THE RIGHT STUFF (Study on Conservative's Brain-funny)

[cally]

THE RIGHT STUFF
Getting in touch with the Mussolini inside
A trip inside the conservative mind is a perilous journey indeed

Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer Sunday, August 3, 2003

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A press release from UC Berkeley announced that researchers, culling 50 years of data, had identified psychological patterns common to the minds of right-wingers. Their findings, published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin, listed these predictors of conservatism: fear, aggression, dogmatism, authoritarianism, tolerance of inequality, intolerance of ambiguity, resistance to change and lack of "integrative complexity" in thought and speech. Hardly a flattering portrait.

The release pushed further, noting that "disparate conservatives" such as Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh each preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality.

The research is serious scholarship, insist the authors from Stanford, U.C. Berkeley and the University of Maryland synthesized 88 previously published samples involving 22,818 participants from 12 countries into 10 "meta-analytic calculations."

The study starts by assuming that people adopt a belief system such as conservatism partly to satisfy some psychological need. "This does not mean that conservatism is pathological," the authors hasten to note, "or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational or unprincipled."


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/08/03/IN250702.DTL

[GoneOffShore]

1. Thank you

I've sent this on to an AOL freeper who has been stalking one of my email accounts.
It should send his blood pressure through the roof.
:bounce: :bounce:

[shirlden]

2. I read that report when it came out

and with some Conservative family and friends in mind, I found it to be pretty much "right on".