2003 U.S. Govt psych study concludes conservatives are neurotic mental cases

[doeriver]

Study of Bush's psyche touches a nerve
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/13/usa.redbox
Julian Borger in Washington
The Guardian, Wednesday 13 August 2003 02.33 BST

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The authors, presumably aware of the outrage they were likely to trigger, added a disclaimer that their study "does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false".

...(more at hyperlink)

[southernyankeebelle]

1. I can see it in some of my family members. My family members

grew up in a dem. household. My young sibling became a doctor and her 2 child are in college to be doctors. My sibling forgot where she came from. She can't stand Obama. She thinks he is going to take away whatever she worked hard for. I know she worked hard for what she has. I told her she has been doing very well since Bush took over and now its time for the lower middle class and the working people to get a break. I reminded her that the government gave her mother a pension that our father earned while in the military. I remind her she got bennies from my fathers services. Now her children are in med school and they have never known hardship of any kind. I remind them that not everyone is in their tax bracket. My son is working very hard and passes over $400 a month for health insurance on a cooks wage. I told them hopefully Obama will help the working poor. I told my sister she is raising snobs. I also told her she needs to put her kids in a soup kitchen to give them some open eyes.