficial, rather than touting one or the other as inherently and invariably superior.
Our findings highlight the importance of situations and historical factors that can produce political shifts by affecting psychological needs pertaining to uncertainty and threat. The need to achieve closure and to resolve ambiguity, for example, are heightened under conditions of destabilizing uncertainty (for example, with the outbreak of terrorism, economic turmoil or political instability). Thus our research is best understood as addressing the cognitive and motivational bases of conservatism (and liberalism) rather than the personalities of conservatives (and liberals).
We readily acknowledge that identifying the motivational underpinnings of a belief system does not constitute a valid argument in a political debate any more than it does in scientific debates. What counts is the cogency of the political arguments and the degree to which they fit with independently verifiable facts and reasonable assumptions. When the dust settles on the current debate, we hope that these important messages will be seen as the real focus of our research.
Arie W. Kruglanski is distinguished university professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. John T. Jost is an associate professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Business. This article was written in collaboration with Jack Glaser and Frank J. Sulloway, both of the University of California at Berkeley.
is my excepting that as much a testimony of the correctness of the "catagory" as the Conservatives' reaction to their catagory is a testemony of the correctness of its description?
hmm?