TASK-ORIENTATION -- AN UNEXPECTEDLY IMPORTANT PHENOMENON

I have often pointed out in this blog how the Leftist leanings of psychologists make them unscholarly and unscientific in the “research” that they do (e.g. here and here and here). The carelessness is not only evident when they write on politics, however. My latest academic upload (here or here) is about an issue in personnel psychology and I was able to explode some ludicrous claims there too.

Perhaps most amusingly, my study also showed that a previously unsuspected variable -- “task-orientation” -- was a good predictor of political party preference. Leftist psychologists have spent years searching for non-obvious predictors of vote (e.g. here) without success. The meaning of my finding is that people who want to get the job done rather than laze about tend to vote conservative. Not so surprising when you think about it!

And another thing Leftist psychologists have vainly been trying to find for decades (e.g. here) is a scale (set of questions) that will predict authoritarian personality (domineering, bossy behaviour). It turns out that task-orientation was a good predictor of that too! In other words, people who push others around are often doing so not for its own sake but for a good reason -- trying to make something happen. I published those findings 30 years ago but their failure to confirm Leftist prejudices has ensured that they have subsequently been totally ignored -- despite my doing in one article two things that have now been the holy grail of political psychology for over 50 years.

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