Conservatives have long complained about certain sectors (academia, science, media, the arts) being dominated by progressives. This study confirms the basic arguments that many liberals have been making in response: It’s really hard to do well in any of those disciplines if your world view is steeped in obedience to authority, hostility to change, and inability to accept ambiguity. Of course, there are certainly people who vote Republican or who identify as conservative that aren’t any of these things, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the Republican party and conservatism in general is based on hierarchy, tradition, and a black-and-white bullheadedness.
The “liberal media” is long-time right-wing target, and they’ve given us Fox News in response. But check out the quality of reporting between Fox and, say, the BBC. Or right-wing radio and NPR. Or the New York Post and the New York Times. It’s not a coincidence that media organizations run by conservatives are a joke, and are insulting to the industry — good reporting requires a curiosity about other people and places, an openness to ideas that challenge your own, and an understanding that life is complex and multi-faceted, and what you find when you bother to look may not fit neatly into your own narrative.
I don’t accept the argument that the mainstream media has a liberal bent. But I do think it’s probably true that there are more progressive and left-leaning people working in the mainstream media than right-leaning people, precisely because progressive, open-minded and intellectually curious people are going to be drawn to jobs like Reporter in the first place. On the other hand, people who are raised with a need for right-or-wrong morality, unquestioning allegiance to authority figures, and tradition for tradition’s sake are going to be drawn to establishments like the military and conservative religious sects. I also think that left-leaning reporters and editors have been bullied by conservatives, to the point where they overcompensate by adopting right-wing narratives, attacking progressive politicians and ideas, and hesitating to call Republicans out on their bullshit (see: The Iraq War). So while our more credible media establishments may employ more liberals than conservatives, the lack of single-mindedness that draws progressives into journalism in the first place ends up damaging their ability to do their jobs well when conservatives go on the offensive against them. When liberals call out Fox News and other politicized Murdoch enterprises that are an embarrassment to journalism,* they respond with, “Fuck you, we’re right.” When conservatives bleat about the “liberal media,” the liberals who work in that media listen, assume it’s a criticism made in good faith, and shift. Unfortunately, they long failed to realize that conservatives don’t want them to do their jobs well; conservatives want them to be conservative political shills.
It gets even more complicated now with the advent of the blogosphere, and the growing left-wing criticism of journalists. Many of those same journalists who were long under right-wing fire shifted their reporting strategies, editors shifted their editorial strategies, the quality of our media took a nosedive, and we’re all suffering for it. Now when progressives criticize the media, media elite hear a left-wing version of what the right has been saying: We want you to be more liberal. In fact, most progressives don’t want the media to repeat liberal talking points (Lord knows we attack the liberal talking points enough). We want them to do their jobs and do them well, politics aside.
It’s really hard to be a good journalist if your journalism amounts to, “George W. Bush is totally badass and war is teh awesome, here are some Iraqis with flowers. Look, flags!” It’s really hard to be a good scientist if you don’t believe in evolution. It’s really hard to do well in academia if you think it’s nearly blasphemous to challenge established norms and you refuse to accept that morality is complex and life comes in lots of shades of gray. It’s hard to be a great artist if you hate change.
Obviously these aren’t blanket characteristics. I’ve met plenty of authority-worshiping, fall-in-line liberals in my day, and plenty of (ok, well, a few) open-minded, flexible conservatives. But as a general rule, this study seems to illustrate what most of us already know through our God-given common sense.
*Really. If you’re hired by a Murdoch enterprise, good luck getting a job anywhere else in journalism. Many a journalism professor warned us about this — you pick up such bad journalistic and ethical habits working at a place like the New York Post that most credible institutions won’t touch you with a 10-foot pole afterwards.
So, an academic study from two liberal universities confirms the basic arguments that liberals have been making about why they dominate the universities?
Wow, I guess that debate is settled.
Oh I’m not so sure about that. It is ver hard to make such grabd genrealiztions, I think. And while I consider myself neither left nor right, merely original and often contrarian, I found in law school that self-identified libreals would fail to comprehend my arguments about 98% of the time, while self-identified conservatives failed so at about a 90% rate. (incidentally, a fond law school memoery: father Robert Drinan arguing to me that maybe the massacre at Srebrenica really wasa NATO hoax to make the Serbs look bad. God, if only he had daid something that stupid about some group people in law school care about, instead of worthless Bosnjiaks.)
A conservative institution tried to replicate the study, but it blew their rigid little minds.
I think it would be interesting to look at how well the study is able to predict the relative presence of conservatives in various academic fields.
There is, for example, a much greater proportion of conservatives working in major law schools than in other areas of academe. I have to wonder, based on the study, how much of this is due to the fact that the law is a field largely dependent on respect for tradition (cf. the importance of precedent in the law with the relative lack of importance of received wisdom in other fields).
I have a fair share of skepticism about a study like this.
Part of the problem is, as we all know, that political views lie upon a continuum, so it’s not always easy to draw a clear line between “liberal” and “conservative”. What appears liberal to one person may appear conservative to another; furthermore, the liberal-conservative axis can vary depending on the issue being considered.
We should also consider that political terms like “liberal” and “conservative” are historically and culturally contingent. A liberal in nineteenth-century Britain would look different from a liberal in the twenty-first century United States.
On top of that, I wonder how this study accounts for people’s change in their political views. When I was an undergraduate, I was a pretty mainstream conservative; since then, I’ve moved considerably leftward. In fact, I’m probably farther to the left than many of the people I opposed politically when I was an undergraduate. What happened? Did my “true” brain assert itself? Or did it undergo change over time? If it’s the latter, what were the corresponding neurobiological changes?
Maybe it’s the historian of science in me, but I’m cautious about making too much of a study like this right now.
To the extent the study is accepted as true by liberals, it demonstrates their tendency to abandon the notion of personal responsibility in favor of materialistic, deterministic explanations of human thought and behavior. But hopefully some of them will be tolerant enough to be open to the idea that the study is completely false.
Yeah I’m skeptical of it too. It’s just one study. It was just an interesting jumping-off point to make some wider observations.
A liberal in nineteenth-century Britain would look different from a liberal in the twenty-first century United States.
Well, a modern day liberal in the UK would essentially share my views: pro-democracy, pro-environment, pro-trade and pro-business, with responsible social programs and efficient tax systems. You’ll all go crazy at this, but a modern New Deal liberal in many ways resembles a fascist. no, not in Jews-to-the-ovens fascist, but rather the government-corporations-unions will manage a semi-controlled economy. A lot of the NIRA and other New Deal legislation distinctly resembles 1930s German and italian economic and industrial policy.
You’re skeptical of it, Jill, yet you call it “unsurprising” and say it “demonstrates” its hypothesis.
Ha. Ok fine, you guys caught me trolling my own blog. Can’t a girl have a little fun every now and then?
(In other words: No, I don’t think the study is conclusive, no I don’t think all conservatives are narrow-minding based on how many times they recognized a flashing W, no I don’t think it demonstrates much of anything, etc etc. I thought the study was funny, and so I used it as an inflammatory starting-off point for a post about issues that I do think are actually legitimate and worth discussing).
I won’t go crazy at reading that; this comparison has been made for years by opponents of New Dealers (when they weren’t comparing the New Deal to socialism or communism).
But it does tend to support the point I was making above, which is that political terminiology is so fluid that it’s difficult to arrive at a definition that is stable enough to be useful in a study like this.
There’s no way this is true. It’s definitely hogwash! no if, ands, or buts about it.
A thought: I’ve been seeing this taken as personality-begets-politics. But what if it’s the other way around, and your investment in conservatism makes you more incurious over time and your investment in liberalism makes you more curious over time? There might be a feedback loop here.
I’d believe you, but I’ve read conclusive studies that demonstrate that the feminist brain is characterized by humorlessness.
OMG I read that study too!! The same one that said conservatives are more likely to have small penises and wet their beds as adults?
Oh, so *that* explains David Vitter’s diaper!
Also, it’s not one study. There’s a lot of cognitive studies demonstrating a linkage between conservative politics and some unpopular personality traits like fearfulness, incuriosity, etc. They’ve even done studies that found that if you remind people they’re going to die, they get momentarily more right wing in their attitudes. And there’s even been twin studies that indicate that there might be a genetic component that makes some people more likely to others to seek out Big Daddy to do all their thinking for them. One study is basically never conclusive, but there’s a pile-up of evidence indicating that there’s a link between personality traits and political tendencies, and no the findings are not flattering to conservatives.
Minus the unions, this is different than the “capitalism” we have right now under the Republicans … how, exactly? When credit card companies refer to customers who pay their bills on time and in full as “deadbeats” and corporations are conspiring with each other to fix prices, how on earth is that a free market?
i wonder what this study would look like outside the american context, or when one goes beyond liberal and conservative.
would indian socialists be more close minded than free-marketers? what about communists in russia? how would right wing cuban dissidents compare to castro supporters? do libertarians or neocons resemble liberals or conservatives? many american leftists don’t self-idetify as liberal, are they more open-minded than their liberal counterparts or less?
This work has been going on since at least the 1950s, but it’s my understanding that most of it has been sociocultural in orientation. Given the history of scientific studies that have tried to correlate behavior with some inherent biological substratum, it’s important not to make claims too broadly.
Of course. Just don’t be surprised when we ask you to explain whether or not you’re kidding. :)
I think Amanda has a good point, and I’d suggest there is also an amount of social pressure involved too. Sure, liberal people would be attracted to certain fields, but being surrounded by lefties (as one inevitably is in academia) is definitely going to make left wing ideas seem more “normal.” Whereas if you’re in a more conservative milieu (like business), the opposite will result.
Shakur-
Circumstancial Ad homieum in post #1! But thanks for playing.
Shankar’s post #1 only served to prove the point to me – he has already decided the study cannot be true. That’s exactly the kind of dogmatism the study references.
It always seemed straightforward to me – how can someone be good at asking questions if they are certain they already know all the answers?
And why is it nobody complains about the majority of investment bankers being conservative?
Brilliant, you’ve caught me out. My rigid habits of mind have made me decide this study can’t be true, while your Bhoddisava-like open-mindedness has led you to consider the data of the study–which you no doubt have examined personally–and conclude that it must be true.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Shankar – have you actually been reading the comments?
Your rigid habits of mind have made you decide that the study can’t be true. Our Bhoddisava-like open-mindedness (love that one!) has led most of us to find it interesting, if neither conclusive nor completely persuasive.
This is supposed to be crazy? How?
Tapetum–Hm, point taken–Only Jill and Amanda seem to accept the study on it’s face, and Jill then said she was foolin’ with us.
But then, to be fair, I gave no indication that I had decided the study couldn’t be true, I only expressed my skepticism that this study was unbiased, by virtue of the institutions that produced it.
Wow, this post really brought out the crazies. It’s like having walking visual aids.
And gee, maybe if conservatives want to make it in academia, they should stop going to “Liberty” University and stop wanking to their Bibles.
It would make sense that political parties evolve to suit certain personalities. (Apparently the US has only two. :P )
Of course, when you describe a personality type, there are no neutral words. The opening sentence of this article reads:
It could just as easily read: