(From May of 2004, to 2015 the National Library of Australia archived this site annually. See e.g. here)

After 2015 See the Wayback Machine here



ACADEMIC HOMEPAGE FOR DR. JOHN J. RAY

Biographical note

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY (JR for short). I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I was, in other words, born in the Tropics, like my parents and all of my grandparents before me. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. in Behavioural Sciences from Macquarie University in 1974.

I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of New South Wales. I taught primarily social psychology and research methods. My major research interests lay in psychological authoritarianism, conservatism, racism and achievement motivation -- resulting in over 250 academic publications all told. My major book was Conservatism as heresy, published in 1974. Another copy here

At age 39 in 1983 I retired permanently from academic employment and moved back to Brisbane, Queensland, to concentrate on business and personal interests. I have been married four times and have one son born in 1987. My favourite recreation is listening to baroque music -- particularly the the music of J.S. Bach. (Click here to listen to some famous background music from that period). You can find some more extensive autobiographical notes here or here.

My preferred email address is jonjayray@hotmail.com but jonjayray@gmail.com also gets me

To see a photo of me (not advised!) See here or for lots of good photos see here. And for some pictures of bureaucracy at work, see here or here


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HOW TO USE THIS PAGE TO READ MY WRITINGS:

Simply click on the document header you wish to view. There is a list of all my publications in normal reference order (i.e. first by name and then in chronological order and then by arbitrary a, b, c etc notations) here. Click on the name of any article to read it online.


Because there are so many of my published papers, I provide three further ways of accessing them. In addition to the chronological list, there is also an alphabetical list and a subject index immediately following:


Here are twenty-three lists of my articles under various classifications:

Racism

Conservatism

Authoritarianism

Achievement motivation

Neuroticism and anxiety

Dogmatism and mental rigidity

Alienation

Social Class

Criminology

Environmentalism

Analytical philosophy

A-B personality and heart disease

Questionnaire acquiescence

Survey research methods

India

Scotland

South Africa

Dutch Follies

Critiques of other writers

Articles of libertarian interest

Articles relevant to Eysenck's theories

Articles using the "Directiveness" scale

Table of contents for Conservatism as heresy

The topical lists above do not at all however exhaust the topics I have written on. They are simply the topics on which I have written most. There are other topics on which I have written one or two papers only. See my complete list of publications (in order of publication date) for these.

Finally, I have also subdivided my articles in terms of where they were published. There is a list of articles published in The Journal of Social Psychology, a list of articles in Personality and Individual Differences, a list of articles published in Australian academic journals (including The Australian Journal of Psychology), a list of articles published in British academic journals and a list of articles published in political journals. Most of the latter are in Political Psychology. I had lots of articles published in other journals but those five categories are probably the most useful.

You can also view an alphabetical list of just my published papers. Copyright restrictions must of course be observed with the published papers.

There is also a separate list of unpublished papers. You may use those papers in any way you like as long as proper acknowledgment of their source is made and my email address is given (jonjayray@hotmail.com). Any abridgments or alterations must also be clearly noted if the paper is further reproduced or circulated. Note that some of the unpublished papers have near equivalents that were published.

CLICK HERE to view Published papers by J.J. Ray that are online here (in alphabetical order of title).
CLICK HERE to view Unpublished papers by J.J. Ray that are online here (in alphabetical order of title).
(To download any of the documents, simply Cut and Paste)

And just for fun, here are some Poems, some Jokes some Famous Sayings, Some short original plays mainly for home performance and a few notes on the more amusing Follies of the English language


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So what are my conclusions from all that research?

My conclusion is that self-reports cannot reliably deliver accurate information about political psychology. The unreliability of self-reports is of course a byword so psychologists have devised various ways of allowing for that. Almost all of my research was based on self-reports so I routinely used all the common methods of dealing with their inherent problems. In addition, I used one that is most unusual in psychological research: I confined my research almost entirely to general population samples. Psychologists normally do their research by surveying university and college students and many of such respondents are too "wised up" for the precautions against misleading answers to work well. They tend to give the answers that they think the psychologist wants to hear and are rather good at doing so.

Even my high level of "precautiousness" was, however, in my final analysis, not good enough when one is examining political attitudes, and it was political attitudes that I was most interested in. What Leftists, in particular, said about themselves lined up very poorly with what is known from history about Leftist behaviour. For example, Leftists are great lovers of a powerful central authority, as preached by Hegel and as seen in Communist movements worldwide, yet there is never any trace of that in survey research results. One would in fact gather from their responses that they are against all that. The supporters of big government tend to portray themselves as opposed to everything about it. Leftists just seem unable to acknowledge their own real attitudes and motivations. The real motivations of Leftists would seem too dismal to be acknowledged.

So in the end, I think my results do have an important function: They discredit the entire discipline of political psychology insofar as it is based on survey research, which it mostly is. History is our only source of reasonable inferences about human political motivation.


RECENT WRITINGS

The published and unpublished articles listed above were all written while the internet was in its infancy and were written for publication in academic journals on paper. Since then, however, I have written much that has appeared at various sites on the internet . Click HERE for a menu of my internet publications.

Plus An ancestral document -- and -- Some Christmas letters -- and -- My recipe collection (All in one file here)



You should also be able to find on this site a selection of articles by others that I have "saved". Some I agree with and some I do not but for one reason or another I would like them to remain available. The internet is notorious for "vanishing" articles so I try to cope with and overcome that in a few cases. See here. If the files fail to come up, try here and here



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