Conservatives Deconstructed
Are they nuts?
Have you ever wondered about those ubiquitous conservatives?
Why do they support tax breaks for the rich when so many of their fellow
citizens are in dire straits? Why do they applaud John Ashcroft and his
post-9/11 curtailment of civil liberties? Why do they oppose laws that address
historic wrongs and enforce constitutionally guaranteed rights? Why do they
respond to a societal drug problem with incarceration and expanded prison
construction? Why do they gut regulations that are meant to protect the
environment? Why do they invest more than half of our tax dollars in the
military? Why are they so mean-spirited? In other words, why do conservatives
do what they do? Are they nuts?
No, not according to a fascinating new study in Psychological Bulletin,
“Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” Conservatives do,
however, possess certain psychological traits and motives that no one in their
right (or is that left?) mind would want to share.
The study’s four authors, John T. Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie W. Kruglanski, and
Frank J. Sulloway, write, “People embrace political conservatism (at least in
part) because it serves to reduce fear, anxiety and uncertainty; to avoid change,
disruption and ambiguity; and to explain, order and justify inequality among
groups and individuals.” To come to this conclusion the authors examined 88
different psychological studies conducted between 1958 and 2002 that
involved 22,818 people from 12 different countries. They boiled that
information down into a number of psychological attributes that are closely
associated with people who are politically conservative.
Rigid and closed-minded
“Dogmatism has been found to correlate consistently with authoritarianism,
political-economic conservatism, and the holding of right wing opinions,” write
the authors. Conversely, studies have found that conservatives in general have
little tolerance for ambiguity. A fact that helps in decoding this statement that
George W. Bush made in Geneoa, Italy: “I know what I believe and I believe
what I believe is right.”
Such thinking could explain why the Bush administration officials ignored those
intelligence reports that failed to support going to war with Iraq.
“
intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the
familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic clichés and
stereotypes,” write the authors.
Numerous studies have also shown that conservative policy makers entertain
less cognitively complex thoughts than their liberal or moderate counterparts. A
study of speeches made in the House of Commons in 1984 found that “the
most integratively complex politicians were moderate socialists.” Their
complexity of thought was found to be significantly higher than that of extreme
socialists, moderate conservatives or extreme conservatives. Similarly, in the
United States, a study of speeches on the floor of the Senate in 1975 and 1976
found that senators with liberal or moderate voting records exhibited
significantly more complex thinking than their conservative counterparts.
That explains a lot, doesn’t it. Bush again comes to mind. As he told a British
reporter, “Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I
think.”
Further studies show that conservatives have been found to shun new,
stimulating experiences and to avoid situations where the outcome is uncertain.
The authors write that the fact that conservatives are “less tolerant of ambiguity,
less open to new experiences, and more avoidant of uncertainty” may help
explain why “congressional Republicans and other prominent conservatives in
the United States have sought unilaterally to eliminate public funding for the
contemporary arts.”
From an early age, conservatives demonstrate a personal need for order and
structure. One study has shown that conservative teens are more likely to say
they are “neat, orderly and organized” than are liberal adolescents. The authors
note that this desire for set rules correlates with the examples of mental rigidity
mentioned above, and can be seen in the political realm when conservatives
attempt to order their own and other’s lives by advocating drug testing, core
educational curriculum, controls on people with AIDS, and strict parental
control of children.
Impulsively aggressive
R.A. Altemeyer, a psychologist who has extensively studied people with
right-wing beliefs, has observed:
see the world as a dangerous place, as
society teeters on the brink of self-destruction from evil and
violence. This fear appears to instigate aggression in them.
Second, right-wing authoritarians tend to be highly self-righteous.
They think themselves much more moral and upstanding than
others—a self perception considerably aided by self-deception.
… This self-righteousness disinhibits their aggressive impulses and
releases them to act out their fear-induced hostilities.
George Will seems steeped in that fear. To illustrate that point the authors quote
this passage from an essay by Will: “Conservatives know the world is a dark
and forbidding place where most new knowledge is false, most improvements
are for the worse.” Psychological studies back Will up. People with right-wing
personalities hold more pessimistic views and left-wing personalities hold more
optimistic ones. And that pessimism and optimism appears to inform how
conservatives and liberals view their fellow humans. A 1984 survey of
“emotional reactions to welfare recipients” found that conservatives “expressed
greater disgust and less sympathy” than liberals.
While this propensity of conservatives to be threatened and fearful does not
appear to induce neurotic behavior, one study of dream lives discovered that
Republicans had three times as many nightmares as Democrats, indicating that
fear, anger and aggression might be a factor in the subconscious motivations of
conservatives.
The authors speculate that this susceptibility to fear “may help explain why
military defense spending and support for national security receive much
stronger backing from conservative than liberal political leaders.”
Afraid of loss
It has long been known that conservatives resist change while progressives
accept change. Indeed, according to studies, this is the most common way that
people from both groups self-define themselves.
“To the extent that conservatives are especially sensitive to the possibilities of
loss—one reason why they wish to preserve the status quo—it follows that they
should be generally more motivated by negatively framed outcomes (potential
losses) than by positively framed outcomes (potential gains).”
Consequently, conservatives respond better to threats. In a study conducted
five days before the 1996 presidential election, researchers presented voters
with persuasive arguments that stressed either the potential rewards of voting
(“it is a way to express and live in accordance with important values”) or the
potential losses from not voting (“not voting allows others to take away your
right to express your values”). More generally, the authors suggest that “framing
events in terms of potential losses rather than gains leads people to adopt
cognitively conservative, as opposed to innovative, orientations.”
Haunted by death
Of course, the greatest personal loss is death. Studies demonstrate that the
people who most fear death are the most conservative. More generally, the fear
of death and the resulting protective posture that such a threat engenders cause
people to become conservative and to strongly “defend culturally valued norms
and practices” and “to distance themselves from, and even to derogate,
out-group members to greater extent.” Similarly, the fear of death has also been
linked to “system-justifying forms of stereotyping and enhanced liking for
stereotype-consistent women and minority group members” and “greater
punitiveness, and even aggression, toward those who violate cultural values.”
Applying that knowledge, the authors write, “High profile terrorist attacks such
as those of September 11, 2001, might simultaneously increase the cognitive
accessibility of death and the appeal of political conservatism.”
While trying to retain the impartiality of scientists, albeit social ones, the authors
warn that the available evidence indicates that governments can manipulate
people’s conservative tendencies by raising the specter of death. They write,
“Priming thoughts of death has been shown to increase intolerance, out-group
derogation, punitive aggression, veneration of authority figures and system
justification.”
That is what we have seen in the wake of 9/11 as public opinion and media
coverage took a sharp turn to the right, setting the stage for pre-emptive wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
The authors acknowledge what has long been assumed by sociologists,
economists, and political scientists: people adopt conservative beliefs to serve
their own self-interests. They agree that this helps explain the conservatism of
“upper-class elites.” However, the authors hold that the personal need to
“reduce fear, anxiety, dissonance, uncertainty or instability” better explains why
a vastly greater number of people who are not part of the elite, and particularly
those who are disadvantaged or from low-status groups, “might embrace
right-wing ideologies.”
The authors also take issue with the common notion that people inherit
ideological beliefs from their parents. A statistically significant correlation exists
between the two, but it is far from overwhelming. The authors maintain,
“Conservative ideologies, like virtually all other belief systems, are adopted in
part because they satisfy various psychological needs.”
Conservatives have not taken kindly to “Political Conservatism as Motivated
Social Cognition.” Will, perhaps fearing the truth, ridiculed the study in the
Washington Post, making fun of the authors’ academic jargon.
Yet this delineation of the psychological needs that motivate conservatives
provides progressives with lessons on how they might communicate with a
wider audience. For example, when speaking to the problems of the Patriot
Act, administration critics could reach out to a conservative audience by
emphasizing that the act presents a radical infringement on the Bill of Rights, and
should therefore be opposed by all who value the precepts on which America
was founded.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/firststone/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
