The Jost article claims that conservatives are angry and fearful and it builds on a literature that claims that conservatives are unhappy. I find this strange, given the decades of superb data showing the opposite. In the NORC General Social Survey (a standard social science database, second only to the U.S. Census in use by U.S. sociologists), the GSS asks the standard survey question about happiness in general. In the 1998-2002 GSS, extreme conservatives are much more likely to report being "very happy" than extreme liberals--47.1% to 31.6%. Earlier years show a similar pattern.We may conclude, with Chris Lawrence, that...
Earlier General Social Surveys found that conservatives were more satisfied with their health, their friendships, their family life, and the city or place they live--all in all, a remarkably consistent picture.
Another claim in the Jost paper is that conservativism is driven by anger and fear. Again, their claims conflict with some of the highest quality data available. In the 1996 GSS, questions were asked about anger and fearfulness. Extreme conservatives were much less likely to report being mad at someone every day in the last week--7.3% to 24.2% for extreme liberals. Extreme conservatives were also less likely to report being fearful in the last week--32.5% to 56.3% for extreme liberals. In other words, a staggering one-quarter of extreme liberals report being mad at someone EVERY DAY and most extreme liberals report being fearful at least once a week.
One hopes, not knowing the journal hierarchy in psychology, that the Psychological Bulletin is the intellectual equivalent of toilet paper among the APA�s journals, but somehow I doubt that. The editor and reviewers who allowed this garbage to be published ought to be embarrassed.Somewhere Professor Lindgren of Northwestern points out that a quick look at the biggest, most carefuly collected, and most standard dataset, the General Social Survey, has opposite results, and is not even mentioned in the article.
Today I learned something else. The article is a "meta- analysis", meaning that it
really is just an article surveying other people's original research and then using
somewhat dubious (but not altogether worthless) statistical analysis to try to combine
data from disparate studies, and is a full 37 pages long-- which in economics would
mean that the editors of the journal in which it was published really thought it was
valuable. Yet as Byron
York reports, it seems the authors got $1.2 million from the government for this.
Congressional investigators have found that the study was financed by $1.2 million in
federal funds. According to the House Republican Study Committee, Kruglanski received
National Institute of Mental Health grants totaling $976,762, Glaser received National
Institute of Mental Health grants totaling $48,464, and Jost and Kruglanski together
received an estimated $213,800 from the National Science Foundation.
The study, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," was written by John
T. Jost, a professor at Stanford University, Jack Glaser and Frank J. Sulloway,
professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and Arie W. Kruglanski, a
professor at the University of Maryland. It was published in the American Psychological
Association's Psychological Bulletin.
It could be that York is distorting the situation, and the money was grants to the
researchers, not to the particular project, generating other work that is more valuable.
But I am struck by the size of the Kruglanski grant (is that why he is a co-author?). In
economics, we don't get grants that size for doing survey papers. We ought to start
looking out for these medical research grants on non-medical topics!
[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.08.01b.htm ]
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