Excerpt #109 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Four researchers (Assistant Professor Jack Glaser of the University of California; Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and Visiting Professor Frank Sulloway of UC Berkeley; lead author, Associate Professor John Jost of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business; and Professor Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland at College Park) culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism.
The final report demonstrates that at the core of political conservatism is resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality.
Some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:
Fear and aggression
Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
Uncertainty avoidance
Need for cognitive closure
Terror management
“From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination,” the researchers wrote in an article “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin.
The psychologists sought patterns among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books, and conference papers.
The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions, and verdicts rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field, and survey studies.
According to Glaser, ten meta-analytic calculations performed on the material, which included various types of literature and approaches from different countries and groups, yielded consistent, common threads.
Avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought — resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo.
The terror management feature of conservatism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views.
Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism — an endorsement of inequality, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid, and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South S.C.).
Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said.
Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form.
While most people resist change, Glaser said, liberals appear to have a higher tolerance for change than conservatives.
As for conservatives’ penchant for accepting inequality, one contemporary example is liberals’ general endorsement of extending rights and liberties to disadvantaged minorities such as gays and
lesbians, compared to conservatives’ opposing position.
The researchers said that conservative ideologies, like virtually all belief systems, develop in part because they satisfy some psychological needs, but that “does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled.”
They also stressed that their findings are not judgmental.
Although they concluded that conservatives are less “integratively complex” than others, “it doesn’t mean that they’re simple-minded.”
Conservatives don’t feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions.
“They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm,” Glaser said.
He pointed as an example to a 2001 trip to Italy, where President George W. Bush when asked to defend certain policies, told assembled world leaders, “I know what I believe, and I believe what I believe is right.”
And in 2002, Bush told a British reporter, “Look, my job isn’t to nuance.” Excerpted from a piece by Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations
TYRANNY IS NO LESS ADEPT THAN VIRTUE.
The Republican Party has chosen to deny social, ecological, cultural, religious, and economic realities which are unavoidably complicated, complex, diverse, ironic, and paradoxical. Instead they have chosen to make their own simplistic, ideological, and chauvinistic fantasy world that has little affinity for law, science, a free and independent press, fairness, true security, ecological sustainability, and the accountability that is requisite for genuine democracy. — David W. Orr (from “The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party”)