We all know, because we're reminded constantly, that science trumps... science is the end-all to any debate, science has, to put it in a way that should communicate clearly, become God.
So we can't be surprised when we find out that God has spoken and God says that conservative perspectives are evidence for serious psychosis:
A few weeks ago, I came across a reference to an unpublished conference paper, with the intriguing title, “Does endorsement of hierarchy make you evil? SDO and psychopathy.”
So I contacted the lead author, Marc Wilson, a New Zealand psychologist at Victoria University of
First, a bit of background. Psychopathy — once thought to be an all-or-nothing condition — is now understood in a dimensional fashion (more or less) and is measured by instruments such asThe Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. While our understanding of psychopathy first developed largely from studying criminal populations, Hare himself has said, “I always said that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock exchange,” so it’s fairly straightforward to measure and compare psychopathic tendencies and SDO. And that’s just what Wilson has done.Wellington, to ask him about his research.
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“Therefore, it makes sense that environments that promote social hierarchies will also be fertile breeding grounds for individual dominance, and vice versa,” he continued. Digging down a bit into specifics was quite illuminating.
“By ‘environments’ I can imagine a few that are good candidates — financial markets for example,” Wilson said. “Indeed, some of my other work shows that people who work in commerce focused on hierarchy-enhancing wealth consolidation also tend to be more social dominant (an old finding) but also more psychopathic — indeed, people who study commerce at university are not only more psychopathic than people in other fields of study but less psychopathic commerce students are more likely to switch majors to more hierarchy-attenuating disciplines, while more psychopathic arts students (for example) are more likely to switch to commerce degrees.”
Crazy artists? Try crazy businessmen. Crazy stock-traders. That’s what Wilson’s research shows you’re far more likely to find. Not the wild-eyed kind of crazy we’ve all been led to expect, but the button-down, conservative kind we heard in the Donald Sterling tape — or that we can hear on Limbaugh’s radio show, or see on Fox News any day of the week.
These people are serious. Make no mistake about it.
Robert Tracinski over at The Federalist breaks it all down for us:
So I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and along comes Paul Rosenberg in Salon to sling together a set of dubious studies and claim that there is a “link” between conservatism and psychopathy. The link primarily consists of measurements of “social dominance orientation.” And how is this measured? By giving people questionnaires asking them to choose between oppositions like this one: “Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups,” versus “Group equality should be our ideal.” Can you see the bias here? In effect, the choices are to back affirmative action—”group equality” as the organizing principle of society, as opposed to mere legal equality—or embrace racism. It’s easy to arrive at the result that the right is psychopathic when you’ve programmed that assumption into your experiment from the beginning.
The root error, though, is this: “Psychopathy—once thought to be an all-or-nothing condition—is now understood in a dimensional fashion,” i.e., as a grab bag of superficial characteristics possessed by everyone in some degree or another.
Which is precisely how we’ve gotten this absurd extension of the label “psychopath” onto anyone you don’t like. It’s just another example of how the “data-driven” party of science loves to use sloppy, half-understood science to confirm their own prejudices.
He goes on to call the Salon piece's author a political hack.
My hope is that this is obvious to even the most casual of readers.
My suspicion though is that like global warming, a scientific consensus will be formed, one around the premise that conservatives are inherently bat guano crazy.
You don't think they'll go there?
Then maybe you are bat guano crazy.
