Monday, October 20, 2003

REPORT FROM INDIA

My latest academic upload (see here or here) is a report of some research carried out in India among a large group of Indian village farmers. My Indian co-author and I looked at the claim that third-world farmers fail to modernize and improve their output because of "resistance to change". We found that attitude to change had nothing to do with it. It was the more intelligent and more highly motivated farmers who modernized and prospered. That naughty old IQ that the Leftists hate was at work again! How inconvenient that all men are unequal!

We know that Leftists also see "resistance to change" as what underlies conservatism -- even though James Lindgren shows from the public opinion poll data that it clearly is not. Leftists themselves are so hungry for change that they tend to see resistance to change under every bed, as it were. They cannot grasp that change as such it is just not a big issue for most people.

I might also note the unusually high quality of the data gathered by my Sikh collaborator in the Indian farmer study. He not only went out and interviewed real live Indian farmers but he sampled carefully those he interviewed and ended up doing a total of 300 interviews -- each of which took 4 hours! I cannot think of a single piece of Western research that was as thoroughly done. Handing out a bunch of questionnaires to your students (or playing tricks on your students) is the usual “research” method of Western psychologists.

It tends to show how shameful it is that research reported in Indian social science journals is almost universally ignored by allegedly "anti-racist" Western psychologists. Deeds speak louder than words! I myself do cite Indian sources. I cited five in the Indian farmer study alone. I can be slightly understanding that American and British psychologists fail to cite relevant sources in German but the Indians even go to the trouble of reporting their findings in English and still get ignored!

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