August 14, 2003
BERKELEY STUDY INCONCLUSIVE
Study of Bush's psyche touches a nerve (Guardian, 8/13/2003)A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".
As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction....
The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.
"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.
One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction....
George Will, a Washington Post columnist who has long suffered from ingrained conservatism, noted, tartly: "The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of our psychological needs and neuroses."
Ooh, "ingrained conservatism," sounds painful. Does it have something to do with the feet?
But isn't Professor Glaser's belief that there are no WMD in Iraq a trifle premature? Presumably he jumped to this conclusion because he is a conservative. On the other hand, it seems the discovery of WMD would change the paper's conclusions, by showing that it was the liberals who "arrived at premature conclusions, and imposed simplistic cliches and stereotypes." Given that psychology is an empirical science, I imagine the authors will be quick to publish a revision in that case. David Kay, get on with it: your work is critical to the advance of psychological science!