Joy. I've read the study you speak of, palerider, and am also a psych major. As you can guess, studies like this lay at the intersection of my academic interests.
I was recently in a discussion with a member of this forum who presented a study from Stanford that supposedly represented a psychological profile of conservatives. Aside from the fact that no conservatives were spoken to as a part of this “study”, some of the prime examples the “study” held up as examples of conservative thought were among the most notorious leftist tyrants of the 20th century. Joseph Stalin, Lenin, chairman Mao, and Pol Pot were apparently studies in conservativism.
That no one was actually consulted for the study is not entirely unusual -- it was not what we would consider a study itself but a "meta-study" (basically the consolidation of a large body of research into one simplified set of findings). The problem is that what was consulted was not actually research, and the analysis is itself was conducted in a pretty ludicrous way. They can easily be criticized for tailoring the data to fit the conclusion. Because the data itself is qualitative, not quantitative, they cannot be refuted mathematically.
Kerlinger did probably the best work on quantifying political ideology; he produced two separate scales for measuring conservatism and liberalism, called SAC and SAL respectively (the SA stands for social attitudes). His own findings show a strong positive correlation between SAC scores and Adorno's F scale (which measures authoritarianism) of about .74, though there are some very strong and valid criticisms of the F scale that Kerlinger himself put forth (namely that it does not properly control for response set and acquiescence bias, that Adorno's own findings are flavored by his Marxist affiliations, and that the SAC scale was designed in the late 1960's and is badly in need of revision). The correlation between SAL and the F scale, by contrast, was -.05, which is statistically insignificant. It does not mean liberals are not authoritarian, as the study's authors would say, only that they are not all authoritarian, or not consistently so. If one were to plot them on a scatterplot, they would be all over the place, with such a large amount of spread about the regression line that the correlation approaches 0.
The research is, in other words, bunk. Most people know that, except for a few swaths of academia.
Well thank you Mr. Moderator, I didn't know you had become one. I guess congratulations are in order. Meanwhile, it's quite a stretch to equate someone like Pol Pot with modern day liberalism within the U.S., I guess, it's the old liberals are commies approach.
Yes, but it makes even less sense to equate Pol Pot with modern day conservatism, which is his gripe against the study's authors.
Popeye and Palerider, I strongly recommend you both read
The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Peter F. Drucker, which explores the nature of fascism and totalitarianism. One of his most ironic findings is fascism's total lack of internal consistency. It was as antiliberal as it was anticonservatism (not to mention as anticommunist as it was anticapitalist, as antisecular as it was atheistic, and so on). He was there when fascism was on the rise and has many of the old Nazi leaders, like Goebbels, on record as saying the whole thing was basically crap and they were surprised anyone with sense was following it.
