John Jost, leading author of the Berkeley study, has emailed me his reply to Prof. Lindgren’s post showing that conservatives in the community at large are happier than Leftists. A little birdie tells me that Prof. Lindgren now has a blockbuster demolition of the whole Berkeley study in the offing. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, one of my correspondents expresses well a point that I have often made over the years in my comments about the research on which psychologists base their “knowledge” of conservatism:
Here's a point that most of the critics of the study haven't even mentioned. Take a look at the studies on which this meta analysis is based: The overwhelming majority consist of analyses of college students in the US and other countries. Now I have nothing against college students, I was one once myself many eons ago, but is there anyone in the entire world, other than idiotic psychology professors, who believes that you can understand the essence of a political philosophy or the values and beliefs of the the members of a political philosophy by quizzing college students?
I have just posted here (or here) an article I had published over 30 years ago about the main measure of conservatism relied on by the Berkeley authors. My research showed that the questionnaire concerned was basically inapplicable to general population groups. In other words, what psychologists call conservatism among their students is different from conservatism in the community at large. Yet another finding that the Berkeley group “overlooked”!
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