On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Brian Siano wrote:
> As for the study about common traits among conservatives, I'm very wary
> about it-- even though I've met Frank Sulloway, and I think he's pretty
> scrupulous, and he made a fairly decent case in his work on birth order
> and ambitions (_Born to Rebel_). It does sound as though the study
> basically reiterates the conclusions of Theodore Adorno's study of
> authoritarian personalities. My main issue with the article Doug
> circulated is that it seemed to focus in on traits seen in conservatives
> that, with a little linguistic legerdemain, could easily be applied to
> liberals or even leftists. And the traits themselves struck me as, well,
> expressions of something deeper, that may not run along the lines of
> specific political ideologies or modern political labels.
>
> This is the sort of thing I wouldn't mind discussing in detail, except
> that a) I've only seen the press release about the study, so I couldn't
> make any meaningful commentary about it, and b) I just don't have the
> time to go on with some notions of my own that are really very tentative.
I've read the article. It's decent research, in my view. Various measures (not just the F-scale) have been assessed, and the basic findings are robust: people with conservative political views (defined in American terms) are less tolerant of uncertainty, more concerned with fear and threats, and tend to speak in less cognitively complex ways than people with more liberal views. The authors stress that this is not a condemnation of the "conservative" personality style; it is, however, a real psychological tendency.
One other thing to add: it's not simply one research finding by some politically motivated left-wing hacks. The paper is a meta analysis of about 100 studies on the topic. The effect sizes (d-stats) for the differences they report are statistically significant (the reported differences in the thinking patterns of liberals and conservatives is very unlikely to have occurred, if in fact liberals and conservatives do not differ on these dimensions). It's about as solid as psychological research on human beings gets.
Miles