Tag: Conservatism

Do Religion, Racism, Conservatism, and Low I.Q. Go Hand in Hand?

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Conservatism, conservatives, Intelligence, Low I.Q.

Do Religion, Racism, Conservatism, and Low I.Q. Go Hand in Hand?

Lower cognitive abilities predict greater prejudice through right-wing ideology.
Post published by Goal Auzeen Saedi Ph.D.

This morning as I logged onto Facebook, I came upon this image. Having followed the Boston marathon and MIT shooting coverage initially, I lost some interest when it came down to the “hunt.” As much as justice matters to me, so does tact and class, and the sensationalism of manhunts always leaves me uncomfortable. I also knew it would be a matter of time before the political rhetoric would change from the victims and wounded to the demographic factors of the suspects—namely race and religion. And alas, it has.

However, what struck me most about this image posted above was the Facebook page it came from, “Too Informed to Vote Republican.” I wondered about this, recalling an old journal article I’d come across when studying anti-Islamic attitudes post 9/11. The paper referenced a correlation between conservatism and low intelligence. Uncertain of its origin, I located a thought-provoking article published in one of psychology’s top journals, Psychological Science, which in essence confirms this.

Hodson and Busseri (2012) found in a correlational study that lower intelligence in childhood is predictive of greater racism in adulthood, with this effect being mediated (partially explained) through conservative ideology. They also found poor abstract reasoning skills were related to homophobic attitudes which was mediated through authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact.

What this study and those before it suggest is not necessarily that all liberals are geniuses and all conservatives are ignorant. Rather, it makes conclusions based off of averages of groups. The idea is that for those who lack a cognitive ability to grasp complexities of our world, strict-right wing ideologies may be more appealing. Dr. Brian Nosek explained it for the Huffington Post (link is external)as follows, “ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simple solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies.” For an excellent continuation of this discussion and past studies, please see this article from LiveScience (link is external).

Further, studies have indicated an automatic association between aggression, America, and the news. A study conducted by researchers at Cornell and The Hebrew University (Ferguson & Hassin, 2007) indicated, “American news watchers who were subtly or nonconsciously primed with American cues exhibited greater accessibility of aggression and war constructs in memory, judged an ambiguously aggressive person in a more aggressive and negative manner, and acted in a relatively more aggressive manner toward an experimenter following a mild provocation, compared with news watchers who were not primed” (p. 1642). American “cues” refers to factors such as images of the American flag or words such as “patriot.” Interestingly, this study showed this effect to be independent of political affiliation, but suggested a disturbing notion that America is implicitly associated with aggression for news watchers.

Taken together, what do these studies suggest? Excessive exposure to news coverage could be toxic as is avoidance of open-minded attitudes and ideals.  Perhaps turn off the television and pick up a book?  Ideally one that exposes you to differing worldviews.

*Please note comments that are offensive, defamatory, discriminatory, racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise inappropriate will be automatically removed by the author’s discretion.

References

Furguson, M.J. & Hassin, R.R. (2007). On the automatic association between American and      aggression for news watchers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1632-1647.

Hodson, G. & Busseri, M.A. (2012). Bright minds and dark attitudes: Lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice through right-wing ideology and low intergroup contact. Psychological Science, 23, 187-195.

BEHIND THE DICTATORS

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Behind The Dictators, Catholic Action, Catholic Dictators, Catholic Fascism, Nazism

BEHIND THE DICTATORS

Insightful, provides a clue to the seminal inspiration, real ideological and political force behind the rise of the Christo-fascist, American Religious Right!

http://archive.org/stream/BehindTheDictators#page/n9/mode/2up

Behind the Dictators

http://archive.org/details/BehindTheDictators

Fascism and Nazism as the political arms of Right Wing Catholicism

 

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God Psychotics: “God Sent The Shooter”

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in God Hates Fags, God kills kids, God Psychotics, Religious Cretins, Religious Right, Westboro

According to the Ultra-conservative, Right Wing Christians from the Westboro Church Group, god ordered the slaughter of innocent children in Connecticut!

A disturbingly poisonous example of how religion destroys the human intellect and natural human sense of empathy.

As we reported recently, the superstitious belief in a god that is easily offended and the slaughter of little children is a frequent theme in the bible.

From the Westboro site:-

“God sent the shooter to Newtown, CT. “Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?” Amos 3:6. He is punishing you for your sins against Him (e.g., fag marriage).”

 

Westboro

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Is the Right-Wing Psyche Allergic to Reality? A New Study Shows Conservatives Ignore Facts More Than Liberals

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Right Wing, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Wingnuts

Is the Right-Wing Psyche Allergic to Reality? A New Study Shows Conservatives Ignore Facts More Than Liberals
More evidence that conservatives tilted their views of the facts to favor their moral convictions more than liberals did, on every single issue.

This story was originally published at Salon.

Last week, the country convulsed with outrage over Missouri Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s false suggestion that women who are raped have a special bodily defense mechanism against getting pregnant. Akin’s claim stood out due to its highly offensive nature, but it’s reminiscent of any number of other parallel cases in which conservative Christians have cited dubious “facts” to help rationalize their moral convictions. Take the twin assertions that having an abortion causes breast cancer or mental disorders, for instance. Or the denial of human evolution. Or false claims that same-sex parenting hurts kids. Or that you can choose whether to be gay, and undergo therapy to reverse that choice. The ludicrous assertion that women who are raped have a physiological defense mechanism against pregnancy is just part of a long litany of other falsehoods in the Christian right’s moral and emotional war against science.

In fact, even as Akin reaped a whirlwind of disdain and disgust, a new scientific paper has appeared with uncanny timing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, underscoring what is actually happening when people contort facts to justify their deep seated beliefs or moral systems. Perhaps most strikingly, one punch line of the new research is that political conservatives, like Akin, appear to do this significantly more than political liberals.

In recent years, the field of moral psychology has been strongly influenced by a theory known as “moral intuitionism,” which has been championed by the University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Dealing a blow to the notion of humans as primarily rational actors, Haidt instead postulates that our views of what is right and wrong are rooted in gut emotions, which fire rapidly when we encounter certain moral situations or dilemmas—responding far more quickly than our rational thoughts. Thus, we evaluate facts, arguments, and new information in a way that is subconsciously guided, ormotivated, by our prior moral emotions. What this means–in Haidt’s famed formulation–is that when it comes to evaluating facts that are relevant to our deep seated morals or beliefs, we don’t act like scientists. Rather, we act like lawyers, contorting the evidence to support our moral argument.

But are we all equally lawyerly? The new paper, by psychologists Brittany Liu and Peter Ditto of the University of California-Irvine, suggests that may not actually be the case.

In their study, Liu and Ditto asked over 1,500 people about their moral and factual views on four highly divisive political issues. Two of them–the death penalty and the forceful interrogation of terrorists using techniques like water-boarding–are ones where liberals tend to think the act in question is morally unacceptableeven if it actually yields benefits (for instance, deterring crime, or providing intelligence that can help prevent further terrorist strikes). The other two–providing information about condoms in the context of sex education, and embryonic stem cell research–are ones where conservatives tend to think the act in question is unacceptable even if it yields benefits (helping to prevent unwanted pregnancies, leading to cures for devastating diseases).

In the experiment, the subjects were first asked about their absolute moral beliefs: For instance, is the death penalty wrongeven if it deters others from committing crimes? But they were also asked about various factual aspects of each topic: Does the death penalty deter crime? Do condoms work to prevent pregnancy? Does embryonic stem cell research hold medical promise? And so on.

If you believe some act is absolutely wrong, period, you shouldn’t actually care about its costs and benefits. Those should be irrelevant to your moral judgment. Yet in analyzing the data, Liu and Ditto found a strong correlation, across all of the issues, between believing something is morally wrong in all case–such as the death penalty–and also believing that it has low benefits (e.g., doesn’t deter crime) or high costs (lots of innocent people getting executed). In other words, liberals and conservatives alike shaded their assessment of the facts so as to align them with their moral convictions–establishing what Liu and Ditto call a “moral coherence” between their ethical and factual views. Neither side was innocent when it came toconfusing “is” and “ought” (as moral philosophers might put it).

However, not everyone was equally susceptible to this behavior. Rather, the researchers found three risk factors, so to speak, that seem to worsen the standard human penchant for contorting the facts to one’s moral views. Two those were pretty unsurprising: Having a strong moral view about a topic makes one’s inclination towards “moral coherence” worse, as does knowing a lot about the subject (across studies, knowledge simply seems to make us better at maintaining and defending what we already believe). But the third risk factor is likely to prove quite controversial: political conservatism.

In the study, Liu and Ditto report, conservatives tilted their views of the facts to favor their moral convictions more than liberals did, on every single issue. And that was true whether it was a topic that liberals oppose (the death penalty) or that conservatives oppose (embryonic stem cell research). “Conservatives are doing this to a larger degree across four different issues,” Liu explained in an interview. “Including two that are leaning to the liberal side, not the conservative side.”

There is a longstanding (if controversial) body of research on liberal-conservative psychological differences that may provide an answer for why this occurs. Conservatives, Liu notes, score higher on a trait called the need for cognitive closure, which describes a feeling of discomfort with uncertainty and the need to hold a firm belief, a firm conviction, unwaveringly. Insofar as a need for closure pushes one to want to hold coherent, consistent beliefs–and makes one intolerant of ambiguity–it makes sense that wanting to achieve “moral coherence” between one’s factual and moral views would also go along with it. Conservatives, in this interpretation, would naturally have more conviction that the facts of the world, and their moral systems, are perfectly aligned. Liberals, in contrast, might be more conflicted–supportive of embryonic stem cell research, for instance, but nourishing doubts about whether the scientific promise we heard so much about a decade ago is being realized.

In documenting an apparent left-right difference in emotional reasoning about what is factually true, the new paper wades into a growing debate over what the Yale researcher Dan Kahan has labeled “ideological asymmetry.” This is the idea that one side of the political spectrum, more than the other, shows a form of biased or motivated assessment of facts–a view that Kahan rejects. Indeed, he recently ran a different study and found that liberals and conservatives were more symmetrical in their biases, albeit not on a live political issue.

The question of why some researchers find results seeming to support the left-right asymmetry hypothesis, even as others do not, remains unresolved. But the new paper by Liu and Ditto will surely sharpen it. Indeed, Kahan has already weighed in on the paper, acknowledging that it provides evidence in support of asymmetry, but observing that in his view, the evidence againstasymmetry from other research remains more weighty.

The upshot, for now, is that it’s hard to deny that all people engage in goal-directed reasoning, bending facts in favor of their moralities or belief systems. But–to butcher George Orwell–it may also be true that while all humans are biased by their prior beliefs and emotions, some humans are more biased than others.

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including “The Republican War on Science” (2005). His next book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality,” is due out in April.
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Like The American Religious Reich | Religious right in Egypt hoping for Islamic law

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Islamic Fascism, Islamic Power, Islamic Theocracy, Religious Reich, Religious Right, Sharia

Religious right in Egypt hoping for Islamic law

Hazem Salah abu Ismail’s blend of populism and ultraconservative Salafi Islamhas turned him into a leading presidential candidate.

By Jeffrey Fleishman

CAIRO — The men gathering outside the yellow mosque agreed: Adulterers should be stoned to death, the hands of thieves cut off.

“But not now,” said Kareem Atta, waiting in a cool breeze for the sheik’s car to roll up next to the Quran sellers. “Shariah law must be gradually put into place so it doesn’t shock the system. You can’t cut people’s hands off if you first don’t give them financial justice.”

The young students, engineers and laborers are followers of Hazem Salah abu Ismail, a lawyer and holy man whose poetic blend of populism and ultraconservative Salafi Islam has turned him into a leading presidential candidate. Posters with Ismail’s gray beard and boyish face seem to hang on every street and alley across this ancient city.

Ismail is at once provocative and soothing, in a breath switching from genial to fiery. He has suggested revoking Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and holds up Iran as an exemplar of defiance against the U.S. His hard-line rhetoric has nudged American officials closer to the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood, a sign of Washington’s scrambling to keep pace with the tremors of the “Arab Spring.”

“I will never become a puppet for the U.S. or Israel or any Western power,” Ismail said in a recent speech. He added that the U.S. was funneling money to certain Egyptian candidates to “suit their interests,” and he urged young Muslims to “spoil such a plot.”

Ismail’s candidacy, however, may be in jeopardy over an embarrassing link to America. His mother, Nawal Abdel Aziz Nour, who lived with his sister in the Los Angeles area, became a U.S. citizen before she died, according to California public records. That would make him ineligible to run. Ismail claims his mother held only a green card, not a U.S. passport. The election commission, which confirmed that Ismail’s mother held an American passport, is expected to decide on whether to disqualify him in coming days.

Ismail’s is a robust voice in the fractious political Islam that is spreading across an Egypt freed from three decades of Hosni Mubarak‘s secular rule. The movement’s passions and designs on power are shaking leftists and non-Muslims, but also altering the dynamics for Islamists and challenging the dominance of the Brotherhood.

That was evident when the Brotherhood, which controls parliament and had promised not to put forward a presidential candidate, broke its pledge and nominated Khairat el-Shater, a multimillionaire and longtime political prisoner who instantly became a front-runner. El-Shater represents the middle ground for Islamists, book-ended by Ismail’s sharper conservatism and the liberal Islam of Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former Brotherhood member.

Ismail and his competitors embody a new Egypt searching for a religiously resonant yet pragmatic brand of politics that can fix the nation’s deep economic and social problems. Similar scenarios are enveloping rising Islamists in Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and will certainly be a factor in Syria if President Bashar Assad falls.

The son of a late prominent religious scholar, Ismail represented Egyptians, including his opponent el-Shater, in civil-rights cases against the Mubarak government. He embraced last year’s revolution before many other Islamists and has been a forceful critic of the ruling military council.

He’s a favorite on talk shows and Internet videos, a charismatic speaker who can charm a university crowd as easily as he can raise cheers from millworkers in the provinces. He skims the edge of fundamentalism — he once suggested that he and Osama bin Laden shared the same ends, if not the means, to create an Islamic state — but connects with Egyptians’ everyday worries.

“We live in dignity,” is his slogan, which highlighted his recent call for Egyptians to each donate 72 pounds ($12) so the country could free itself of American influence by rejecting $1.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid.

Such prescriptions may not be widely popular in a country where more than 40 percent of the population is poor, but they encapsulate Egyptians’ rising sense of pride. They also show a defiance toward the West that Ismail believes should encompass everyone from politicians to militants. He has said of bin Laden: May God “be pleased with him and be merciful on him. I hope that God will accept him among believers, martyrs and righteous.”

Ismail believes women should be veiled and segregated from men in the workplace. Egypt’s lone female presidential candidate, Bothaina Kamel, recently referred to him as a “phenomenon similar to a sci-fi movie.” But she added she would support Ismail ahead of secular presidential front-runner Amr Moussa, whom many regard as a throwback to the old regime.

Ismail’s recurring message of the power of Islam to transform society was evident outside the Assad bin Forat mosque in Cairo, where he has preached for years. It is his wellspring and sanctuary and, now, an unofficial campaign office of pious men rushing with posters, T-shirts and signature sheets.

“I’m doing this for the sake of God so that we can have Shariah law in Egypt,” said Yasser Adel, a campaign volunteer. “We need someone with clean hands who knows his religion well and is not corrupt. We should gradually have an Islamic state like in Saudi Arabia, but this must come with respect for all minorities.”

Such sentiment alarms women, liberals and non-Muslims anxious over Islamists’ control of the legislature and a panel drafting a new constitution. But devotion guides many Egyptians who for years steeled themselves with religion against the state’s injustices.

The young at the mosque were excited, even surprised, that they could gather without fear of arrest. Theirs was a focused energy not only on their candidate but also the prospect of what his election could mean to an Arab world in disarray.

“Egypt is the heart of the Islamic world, and if Egypt rises religiously, the whole Muslim world will rise,” said Ahmed Fathy, dressed in a pinstriped suit and holding the hand of his daughter. “Shariah means an end to poverty and the corruption that have left this country struggling.”

As he spoke, trucks and minivans bearing Ismail’s image were loaded with placards and campaign literature and driven off into the night.

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Psychology | Low IQ Leads To Conservatism, Racism, Right Wing Ideologies and Vice Versa

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Conservative, Intelligence, IQ, Racism, Racists

(Obviously, low intelligence also fosters religion).

Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes

Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact
  1. Gordon Hodson and
  2. Michael A. Busseri

+ Author Affiliations


  1. Brock University
  1. Gordon Hodson, Department of Psychology, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Ave., St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1 E-mail: ghodson@brocku.ca

Abstract

Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology.

A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.

Racism Iq

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