October 24, 2006

Are conservatives less "open"?

I guess I should note the latest echo of an old refrain -- a paper by John Jost titled "The End of the End of Ideology". I reproduce the abstract below:

"The "end of ideology" was declared by social scientists in the aftermath of World War II. They argued that: (a) ordinary citizens' political attitudes lack the kind of stability, consistency, and constraint that ideology requires; (b) ideological constructs such as liberalism and conservatism lack motivational potency and behavioral significance; (c) there are no major differences in content (or substance) between liberal and conservative points of view; and (d) there are few important differences in psychological processes (or styles) that underlie liberal versus conservative orientations. The end-of-ideologists were so influential that researchers ignored the topic of ideology for many years. However, current political realities, recent data from the National Election Studies, and results from an emerging psychological paradigm provide strong grounds for returning to the study of ideology. The liberalism-conservatism distinction remains a pervasive and parsimonious means of organizing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (for both laypersons and social scientists). Studies reveal that there are indeed meaningful political and psychological differences that covary with ideological self-placement. Situational variables-including system threat and mortality salience -and dispositional variables- including openness and conscientiousness- affect the degree to which an individual is drawn to liberal vs. conservative leaders, parties, and opinions. A psychological analysis is also useful for understanding the political divide between "red states" and "blue states."

The last few sentences above reflect the familiar claim (going back to at least 1950) from Leftist psychologists that conservatives are in some sense psychologically inferior or disabled. I have been rebutting such tripe for over 30 years so I cannot work up enough enthusiasm to go to the library and look up the full article but it seems from the abstract to be just another rehash of an earlier collaborative article by Jost that I have already demolished here. Jost and his colleagues don't even know what a conservative is so there is NO chance of their findings having any real-world significance.

Dr Helen has however given us an extract from the latest article by Jost in which the claim is made that Leftists are more "Open" in various ways. I wonder has Jost taken account of the findings of Van Hiel? Van Hiel is a Leftist psychologist but he works unusually hard to get data from real-world Leftists and Rightists -- as distinct from the usual practice of handing out a bunch of questionnaires to your students. And, as I point out here, Van Hiel actually found in one study that it was conservatives who were more open and in another study found that openness was not politically polarized.

As Dr Helen also points out, that real-world data can be pesky stuff!




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