MORE CRAP PSYCHOLOGY

Given the compulsive Leftism that permeates the social sciences, it is not surprising that the standards of scholarship in social science writing are normally so slight as to require a metaphorical microscope to find them. For many years I regularly wrote formal critiques of the most egregious examples of bad scholarship in psychology and sociology and I usually got them published in the academic journals concerned. It was however a great waste of time -- as both facts and reason are noted in the social sciences only insofar as they accord with Leftist prejudices. I think I should however keep the pot boiling to some extent so I do from time to time note on this blog and elsewhere how absurd various current claims from psychology are -- even if I can no longer be bothered to do a full formal critique of the particular article concerned. So I am going to make a few comments today on: Hastings, B.M. & Schaffer, B.A. (2005) "Authoritarianism and sociopolitical attitudes in response to threats of terror". Psychological Reports, 97, 623-630. It is fairly typical of the rubbish that psychologists produce in the guise of research so a critique of it might serve as a useful proxy for critiques of many similar such articles.

As is the usual fashion among psychologists, the authors make no attempt to sample any known population and proceed to base broad conclusions about human psychological processes on the answers to questionnaires given by 61 women and 10 men drawn from various classes at the small Mt. Aloysius College in Pennsylvania. The results are therefore of totally unknown generalizability. For the sake of the exercise, however, let us assume that there is some generalizability to their results and ask how those results were obtained.

What they did was to correlate several "scales" (standard collections of questions) with one another. They found that scales allegedly measuring Right-wing authoritarianism (the RWA scale), Democratic Values and Militarism tended to correlate with one another. They seem to think that this constitutes proof that conservative "authoritarians" are anti-democratic and militaristic. What a laugh! I won't bother reproducing any of the items of the three scales here but all three scales include many statements that would normally and uncontroversially be taken as indicating conservatism. So all that they have shown is in fact that people are consistent in their conservatism. People who express conservative views on one "scale" also tend to express conservative views on all three scales. Big deal! It is what scientists call an "artifactual" (researcher-induced) finding. I have been noting that sort of charade among psychologists for many years (see e.g. here).

The other thing they found, if I read it aright, is that people got more "authoritarian" (Read: "conservative") when they felt threatened. That is however just a regurgitation of the old New York adage: "A conservative is a liberal who was mugged last night". And everybody knows how conservative the armed forces are. As a former Army man myself, it has never surprised me (but has always pleased me) how many supportive emails I get with "mil" at the end of the sender's email address. So even if we take the Hastings & Schaffer results far more seriously than we should, we find that their final conclusion is little more than a commonplace. What would have been interesting is if they had explored WHY encounters with reality make people more conservative -- but that enquiry would have led them in very uncomfortable directions, I fancy.

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ELSEWHERE

Interesting that the old Nazi pix that I put up on Friday via Calvin College would not come down for most of the day. Being a cautious old conservative, of course, I had foreseen that and gave backup links to where you could find the same pix on one of my own sites. What I had foreseen was that the links to the Calvin College site might overload their bandwidth but I think there was in fact more to it than that. I put the pix up on four different blogspot sites and and none of the four would bring in the pix from Calvin college. Being a skeptical old devil, however, I also posted the same links on three non-blogspot sites and the pix there always came down promptly over the same period. So I suspect that someone at Calvin College got a bit irked at anybody actually looking at what they have in their archive and blocked all blogspot sites from accessing the pix. Why am I not surprised?

No Pasaran linked to my comments about the Nazi propaganda posters but wisely used my site as source for the pic they used rather than relying on Calvin College.

Proof of the power of the individual: "Political friends and many former foes paid tribute yesterday to Lady Thatcher, the former Conservative Prime Minister, who celebrates her 80th birthday today. Michael Howard, the outgoing Tory leader, placed her alongside Winston Churchill in the gallery of national leaders".

French bungling: "Much has been said about the French social and economic model. There are those who would defend it to the last as the only hope against the deadly forces of globalisation, and those who want it buried as soon as possible, precisely so France can benefit from globalisation. Whichever camp you're in, the case of the state-owned Corsican ferry company SNCM, over whose fate the centre-right government and a couple of radical trade unions are currently scrapping, provides a textbook example of where the model can go catastrophically wrong.... The current crisis is the direct result of an exceptionally well-developed system of government protection that has manifestly had its day, and has been waiting to happen for more than 30 years - ever since a rival, commercial and efficiently run company, Corsica Ferries, appeared on the scene. Flying the Italian flag, which is far less onerous for shipping companies than the French, and employing mainly foreign sailors, Corsica Ferries makes good money. The SNCM, however, forced by its state-owned status to fly the French flag and employ unionised and militant French and Corsican sailors under a very generous French social regime, has been racking up ever-widening losses for years".

Neal Boortz has an excellent fisking of an attempt by a twisted Leftist academic to blame the recent chaotic events in New Orleans on middle America. One excerpt: "Obviously Engle has a problem with achievement. In a word, she harbors great resentment toward those who have gone the extra mile to achieve success and wealth. Somehow she has convinced herself that the problems that afflicted the poor in New Orleans were due to the existence of gated communities and the presence of the evil rich. If there had been no wealthy neighborhoods in New Orleans the poor, somehow, wouldn't have suffered. Engle also finds great fault with the idea that people would go to extra lengths to protect themselves from crime. How hideously insensitive of the rich! How very un-American! No doubt were we to locate Ms. Engle's automobile wherever it is parked while she is out there community-building, we would find it to be unlocked; ditto for her home. After all, Engle certainly wouldn't want to do anything to protect herself from crime, would she? That would be a certain indicator of a complete lack of moral goodness on her part"

There are some new posts from Chris Brand here with a lot of news from Britain that I hadn't heard -- Tony Blair being investigated for "racism", for instance. I have said it before but I think that U.K. must now stand for the "Unhinged Kingdom"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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