A PATHETIC FIGHTBACK

As far as I can tell, there is only one psychologist who has replied to my criticisms of the Berkeley study of conservatism. And what an amusing job he does of it! He says that the rejection by Political Psychology of my paper on Leftist authoritarianism "really got him angry". How does he know it got me angry? What proof does he have? He has none at all. But proof is of course irrelevant to Leftists. They KNOW. They think that their simplistic theories tell them all that they need to know about the world and see the seeking of facts as an inconvenience. In actual fact, I was rather pleased by the rejection. I saw it as a useful illustration of the closed-mindedness of contemporary academic psychologists! And publication on paper is a trivial matter in the era of the internet anyway.

My critic's own closed-mindedness is shown by the fact that he seems to consider that only an acceptance of existing authority can make you authoritarian. That Leftists oppose existing authorities only in the hope of replacing them by much more powerful authorities (e.g. replacing the authority of the democratic State by the vastly greater authority of the totalitarian State) is not apparently authoritarian in his book.

I could go on to fisk him at length but I doubt that there is much point in it. So I will mention just one more point. The claims about the "dogmatism" of conservatives in the Berkeley paper rely almost entirely on Milton Rokeach’s "D" questionnaire. I pointed out, however, that this questionnaire offers a most dubious index of dogmatism. In reply, my critic simply says that the "D" questionnaire is "doing fine". Any proof of that? No. You are expected to take his word for it: Very authoritarian. Let me therefore spell out what he thinks "doing fine" amounts to:

If people agree with a statement but also agree with its opposite, what does that tell you about the statement concerned? Does it not tell you that the statement concerned is so vague and ambiguous as to be essentially meaningless? Yet the "D" questionnaire consists entirely of such statements! Agreeing with a set of vague and ambiguous statements makes you dogmatic? I would have thought it made you tolerant and agreeable! Rokeach and the Berkeley group have clearly got the whole thing back to front. Conservatives DO tend to agree with statements in the "D" questionnaire but I don't think that shows them as being dogmatic. I think it shows quite the opposite. It shows how easygoing they are. So you see what sort of "science" we are dealing with in this affair. It is not even in the same ballcourt as science.

For some other examples of the absurdities that pass for science among psychologists see here or here or here

I have noted previously how rich it is for Leftist psychologists to accuse conservatives of "motivated" (unrealistic) and simplistic thinking when a major complaint that conservatives have always had about Leftists is their refusal to acknowledge anything that did not suit them -- such as the Soviet horrors. For those interested in a fuller demonstration of how simplistic ("intolerant of ambiguity") most academic psychologists themselves are, my article here spells it all out in academic terms.

******************************