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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (445747)	8/21/2003 5:41:58 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

I know. We were laughing about that a couple of weeks ago. After laughing, this is what I would have done, if I were a conservative, and had read about that study. I'd make the point that fear isn't always irrational, in fact as a cautionary default emotional stance offered certain survival advantages to those imbued with it. As for intolerance of ambiguity, that could be another way of describing impatience with a refusal to take a stand, or to commit to a course of action, in circumstances in which passivity could be dangerous. I'd also suggest that there may be at this very moment a right wing researcher designing a study called "Liberal Politics as Motivated Social Cognition." It would be structured so as to ascertain whether there could be established an association of certain psychological factors with membership in the Liberal Party. Among the factors that might be studied would be tendencies to "magical thinking"; tendencies to go into "denial states" in the presence of evidence that causes discomfiture (a form of cognitive dissonance); psychological identification with those seen by subject as significantly lower on some perceived social scale, or as less "fortunate" (a form of free-floating guilt) -- an identification that may operate to a degree so strong that the rational processing of data is impeded; confusion of the esthetically or morally pleasing idea or image with the possible (a form of wishful thinking)... Maybe add a greater than average desire to love and be loved, and a tendency to sanctimony. I'd better take "tendency to sanctimony" off. There's a lot of that going around on both ends of the spectrum.