New Study: Conservative Value Judgments Tied to Antisocial Personality Traits

WOW!

Learned a new term today.
Machiavellianism - a term that some social and personality psychologists use to describe a person's tendency to deceive and manipulate other people for their personal gain.

Conservatives lie about everything.
They lie about weapons of mass destruction, the lie about global warming, they lie about taxes, they lie about sex, they lie lie lie lie lie!

Doesn't surprise me. I read a reference somewhere, I have to find it, where a supporter of Scott Walker in Wisconsin wrote that his students were a collection of "poor white trash" and "gangbangers".

That actually makes a lot of sense.

A conservative position, by definition, is one of -protect your own, the rest are your enemy-.

It's not inherently social, it is about protecting yourself and your tribe against outsiders trying to take from you.

I guess it depends on what they are calling "conservative". Gay marriage and terrorism without trial for example. Legislating socially conservative views is politically liberal. Punishment without trial is also completely unconstitutional and therefore not politically conservative. I think a better term referring to the people in this study would be bat-shit crazy Republican tools.

Was the point of John Dean's "Conservatives Without Conscience" as well.

Here is a full abstract of the study and its results:

This study examined correlations between moral value judgments on a 17-item Moral Intuition Survey (MIS), and participant scores on the Short-D3 “Dark Triad” Personality Inventory—a measure of three related “dark and socially destructive” personality traits: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy. Five hundred sixty-seven participants (302 male, 257 female, 2 transgendered; median age 28) were recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk and Yale Experiment Month web advertisements. Different responses to MIS items were initially hypothesized to be “conservative” or “liberal” in line with traditional public divides. Our demographic data confirmed all of these hypothesized categorizations. We then tested two broad, exploratory hypotheses: (H1) the hypothesis that there would be “many” significant correlations between conservative MIS judgments and the Dark Triad, and (H2) the hypothesis that there would be no significant correlations between liberal MIS judgments and Machiavellianism or Psychopathy, but “some” significant correlations between liberal MIS judgments and Narcissism. Because our hypotheses were exploratory and we ran a large number of statistical tests (62 total), we utilized a Bonferroni Correction to set a very high threshold for significance (p=.0008). Our results broadly supported our two hypotheses. We found eleven significant correlations between conservative MIS judgments and the Dark Triad—all at significance level of p is less than 0.00001—but no significant correlations between the Dark Triad and liberal MIS judgments. We believe that these results raise provocative moral questions about the personality bases of moral judgments. In particular, we propose that because the Short-D3 measures three “dark and antisocial” personality traits, our results raise worries about the moral justification of some conservative moral judgments.

The paper presenting these findings is available at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k86q25k2278188gw/
Contact: Marcus Arvan, PhD