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A slightly less derisive version of this article appeared in "Front Page" magazine at:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9544 The "Front Page" version is also reproduced here

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LEFTISM AS COMEDY: The "Berkeley" study



John J. Ray, 2003

Like most college and university teachers in the social sciences and humanities, academic psychologists are overwhelmingly Leftist in their orientation. So it will be no surprise to hear that at least since the 1950's psychologists have been doing their best to find psychological inadequacy in conservatives. To anyone with a knowledge of history the results have been fairly hilarious (See here) but psychologists rarely seem to know anything about history so that has not disturbed them.

I spent 20 years from 1970 to 1990 getting over 200 articles published in the academic journals of the social sciences which subjected the various politically relevant theories of psychologists to empirical test. The only test that psychologists normally give to their theories is to seek the opinions of their freshman (should that be "freshperson"?) students on a variety of issues and present THAT as evidence about how the world works. My consistent strategy was to do the same sort of test among random samples of people in the community at large. And guess what? People in the community at large are not nearly as accommodating to the theories of psychologists as psychology students are!

My norm-violating, non-conformist (non-conservative?) behaviour in actually doing a SERIOUS TEST of these theories won me no kudos, however. I appear to have had far more articles on political psychology published in the academic journals than anyone else and so would therefore -- by conventional academic criteria -- normally be considered the No. 1 world expert on the subject but in fact my writings have always been comprehensively ignored. My findings did not produce the RIGHT CONCLUSIONS, you see. In fact my findings showed the theories concerned to be wrong in almost every respect.

So it was no surprise to me at all to read the latest effort in the long line of attempts by psychologists to discredit conservatives. The article "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition" was published recently by John Jost and his collaborators at Berkeley in The Psychological Bulletin -- one of the premier journals of academic psychology. The powers that be at Berkeley were so pleased with this article that they put out a press release that was designed to publicize the findings of the article as widely as possible.

The result was a worldwide roar of laughter from conservative political commentators. The study was so obviously one-eyed that it was very easy to make fun of it. Their claim that Stalin was Right-wing, for instance must be some high-point of twisting the evidence. If the most prominent Communist of the 20th century was Right-wing, who on earth would be Left-wing? Black might as well be white (Whoops! I goofed there. I should have said "Diversity" might as well be white). Here is what Jost and his crew actually said:

"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"

So left-wing ideologues are conservative? Pardon me! It begins to look like the term "conservative" has a pretty strange meaning to these guys. Maybe it is Communism that they are condemning after all? Maybe we real conservatives are right off the hook here?

No such luck. They go on to say that the Leftist horrors that they name are not typical. REAL leftists are apparently not conservative. The fact that Communism at its height controlled roughly half the world is not apparently enough to get them counted as typical Leftists.

The reason they get themselves into this awful muddle is that they have no idea what conservatism actually is. To define what it is, they consulted dictionaries and social science encyclopaedias and their fellow Leftist writers but they do not appear to have consulted a single conservative! And they have certainly studied no political history. They have fallen into the simplistic trap of equating conservatism with rejection of change. It is of course true that conservatives DO reject some changes -- the foolish changes advocated by Leftists in particular -- but it is also true that conservatives WANT change -- change that will get the government off their backs in particular. I guess it was hard to find any conservatives at The People's Republic of Berkeley but if Jost and his friends had managed to get any conservatives to break cover there they would have found out pronto that there are a HEAP of things about our present society that conservatives would like to change. It is only Leftists talking to one another who think that conservatives are motivated only by a rejection of change.

If anybody would like to look at what has historically defined conservatives, a summary of the history concerned can be found here. Briefly, however, conservatives have always resisted attempts to curtail their rights and liberties -- particularly from the incursions of tyrannical governments. THAT is what has often made them resist change -- as governments do have a habit of trying to curtail the rights and liberties of the individual. But to say that conservatives resist change for its own sake is something that only a Leftist would believe. Conservatives believe in liberty. Leftists believe in the State.

So the Jost group in effect fell at the first hurdle. If they could not get straight what conservatism is, the chances of their saying anything reasonable about it were pretty slim. But let us have a bit of a laugh at what they did say anyway.

The first thing to note is that the article concerned is not in any sense new evidence about anything. It is a meta-analysis -- just a summary of what other Leftist psychologists have said on the subject over the years. And as computer people have always warned: GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out). And it is a very strange meta-analysis at that. Although the authors express some pride that they "cast a wide net" in looking for articles to include in their summary, they in fact leave out practically everything that does not suit them. They look only at articles that they like. It is NOT in any way a comprehensive, objective survey of the literature on the subject. For instance, how many of my articles did they cite? Just two. So just in ignoring the great bulk of my articles on the subject they ignored half the relevant literature. But Leftists always have been good at ignoring evidence.

So they say that their Leftist approach to the study of politics "has withstood the relentless tests of time and empirical scrutiny" and go on to cite 13 articles that support their approach as evidence for that assertion. If they had been fair and objective, they could also have quoted 100 articles of mine that upset that assertion. But in good Leftist fashion it is only people who support their views that they cite. No tolerance of ambiguity there!

Their ignorance of what conservatism is also shows in the means they use to measure it. Psychologists measure traits by use of "scales" (sets of interrelated questions). The more "conservative" statements you agree with, for instance, the more conservative you are said to be. The big hitch, of course, is in deciding what is a "conservative" statement. And have psychologists had trouble over that! Two of the most popular scales that psychologists use in studying politics are the 'F' scale -- put together in the late 1940s by the (Marxist) Adorno and his group -- and the RWA scale put together by Altemeyer. Yet in general population samples Leftist voters are just about as likely to get high scores on both scales as Rightist voters are! (See e.g. here) So once again we have the nonsense shoved at us that a lot of Leftists are conservative. Stalin is not alone, apparently!

That their measures of "conservatism" do not correlate with anything of current political relevance was even acknowledged by one of the authors of the scales concerned -- the RWA (Right-wing Authoritarianism) scale. Altemeyer, on p. 239 of his 1988 book Enemies of Freedom makes the bald statement that "Right-wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party". So in what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? It beats me! Leftist psychologists are like something out of Alice in Wonderland where words can mean anything that they say they mean. I myself do think that the F and RWA scales measure some sort of conservatism (though what sort would be hard to say) but it is certainly not political conservatism. My best shot so far at guessing what they measure is an old-fashioned outlook -- but note that both Leftist and Rightist voters are equally likely to be old-fashioned in the sense concerned.

But you would never guess from what the Jost group say that their scales are so hopelessly invalid ("invalid" = "does not measure what it is supposed to measure"). Of the RWA scale, for instance, they say "Scores on the RWA Scale have been found to predict a broad range of attitudes and behaviors related to social, economic, and political conservatism as defined in the general culture at the time. For instance, the scale has correlated reliably with political party affiliation" Weasel words! They do not even seem to have read Altemeyer himself. The shred of justification they have for that statement is that among SOME people (e.g. politicians) those identified as conservative are slightly more likely to get higher scores on the RWA scale. But it still remains true that in the community at large Leftist and Rightist voters are roughly equally likely to get high scores on the thing.

The weasel word above is of course "reliably". Psychologists have the strange habit of taking a correlation seriously as long as it is "statistically significant". But ANY correlation will be statistically significant if the sample size is large enough! So we have the weird phenomenon of correlations as low as .15 (meaning that there is only a 2% overlap between two groups of people) being taken as proof of something ( See e.g. here). What this means in practice is that if 51% of voters for the conservatives get a high score on the RWA scale and 49% of voters for the Leftists get a high score on it (which is roughly what happens), psychologists say: "Aha! We told you so! This scale measures conservatism!"). And if that happens often we get statements such as the one that the RWA scale "reliably" measures conservatism. That roughly half of their "conservatives" vote Leftist does not seem to bother anyone at all!

Leftist beliefs are obviously so rigidly held to among psychologists that any evidence at all will do to support them.

I could go on to have much, much more fun with this rubbish (e.g. by pointing out that Hitler was a socialist, that Mussolini was a Marxist, that scores on the Dogmatism scale are meaningless and that intolerance of ambiguity is a unicorn) but I think it would be flogging a dead horse to do so. I have written a fair bit more about it on my main blog for those who want a few more laughs and if anyone wants to look at the academic issues involved in detail there are all my published academic journal articles on the subject to refer to. They are all now online.

One of my academic colleagues -- Prof. James Lindgren -- has also been having a lot of fun in debunking the Jost work. He has gone to the trouble of finding out what the public opinion polls reveal about conservative voters. A sample of his findings is here. He does however have in the works a point-by-point refutation of the Jost claims. Practically everything the Jost group claims about conservatives on the basis of what students say turns out to be the reverse of the truth according to the public opinion poll data. When Prof. Lindgren has got it all up on the net I will of course publicize the link on my blog.







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