Researchers help define what makes a political conservative

[Cadence]

BERKELEY – Politically conservative agendas may range from supporting the Vietnam War to upholding traditional moral and religious values to opposing welfare. But are there consistent underlying motivations?

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

Fear and aggression

Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

Uncertainty avoidance

Need for cognitive closure

Terror management
"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin

snip
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml

[NoodleBoy]

1. Frank Sulloway rocks.

damnit... I need to get Born to Rebel. It'll look great between my copies of Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Borderlands of Science.

[msgadget]

2. Check out this one too

A linguistics professor examines the RNC acceptance speech:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/09/03_lakoff_gop4.shtml

Here's a clip:

He then presented his "opportunity society" program, based on strict-father conservative values. Just as good children must learn discipline both to be moral and to be prosperous, so good citizens — the ones with discipline — can become prosperous by pursuing their self-interest if the opportunity is there. For conservatives, this means getting government out of the way — providing "pathways," not programs.

Freedom was the thread linking his domestic policies to his foreign policy. In domestic matters, it means freedom from the United States government.

George Bush: I am running with a compassionate conservative philosophy: that government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives.

In all these proposals, we seek to provide not just a government program, but a path — a path to greater opportunity, more freedom, and more control over your own life.

We must strengthen Social Security by allowing younger workers to save some of their taxes in a personal account nest egg you can call your own, and government can never take away.

Conservatives have long sought to destroy Social Security and Medicare, for two reasons: First, from their moral perspective, all social programs remove the need for discipline and create dependency. Since discipline is seen as the basis of all morality, all such programs are immoral. Second, there is a business motive. Businesses can make more money if they can get their hands on all the Medicare and Social Security money as investments in them, not in the people whose health and future are insured. The conservative solution is to privatize both programs, creating "personal accounts." More freedom.

[George_S]

3. a tolerance for inequality

So they are tolerant after all. Good to know.