I wasn't particularly impressed with this article. The conclusions seem like tautology: "conservatives want order, structure, and closure", etc. Attempts at quantification are feeble: "more than 90 percent of college students can identify where their political beliefs fit on a scale running from the “left” (liberal) to the “right” (conservative), and that their affiliations strongly influence how they vote in elections." This information has only recently been learned, we are told, courtesy of the "latest research."

At least the takeaway was amusing. He speaks of "a more tolerant society", but really the proposal seem to be: forgo actual dialogue and debate ("beating your head against the wall") in favor of just doing battle at the ballot box.

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Science and Nature this is not.

The researcher here is John Jost, an associate professor of Psychology at NYU. He describes his work:

The first goal is to understand how and why people provide cognitive and ideological support for the status quo, even when their support appears to conflict with personal and group interests. The second is to analyze the social and psychological consequences of supporting the status quo, especially for members of disadvantaged groups. Finally, I am interested in the underlying cognitive and motivational differences between liberals and conservatives.

An NYT article from February touches on this subject:

Mr. Jost did his own research on the red-blue divide. Using the Internet he and his collaborators gave personality tests to hundreds of thousands of Americans. He found states with people who scored high on “openness” were significantly more likely to have voted for the Democratic candidate in the past three elections, even after adjustments were made for income, ethnicity and population density. States that scored high on “conscientiousness” went Republican in the past three elections.

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