There’s been a lot of laughing and snorting lately directed at a Berkeley study that purports to identify the personality traits that lead to political conservatism. Most of the response, such as from Telford, Josh Claybourn, or Julian Sanchez, has been to call it too silly to argue against. Jonah Goldberg in NRO makes an attempt, but his response amounts to, “Liberals are too, at least as much,” which he supports entirely with anecdotal evidence.

Goldberg has actually read the study (PDF file), which is a considerable improvement on the press release, which seems to be going out of its way to be condescending and provocative. An argument about the study between two actual psychologists appears here and here; Brett Marston also has a good response to Goldberg’s piece.

I looked over the study but it’s hard for me to form an opinion about it. It’s a meta-analysis — a study of previous studies — so it doesn’t go through the usual explanations of exactly who was studied, who the control group was, the measuring tools etc. But it does seem to me that a lot of the laughter and outrage coming from the rightward blogosphere comes from a couple of basic misconceptions about psychology, which I’ve run into more than once.

First of all, a lot of conservatives seem to be saying, “They think I’m sick in the head!” Goldberg asserts, “I have no doubt there is no shortage of psychological studies of murderers, rapists, people who think they’re Napoleon, and people who think Carrot Top is funny. But I suspect there’s very little data on people who like to have cereal and orange juice in the morning. Why? Because the former category of people are considered abnormal.” He goes on to darkly speculate that this is the first step to medicating all the righties.

But actually, psychologists study “normal” people all the time. When I was a psych student I took only one course in abnormal psychology — the others were called things like Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Personality (which this study would fall under). This misconception arises, I think, from the confusion of psychology with psychotherapy. Obviously therapists are about treating illness, but psychologists are trying to get a more general understanding of how the mind works. Many studies I’ve seen — relating to things like how memories are formed and retrieved, how children learn to reason, what influences our buying decisions, and so on — have nothing to do with mental illness.

The psychological language here doesn’t help matters — when people hear themselves described as having a “need” for this or that, it sounds like they’re being diagnosed. But believe me, psychologists talk about everybody like that. In fact, I think the language is a lot of the problem here. Another common reaction to a study saying you have more of trait X than the average is to think it’s saying you have too much of trait X. But who’s saying what the correct amount is? If you reword some of these traits a bit, they don’t sound that different from what conservatives say about themselves.

For instance: are conservatives resistant to change? Goldberg points out that this is situational — which in fact the authors of the study point out too, saying their results might be different if they had results from Communist countries. But the concept of conservatism as a defense of tradition hardly seems controversial to me. The founding manifesto of Goldberg’s magazine had that famous line about standing athwart history crying, “Stop!” As Brett points out, when conservatives want change, it’s usually a change back to the way things were before.

Or take “dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity.” Sounds bad, but especially since 9/11, I’ve been hearing a lot of conservatives favorably contrast their own moral clarity with the murky moral relativism of the left. Conservatives are willing to use words like good and evil, to call Islamo-fascism what it is, etc. In other words, if you think there’s too much ambiguity floating around, intolerance of it isn’t a bad thing.

Even the most negative-sounding trait, “fear and aggression,” depends on context. There’s nothing wrong with fear if you have something to be afraid of, and aggression can be justified under certain conditions. Someone who had none of either would be really weird, and probably dead. Back when I was at the Easter service at All Saints, listening to the priest talking about how Saddam Hussein could be dealt with by international law, I wondered if maybe a little more fear wasn’t in order.

Like I said, I’m not defending the study per se, I’m just warning against flying off the handle here. Psychologists have their own lingo, and it sounds goofy to outsiders. So do all disciplines. (Theology certainly does. I remember telling Telford that I don’t know what “creaturely freedom” is, but it would be a great name for a rock band.)

By the way, Dormouse Dreaming, one of the psychologists I linked above, also has a good post about that survey of Germans asking if they thought Bush could have been behind the 9/11 attacks. Those survey questions asking, “Is it possible that …” are one of my peeves, because it all depends on your definition of “possible.” What kind of probability does that mean? 70%? 50%? One-half of 1%? But of course, the results get translated to saying those people believe that absolutely …

Florida will restore the voting rights of 125,000 felons.

I have to say, this business of permanently depriving convicts of the vote always bugged the crap out of me. If a law is unjust, or if the law is unjustly administered, disenfranchising the people most affected by it would be a great way to keep that from ever changing. I suppose people are worried about the converse: felons might vote themselves treatment that’s too lenient. But really, if lawbreakers should reach that critical a mass, it suggests that the social consensus isn’t behind certain laws anyway. Think Prohibition, or those recently overturned sodomy statutes.