{"id":155499,"date":"2015-05-31T01:35:07","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T01:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=155499"},"modified":"2015-05-31T20:04:43","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T20:04:43","slug":"social-science-findings-about-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/social-science-findings-about-conservatism\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Science Findings about Conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

WHAT IS CONSERVATISM?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The great empirical social psychologist who specialized in studying bigotry, Bob Altemeyer, in his 1996 The Authoritarian Specter<\/i>, and his other writings, reported his exhaustive empirical studies, of more than 50,000 individuals in many countries, demonstrating that bigotries against each and every minority group were the highest amongst the individuals who scored as being the most religious in any religion. In each religion, the more fundamentalist (believing in the inerrancy of some Scripture) one was, the more bigoted one tended to be, not just against non-believers, but against homosexuals, Blacks, and so forth. Religious belief, in other words, causes bigotry. His studies also found that his scale for \u201cRight-Wing Authoritarianism\u201d (RWA) or what\u2019s commonly called conservatism, was exhibited the most strongly by fundamentalists (and, in the Soviet Union, those fundamentalists took as their inerrant Scripture not the Bible, but instead Marx’s Das Capital<\/i>). Moreover, as one would expect from persons of faith (even of an atheistic one; i.e., belief in an atheistic \u2018inerrant Scripture\u2019), people of high RWA tended to make incorrect inferences from evidence, accept internal contradictions within their own beliefs, oppose constitutional guarantees of individual liberty, believe more strongly in sticks than in carrots to correct a person\u2019s behavior, and were closed-minded to criticism of themselves. In 1992, Altemeyer had co-authored in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion<\/i>, \u201cAuthoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice,\u201d which examined \u201cthe relationships among right-wing authoritarianism, various indices of religious orientation, and prejudice. Measures of religious fundamentalism … were good discriminators between prejudiced and unprejudiced persons.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Three authors \u2013 Westman, Willink and McHoskey \u2013 published, in the April 2000 Psychological Reports<\/i>, their study \u201cOn Perceived Conflicts Between Religion and Science: The Role of Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism,\u201d and reported that Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism varied together (or tended to be the same group), and that both groups were hostile toward science, and even toward technology. <\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, a summary, and meta-analysis, of not just Altemeyer\u2019s, but numerous other empirical psychological studies of conservatism, was published in the May 2003 Psychological Bulletin<\/i> under the title \u201cPolitical Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.\u201d This dealt with confirmation bias, which is the prejudice that people have to pay attention to what confirms their prior beliefs and to ignore what disconfirms or conflicts with their prejudices. Conservatives were found to have this bias even more than liberals do. (An excellent summary of this article was \u201cConservatives Deconstructed,\u201d by Joel Bleifuss, in the 19 September 2003 In These Times<\/i>. Another was U. Cal. Berkeley\u2019s press release on this study, \u201cResearchers Help Define What Makes a Political Conservative.\u201d) Not only did this research find strong correlations between conservatism and dogmatism, but one of the strongest correlations it discovered was between conservatism and fear of death. Because the meta-analysis was partly funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health \u2013 which are federally funded \u2013 it excluded any exploration of the correlation between conservatism and bigotry, and also excised religion as a factor. Despite this, Britain\u2019s Guardian<\/i> reported, on 13 August 2003, \u201cRepublicans are demanding to know why\u201d this study \u201creceived $1.2m in public funds.\u201d Even though investigation of the links between conservatism, religion, and bigotry was excluded from being researched, the findings still managed to offend conservatives to such an extent that it was unlikely any scientific study of conservatism would be able to be funded in the U.S. in the future, until Republicans decisively lost power in Washington. \u201cDeath anxiety\u201d was found to be the factor which was the most strongly correlated with \u201cpolitical conservatism.\u201d Next was \u201csystem instability\u201d (meaning anything that endangers the existing cultural order). Nothing else was even close to those two factors in predicting an individual\u2019s conservatism. In other words, it found: Conservatism is driven by fear.<\/span><\/p>\n

A study by Bouchard and four other authors, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences<\/i>, in 2003, and titled \u201cEvidence for the Construct Validity and Heritability of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale: A Reared-Apart Twins Study of Social Attitudes,\u201d reported that political conservatism correlated at a stunningly high rate with Altemeyer\u2019s Right-Wing Authoritarianism, and that it also \u201cdemonstrated significant and sizable genetic influence,\u201d so that the inclination to be conservative or religious is influenced not only by one\u2019s environment but by one\u2019s genes. In other words, such conservative traits as lack of compassion, preference to use sticks instead of carrots, etc., are partly a reflection of one\u2019s genetic make-up or temperament, and not entirely a result of one\u2019s training. Furthermore, a 17 November 2014 study in Current Biology<\/i>, \u201cNonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology,\u201d showed a huge difference between liberals and conservatives that can be measured by their MRI brainwave activity that results from pictures that are presented to them of mutilated bodies: conservatives consistently are more disturbed by those pictures. That too indicates a physical basis for conservatism, in fear of death. This finding confirmed one from an August 2012 study which had been published by Britain\u2019s Royal Society, titled, \u201cThe political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences.\u201d It found that, as the press release summed up: \u201cWhile liberals’ gazes tended to fall upon the pleasant images, such as a beach ball or a bunny rabbit, conservatives clearly focused on the negative images — of an open wound, a crashed car or a dirty toilet, for example.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201cWilson-Patterson C Scale\u201d was introduced by G.D. Wilson and J.R. Patterson in their 1968 \u201cA New Measure of Conservatism,\u201d in the British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology<\/i>. It is similar to Altemeyer\u2019s scale \u2013 an alternative to it. The Wilson-Patterson scale was used to measure \u201cconservatism\u201d in the Current Biology<\/i> article, and was one of several measures (along with party-affiliation) that was used in the Royal Society article.<\/span><\/p>\n

The observation is commonly made that conservatives are driven by fears, such as of \u201cthe other,\u201d and are therefore obsessed with military solutions, and police solutions, and with having guns themselves \u2014 all solutions which enable them to force their own way, against the will of \u201cthe other,\u201d regardless of whether \u201cthe other\u201d is \u201cthe Jew\u201d or \u201cthe Black\u201d or \u201cthe socialist\u201d or \u201cthe homosexual,\u201d or whatever. Religion is, for its buyer, a way to deal specifically with his fear of death. But for the seller of religion, it\u2019s a way of enslaving buyers to the seller\u2019s personal ends (which can likewise be a craving for salvation \u2013 ergo: proselytizing so as to win eternal life). <\/span><\/p>\n

This also explains the strong tendency of conservatives to focus on life-versus-death issues instead of on happiness-versus-misery issues (or \u201cquality-of-life\u201d or \u201cwell-being\u201d issues, which don\u2019t concern population-size but instead the consciousness of the individuals \u2013 of whatever number \u2013 who do exist). Consequently, for conservatives, \u201clife\u201d begins at conception, even though it\u2019s a two-celled object; whereas, for progressives, \u201clife\u201d that\u2019s of more than sub-animate value begins whenever consciousness does, and not before consciousness does (such as anti birth-control conservatives believe).<\/span><\/p>\n

The rather blatant ugliness of the personality traits and beliefs correlating with political conservatism (e.g., opposition to equality of opportunity, eagerness to punish people, especially high fear of death, widespread bigotry, etc.) has led some conservatives to attack this entire body of research. For example, the proud conservative John J. Ray, in The Journal of Social Psychology<\/i>, in 1985, headlined \u201cDefective Validity in the Altemeyer Authoritarianism Scale,\u201d and in a \u201cPost-Publication Update\u201d on the web he said that, \u201cAltemeyer (1988, p. 239) reports that Right-Wing Authoritarians as detected by his scale, \u2018show little preference in general for any political party\u2019! In other words, according to the RWA scale, half of Right-Wing authoritarians vote for Leftist political parties! So how can they be rightist if they vote for Leftist parties?\u201d However, Altemeyer wrote what Ray quoted here only as a scholar (in order to appear not to be \u201cbiased\u201d against conservatives, in order to mollify them), not at all as a scientist (social or otherwise). Though most of Altemeyer\u2019s assertions were supported by empirical data that he cited, this particular assertion from him was not, and was purely a go-along-to-get-along statement, which here backfired against him. Altemeyer provided no data whatsoever to support that allegation which Ray quoted; and, in fact, Altemeyer promptly proceeded, right after that statement, to assert that his actual studies showed the exact opposite. For example: \u201cIn every sample of Canadian students and parents I have studied over the last 15 years\u201d (and he was Canadian himself, so this referred to most of his data), the more conservative party\u2019s \u201csupporters have scored significantly higher (as a group) on the RWA scale than\u201d the liberal party\u2019s \u201cbackers.\u201d And, \u201cIn the United States, … Republican supporters scored significantly higher on the RWA scale than Democrats at each of six state universities I visited.\u201d So, there was no exception to the correlation between RWA and exhibited political conservatism. Conservatives simply don\u2019t want to know how ugly-charactered they are, but it\u2019s demonstrated consistently by the actual and now massive data, regardless whether conservatives want to see themselves as they actually are, which empirical studies also show that they refuse to do. <\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding Ray\u2019s charge of \u201cdefective validity\u201d of RWA, numerous independent studies have shown otherwise. For example, \u201cEvidence for the Construct Validity and Heritability of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale\u201d said that, \u201cthe Conservatism Scale\u201d exhibited high \u201cvalidity. It correlates .72 with RWA, a scale which has been extensively validated … and which is considered by some to be \u2018the best current measure of\u201d authoritarianism. A 1991 study was cited as the source of that evaluation. <\/span><\/p>\n

LEADERS\u2019 CONSERVATISM v. FOLLOWERS\u2019 CONSERVATISM<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Subsequently, the first major competing scale for conservatism, the Social Dominance Orientation or SDO Scale, was developed by Felicia Pratto and Jim Sedanius, and introduced in the 1994 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology<\/i>, as \u201cSocial Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes.\u201d There are about 15 questions on the scale, and they all relate to \u201cgroups\u201d and to whether (for example) \u201cIt would be good if groups could be equal,\u201d and, \u201cIn getting what you want, it is sometimes necessary to use force against other groups.\u201d It was the first authoritarianism-measure that failed to correlate with either of the Altemeyer-Wilson ones (\u201cRWA\u201d or \u201cC\u201d Scales). Whereas both types of conservatism (the Altemeyer-Wilson, and the SDO) correlate with sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-dissident attitudes, SDO correlates more with prejudice against subordinates and victims, regardless of category. Young males, perhaps due to high testosterone, were found to score especially high on the SDO scale. Also, high SDO people tended to be more economic, and high RWA people tended to be more cultural, conservatives. Altemeyer\u2019s 2006 The Authoritarians<\/i> theorized that high-SDO people tend to be conservative politicians, whereas high-RWA people tend to be conservative voters. Altemeyer also hypothesized that George W. Bush was probably high on both forms of conservatism. Furthermore, Chris Sibley and Marc Wilson issued in the April 2013 Political Psychology<\/i>, \u201cSocial Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism: Additive and Interactive Effects on Political Conservatism,\u201d which showed that when individuals were studied over a period of time, an increase in one score turned out to correlate with an increase in the other score, even though a high-scorer on one scale had no tendency to be a high-scorer in the other. Furthermore, \u201cBoth constructs are associated with increasing political conservatism, and the lowest levels of conservatism (or highest levels of political liberalism) are found in those lowest in both SDO and RWA.\u201d So: those are two different types of supporters of conservative political parties. However, Altemeyer\u2019s hypothesis that one conservative type are the leaders, and the other are the followers, has not yet been tested, even though it makes sense and would be extremely important in explaining history if it\u2019s true.<\/span><\/p>\n

Conservatives, such as Ray, have similarly condemned the SDO Scale as indicating anything about conservatism. They don\u2019t say they\u2019re personally insulted by the scientific findings on conservatism; they say it\u2019s no science at all. Basically, they reject the sampling methods, or even, sometimes, the basic mathematical methods: factor analysis, and cluster analysis, of data.<\/span><\/p>\n

CONSERVATISM & PSYCHOPATHY<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Clearly, SDO focuses more on raw power, and RWA focuses more on majority-minority in terms of religion, gender, ethnicity, and all the rest. Recent studies of psychopaths have shown psychos to be power-focused. Sibley and Wilson have done a study, “Does endorsement of hierarchy make you evil? SDO and psychopathy,” which found that though there was only a moderate degree of correlation between the two, \u201chigher SDO at time 1 is associated with an increase in psychopathy at time 2, and vice-versa.\u201d In other words: those two traits reinforce each other. (However, that paper has not been peer-reviewed.) And a 2014 study by Dhont and Hodson, in Personality and Individual Differences<\/i>, titled \u201cWhy do right-wing adherents engage in more animal exploitation and meat consumption?\u201d found that: \u201cRight-wing adherents do not simply consume more animals because they enjoy the taste of meat, but because doing so supports dominance ideologies and resistance to cultural change.\u201d In other words: High SDO produces increased meat-consumption.<\/span><\/p>\n

Research into SDO is in its infancy, as is research into psychopathy. However, research into \u201cauthoritarianism\u201d or \u201cconservatism\u201d is in its adulthood, with an enormous scientific literature, having started in 1950 with Adorno\u2019s The Authoritarian Personality<\/i>, which was inspired by the then-recent case of Adolf Hitler.<\/span><\/p>\n

RELIGIOUS CONSERVATISM & ECONOMIC CONSERVATISM<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales headlined in the 2003 Journal of Monetary Economics<\/i> (pp. 225-82), \u201cPeople\u2019s Opium? Religion and Economic Attitudes,\u201d where they analyzed the results of the huge World Values Survey, to find not just the \u201ceconomic attitudes,\u201d but all attitudes, that were correlated with respondents\u2019 religious background, current affiliation, beliefs, and frequency of church attendance. Among the findings were: \u201cReligiosity is associated with \u2026 a stronger belief that the market outcome is fair. Interestingly, religious people are more likely to believe that people are in need because they are lazy and lack will power rather than because society treats them unfairly. Overall, religious people tend to be more supportive of markets.\u201d \u201cThe characteristics that make somebody attend religious services on a regular basis also make her more intolerant toward immigrants and people of other races.\u201d \u201cThe relation between religion and intolerance seems to be present in all religious denominations, \u2026 Only Buddhists are more tolerant [however, more recently the majority Buddhists are trying to exterminate minority Muslims in Thailand].\u201d \u201cIntolerance is mostly an outcome of being raised religiously\u201d and is less correlated with a person\u2019s current frequency of church attendance. \u201cAll religious denominations are associated with a more conservative attitude toward women. However, that effect is twice as strong among Muslims than for any other religion.\u201d \u201cReligious people of all denominations (except Buddhists) are more inclined to believe that people in need are lazy.\u201d \u201cNot surprisingly, religions tend to increase intolerance only when they are dominant.\u201d In other words, regarding that last one, the majority exclude from membership in \u201cGod\u2019s People\u201d the members of minority faiths, who are therefore strongly motivated to be more tolerant than are those people in the majority faith. Buddhism tended to be the least religious of the religions, because Buddhism is actually a cross between a philosophy and a religion. <\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, in June 2008, the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life issued their \u201cU.S. Religious Landscape Survey,\u201d based on \u201cinterviews with more than 36,000 Americans.\u201d On subject after subject, it was found that the more religious a person was, the more conservative he tended to be. \u201cAlmost twice as many people who say religion is very important in their lives are conservative (46%) compared with those for whom religion is less important (25%).\u201d Strikingly, in America, the highest percentages of liberals (respondents who \u201cLean Democrat\u201d) were found in minority religions. 77% of \u201cHist. black churches\u201d were of this category. 66% of \u201cBuddhist\u201d were. 66% of \u201cJewish\u201d were. 63% of \u201cMuslim\u201d were. 63% of \u201cHindu\u201d were. By contrast, 48% of \u201cCatholic\u201d were. 43% of \u201cMainline churches [Protestant]\u201d were. 34% of \u201cEvangelical churches\u201d were. The most-extreme rightwing Americans were \u201cMormon,\u201d only 22% of whom leaned Democratic. (An article on the Web, \u201cSampling of Latter-Day Saint\/Utah Demographics,\u201d notes that on strikingly many demographic variables, Mormons are in the extreme #1 or else in the very last position, as compared to all states or religious groups.) Mormons tended to be concentrated in Utah, where they constituted the overwhelming majority. <\/span><\/p>\n

As a general rule, being conservative went along with being a member of fundamentalistic majoritarian faiths, basically white Christians in the United States. Regarding \u201cGovernment Assistance for the Poor,\u201d the least supportive Americans were Mormons, and then Hindus (their caste system enshrines inequality), followed by white Protestants (equally Evangelical and Mainline). The Americans most supportive of tax-funded assistance to the poor were black Protestants, followed by Muslims and Buddhists, then Jews. One might infer from this study that the more that a given religious believer lives amongst others of her own faith, the more conservative she\u2019s likely to be. Perhaps being a minority tends to drive a person to consider other cultures\u2019 viewpoints, and not to take Scripture as being quite so infallible. One key question asked of respondents was \u201cWhen it comes to questions of right and wrong, which of the following do you look to most for guidance?\u201d The group highest citing \u201cReligious teachings and beliefs\u201d were \u201cJehovah\u2019s Witness,\u201d followed by \u201cMormon\u201d and then by \u201cEvangelical.\u201d The lowest were \u201cBuddhist,\u201d then \u201cHindu,\u201d then \u201cJewish.\u201d This is consistent with people tending to be more skeptical of their Scripture to the extent that they lived and functioned amongst non-believers in that particular Scripture. This is more particularly consistent with Altemeyer\u2019s having found that communists in the Soviet Union tended to be highly authoritarian, whereas communists in the U.S. were not. The Scripture in the Soviet Union was Karl Marx, Das Capital<\/i>. Communism was just an atheistic religion.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStagarite\u201d posted at www.dailykos.com\/storyonly\/2006\/7\/12\/175319\/372, \u201cLiterature Review: Authoritarianism,\u201d providing a good summary of scientific research (as of 2002) regarding the conservative personality. Bruce A. Robinson posted at www.religioustolerance.org\/chr_prej.htm \u201cThe Relationship Between Church Membership and Prejudice,\u201d in which a dozen early studies, from the 1940\u2019s through the 1960\u2019s, examining the relationship between religion and bigotry were referenced. Their general drift, even in those early times, was that people who are more religious were generally also more bigoted. <\/span><\/p>\n

In September 2006, the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion issued a study, \u201cAmerican Piety in the 21st Century,\u201d which contained \u201cSelected Findings from The Baylor Religion Survey.\u201d This study claimed to be \u201cthe most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted.\u201d Under its heading \u201cReligion and Politics\u201d was reported that, among the five listed \u201cReligious Indicators\u201d examined for Christians (\u201cBiblical Literalism,\u201d \u201cReligious Attendance,\u201d \u201cEvangelical Protestant,\u201d \u201cMainline Protestant,\u201d and \u201cCatholic\u201d), overwhelmingly the strongest correlation with conservative political attitudes was fundamentalism (\u201cBiblical Literalism\u201d). Specifically, fundamentalists were far more supportive than anyone else of \u201cSpend more on the military,\u201d \u201c[Politically] Advocate Christian values,\u201d \u201cPunish criminals more harshly,\u201d \u201cFund faith-based organizations,\u201d and \u201cAllow prayer in [public] schools.\u201d They were far less supportive than anyone else of \u201cAbolish the death penalty,\u201d \u201cRegulate business more closely,\u201d and \u201cProtect the environment more.\u201d All five categories of Christians opposed \u201cDistribute wealth more evenly\u201d; and three categories of Christians were especially opposed to the proposal to distribute wealth more evenly: (1) Religious Attendance (or frequency of church-attendance), (2) Evangelical Protestant, and (3) Biblical Literalism. This study provided 100% confirmation of the political strategy of prominent American conservative aristocratic families, and of Bush advisor Karl Rove, to seek Republican votes from the most literal, Bible-believing, Christians. Another interesting finding was that, whereas 50% of Christians whose income was under $35,000 described themselves as \u201cBible Believing,\u201d only 38% of Christians whose income was more than $100,000 did. This suggests that, whereas America\u2019s rich were overwhelmingly the financiers of the Republican Party, America\u2019s poorest (who were strongly Democratic as an entire lot) were still ripe to vote Republican if they belonged to that half of America\u2019s poor who view themselves as \u201cBible Believing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

CONSERVATISM, POLITICS, & WEALTH<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

During 13-15 March 2015, CNN polled on whether respondents preferred that \u201cThe candidate has never been wealthy,\u201d<\/span><\/a> or instead that \u201cThe candidate has had economic success in their life\u201d; and Republicans chose the rich by 63%\/27%, while Democrats chose the rich by 52%\/43%. Independents chose the poor by 49%\/44%. Independents there were the least conservative, the most progressive, though not very progressive; Republicans, by contrast, were extremely conservative, very authoritarian, wanting their boss as their President. The most authoritarian region of the country was the South, which chose the rich candidate by 59%\/35%. The West was close behind: 54%\/39%. Third was Midwest: 49%\/42%. Least authoritarian was Northeast, which preferred the poor candidate by the bare margin of 47%\/46%. As regards population-density, Urban and Suburban were both authoritarian by 55%\/38%, and Rural were barely authoritarian, by 48%\/43%. Young were the least authoritarian, old were the most. Overall, Americans were authoritarian, preferring the rich candidate by 53%\/40% (as if, other things being equal, the poor candidate shouldn\u2019t be expected to have overcome greater obstacles and shown more skill of political leadership in order to achieve a given degree of political renown and appeal than the rich candidate who has achieved that same political level). It\u2019s a population unlikely to sustain democracy \u2013 fundamentally hostile toward democracy, favorable toward aristocracy; more respectful of people who take for themselves than of people who give of themselves; more trusting of people who exploit than of people who serve; more-comfortable being led by the callous than by the compassionate \u2013 a fundamentally myth-dependent deceived population.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are some of my previous reports summarizing the research on that political-cultural disease \u2013 the disease of a nation rather than of merely a person \u2013 conservatism:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/2014\/04\/29908.html<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStudy Shows Republicans Favor Economic Inequality\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Posted on April 5, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/eric-zuesse\/the-rich-and-educated-bel_b_4377474.html<\/span><\/p>\n

“The Rich And Educated Believe Wealth Correlates With Virtue, Says Study\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Posted: 12\/05\/2013<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/2014\/04\/first-ever-political-study-top-1-found-extreme-conservatism-intense-political-involvement.html<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFirst-Ever Political Study of Top 1% Has Found Extreme Conservatism, Intense Political Involvement\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Posted on April 2, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/eric-zuesse\/gallup-poll-finds-democra_b_4683688.html<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGallup Poll Finds Democrats More Compassionate; Republicans More Psychopathic\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Posted: 01\/29\/2014<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/eric-zuesse\/studies-find-that-conserv_b_4558541.html<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStudies Find that Successful People Tend to Be Bad\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Posted: 01\/10\/2014<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/2015\/03\/gallup-finds-among-conservatives-education-increases-false-belief.html<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGallup Finds: Among Conservatives, Education Increases False Belief\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Posted on March 29, 2015<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/2014\/04\/breakthrough-study-proves-good-luck-causes-people-become-conservative.html<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBreakthrough Study Proves: Good Luck Causes People to Become More Conservative\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Posted on April 2, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

Concerning that last-mentioned one, more should be said here about it:<\/span><\/p>\n

That February 2014 study, by Andrew J. Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee, is one of the most important ever done. Its title was \u201cDoes Money Make People Right-Wing and Inegalitarian? A Longitudinal Study of Lottery Winners.\u201d<\/span><\/a> It was important because, as it noted at the end, \u201cTo our knowledge, these are the first fixed-effects results of their kind, either in the economics literature or the political science literature.\u201d Freed of scholar-speak, that was saying: No previous scientific study has been done of whether the correlation that conservatism generally accompanies wealth is causal in either direction: from wealth to ideology, or from ideology to wealth. They found a definite causal relationship: wealth causes conservatism. Or: \u201c[lottery] winners tend to support a right-wing political party, and also to be intrinsically less egalitarian.\u201d Furthermore: \u201cThis money-to-right-leaning relationship is particularly strong for males (we are not certain why). It is also of a \u2018dose-response\u2019 kind: the larger the win, the more people tilt to the right.\u201d There was no other difference between people who won lotteries and people who didn\u2019t; the winners simply became more conservative after they won. Here is how the \u201cAbstract\u201d put that: \u201cMoney apparently makes people more right-wing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This helps to explain why other studies have found that \u201cSuccessful People Tend to Be Bad,\u201d and why \u201cGallup Poll Finds Democrats More Compassionate; Republicans More Psychopathic,\u201d and why \u201cStudy Shows Republicans Favor Economic Inequality.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It also helps to explain why the exit polls in the 2012 Obama-Democrat v. Romney-Republican U.S. Presidential contest showed that Romney\u2019s voters tended to be much higher income than Obama\u2019s voters.<\/span><\/a> Unfortunately, public-opinion polls don\u2019t often ask questions to find correlations between party-affiliation and income, but all of the evidence that does exist on this important topic indicates that conservative voters tend to be richer than progressive voters. Furthermore, the Americans on both the Forbes and on the Bloomberg lists of billionaires are about 70% Republicans and 30% Democrats, versus the usual norm amongst the U.S. population, of 55% Democrats to 45% Republicans (not including Independents)<\/span><\/a>. The Oswald-Powdthavee study helps to explain why that\u2019s the case: lucky people tend to be conservatives; it\u2019s not the case that conservatives tend to be lucky people. Conservatives are no luckier than non-conservatives. They\u2019re also not more competent than non-conservatives. Instead: Success causes one to be a conservative. No matter how progressive or conservative one is before one becomes rich, one becomes even more so after one has become rich.<\/span><\/p>\n

———-<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of \u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse WHAT IS CONSERVATISM? The great empirical social psychologist who specialized in studying bigotry, Bob Altemeyer, in his 1996 The Authoritarian Specter, and his other writings, reported his exhaustive empirical studies, of more than 50,000 individuals in many countries, demonstrating that bigotries against each and every minority group were the highest amongst the individuals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":140594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-155499","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}