It had the whiff of parody. Psychologists dissecting the conservative
brain?

A press release from UC Berkeley announced that researchers, culling
50 years of data, had identified psychological patterns common to the
minds of right-wingers. Their findings, published in the American
Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin, listed these
predictors of conservatism: fear, aggression, dogmatism,
authoritarianism, tolerance of inequality, intolerance of ambiguity,
resistance to change and lack of "integrative complexity" in thought
and speech. Hardly a flattering portrait.

The release pushed further, noting that "disparate conservatives" such
as Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh each preached a
return to an idealized past and condoned inequality.

The research is serious scholarship, insist the authors from Stanford,
U.C. Berkeley and the University of Maryland synthesized 88 previously
published samples involving 22,818 participants from 12 countries into
10 "meta-analytic calculations."

The study starts by assuming that people adopt a belief system such as
conservatism partly to satisfy some psychological need. "This does not
mean that conservatism is pathological," the authors hasten to note,
"or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational or
unprincipled."

As Seinfeld might add, "not that there's anything wrong with that . .
.. ."

The authors also maintain they're not judgmental. Labeling
conservatives" less integratively complex," isn't precisely the same
as saying they're simple- minded. It merely means conservatives aren't
compelled to jump through complex,

intellectual hoops to justify their relatively black-and-white view of
the world.

One of the researchers' methods involved analyzing political speeches
and judicial opinions on the basis of structural complexity.
Conservatives thought and spoke more simply -- hence President Bush's
observation "Look, my job isn't to nuance."