Berkeley psychologists publish study on conservatism.

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... 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... 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. [Berkeley]

This press release was posted on Fark earlier today. The comments thread very quickly mushroomed so that now the number of replies is listed as "infinite." It didn't take long for a reply article by David Limbaugh to show up. Judging from his article, there was no indication that he actually read the study, or that he even read the complete press release. He responded to the study by calling the authors "liberals," asserted that they have a "manifest ignorance of political theory," and then went off on a long chain of non-sequitors.

Surely the professor can do better than that. This example tends to demonstrate the liberals' lack of nuance more than the conservatives', as do many other examples I'll give you. Can't these paragons of complexity understand that Bush's words were at most ill advised based on disputed, not phony intelligence? Don't they understand that a lie involves the intent to deceive, not just arguably erroneous information? Further, can't they grasp that this was not even one of the major reasons we used to attack Iraq? [town hall]

Of course the political views of the authors are not indicated in the press release, so Limbaugh must either have some inside information, or be in possession of great powers of divination. It would be interesting to see a study on what motivates liberals, but it would be difficult to formulate, since "liberal" typically means "all proposals outside of the currently accepted conservative platform." So it seems that a study of liberals would fundamentally be a study of conservatives, and why many people are repelled by them. It would also be interesting to see a study exploring why conservatives seem incapable of making pointed, logical arguments. The replies on Fark were as expected. No one seemed to read the articles before they chimed in. I liked what this Farker had to say:

Conservatives suck. But I'd hit it.