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Study of Bush's psyche touches a nerve
Julian Borger in Washington
The Guardian, Wednesday August 13 2003

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism
can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear
and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".
As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the
report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the
rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from
the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned
inequality".

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the
report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received
$1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science
Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who
turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference
for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the
familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic
cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological
Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the
aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain
the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that
contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The authors, presumably aware of the outrage they were likely to
trigger, added a disclaimer that their study "does not mean that
conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are
necessarily false".

Another author, Arie Kruglanski, of the University of Maryland, said
he had received hate mail since the article was published, but he
insisted that the study "is not critical of conservatives at all".
"The variables we talk about are general human dimensions," he said.
"These are the same dimensions that contribute to loyalty and
commitment to the group. Liberals might be less intolerant of
ambiguity, but they may be less decisive, less committed, less
loyal."

But what drives the psychologists? George Will, a Washington Post
columnist who has long suffered from ingrained conservatism, noted,
tartly: "The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of
our psychological needs and neuroses."