The Scandal of the Leftist Mind

As a close follow-on to our discussion of politically motivated social science as it pertains to gun control in "When Health Professionals Advise", I offer for your contemplation another object lesson why the social sciences are so polluted by ideology as to be worse than useless. In Psychology Today, Jay Dixit writes:

We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we're easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect.

Cinnamon Stillwell never thought she'd be the founder of a political organization. She certainly never expected to start a group for conservatives, most of whom became conservatives on the same day—September 11, 2001. She organized the group, the 911 Neocons, as a haven for people like her—"former lefties" who did political 180s after 9/11.

Stillwell, now a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, had been a liberal her whole life, writing off all Republicans as "ignorant, intolerant yahoos." Yet on 9/11, everything changed for her, as it did for so many. In the days after the attacks, the world seemed "topsy-turvy." On the political left, she wrote, "There was little sympathy for the victims," and it seemed to her that progressives were "consumed with hatred for this country" and had "extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists."

The article purports to explain how an event like 9/11can sway the political views of liberals by appealing to irrational factors like fear over rational, objective analysis. Here Dixit is equating the conservative position with ideology, whereas the liberal position is the non-ideological, rational position. Beside the outright hubris of such a position is the irony that the conversion of a liberal like Stillwell shows the exact opposite, that 9//11 acted as a shock to the system of many ideological liberals, making them less ideological and more open to the possibility that the opposing viewpoint had merit.

Dixit quoted from several studies of conservative psychology in the article, one of which was a paper by John T. Jost, who is an Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University, titled "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition" (2003). Shawn Smith, a practicing psychologist in the Denver area and the proprietor of the Iron Shrink blog, dissects the shabby methodology of this study here. I won't reproduce it here, but Smith convincingly demonstrates how flawed and biased this study is. It's worth a read.

This kind of "research" is even more dangerous than the single issue oriented research that I discussed with regard to gun control because it seeks not to delegitimize just a single policy position but to label an entire political orientation as a mental disorder. But these studies seem to go unchallenged by anyone in the popular press, and act as fodder for leftists like Dixit, whose article is so breathtakingly and transparently biased as to almost be the work of a parodist. There is no need for any expertise in statistical analysis or research study design to pick apart Dixit's nonsense, run of the mill common sense will do. Here are some examples:

We tend to believe our political views have evolved by a process of rational thought, as we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. But the truth is more complicated. Our political preferences are equally the result of factors we're not aware of—such as how educated we are, how scary the world seems at a given moment, and personality traits that are first apparent in early childhood. Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear. How the United States should confront the threat of terrorism remains a subject of endless political debate. But Americans' response to threats of attack is now more clear-cut than ever. The fear of death alone is surprisingly effective in shaping our political decisions—more powerful, often, than thought itself.

This is the main theme that Dixit and the Left are using to deligitimize the conservative mindset, it's reliance on fear. But when did fear become a dysfunctional emotion? Of course we fear death! Everyone fears death, and pain, and want, and disorder and danger. Only a sheltered innocent could imagine that he takes no stock of fear when he formulates his worldview. Fear is our early warning system, it was developed through millenia of evolutionary trial and error to tell us how to stay alive. There is untold wisdom embodied in our fears. The idea that rational thought can only occur in an emotional vacuum is incredibly naiive.

In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren't even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

Sure, pick on the insecure kids! What this study ignores is that there is a ideological progression in most people's lives from youthful liberalism to mature moderation or conservatism. Dixit doesn't state it so obviously, but there is an implicit value judgment that feeling insecure is somehow dysfunctional or illegitimate. Yet there is no effort to determine if these young conservative's life experiences warrant their feelings of insecurity. Or maybe these young people are just more sensitive and perceptive than the others. As any adult past the age of 35 knows, youth is a time or startling ignorance and false confidence. It is amazing that as many people survive to adulthood that do.

We can't see the Left's most cherished value any more clearly than it is displayed here. The Left is the ideology of youthful optimism and innocence. It is the ideology of Peter Pan. The Left's prescription for mental health is to deny that anyone ever needs to grow out of this phase.

If we are so suggestible that thoughts of death make us uncomfortable defaming the American flag and cause us to sit farther away from foreigners, is there any way we can overcome our easily manipulated fears and become the informed and rational thinkers democracy demands?

To test this, Solomon and his colleagues prompted two groups to think about death and then give opinions about a pro-American author and an anti-American one. As expected, the group that thought about death was more pro-American than the other. But the second time, one group was asked to make gut-level decisions about the two authors, while the other group was asked to consider carefully and be as rational as possible. The results were astonishing. In the rational group, the effects of mortality salience were entirely eliminated. Asking people to be rational was enough to neutralize the effects of reminders of death. Preliminary research shows that reminding people that as human beings, the things we have in common eclipse our differences—what psychologists call a "common humanity prime"—has the same effect.

"People have two modes of thought," concludes Solomon. "There's the intuitive gut-level mode, which is what most of us are in most of the time. And then there's a rational analytic mode, which takes effort and attention."

The solution, then, is remarkably simple. The effects of psychological terror on political decision making can be eliminated just by asking people to think rationally. Simply reminding us to use our heads, it turns out, can be enough to make us do it.

This is really rich stuff. Yes, the huge dropoff in flag-burnings after 9/11 is definitely cause for concern. All healthy societies produce large numbers of people who loathe their own country. Afraid to sit next to foreigners? Where does he get this stuff?

So if we want working people to make rational political decisions, we should ask them not to think about losing their jobs or being without healthcare. Those Republican fearmongers are always filling people with the fear of poverty. Oh, wait! It's the Democrats who do that. The Left is motivated by just as much fear as the Right. They fear economic independence, they fear disparities in wealth, they fear social responsibility for sexual activity, they fear making tough foreign policy decisions, and they fear old age and death. Everyone fears death. To be more succinct, they fear the loss of innocence. They won't grow up.

Update 01/21/07: John Jay Ray at Dissecting Leftism concurs.

Update 01/22/07: Cinnamon Stilwell, who was interviewed for the article, has a roundup of internet reactions to it, including a mention of the Daily Duck.