An article was recently published making that claim. I ran into it as a result of a YouTube video reacting to it & interviewing the author about it. The show's two hosts included one "liberal" who clearly didn't want it to be true. Her questions were all looking for some other way to explain things, along the lines of "correlation isn't causation", which is one of the weakest ways to try to oppose new research that you don't like but don't have any better way to poke holes in. (And the comments were full of right-wingers piling on about how lame her opposition to it was, which was accurate; she did a bad job and made her side look helpless in the face of the "facts & logic".)
And the claim went against what I expected before as well, given that previous studies have consistently found conservatism more associated with worse results in nearly every practical measure of mental/sociological health in the decision-making of adults. So how is mental health among the young distributed in the opposite way? I was all set to find out something new & unexpected.
It turned out to be this article, published not in a journal of psychology or such but by the "Institute For Family Studies", whose "About Us" page is actually named "Our Mission" right in the URL. You can read their self-description at the link if you want, but I can tell you ahead of time, it'll sound exactly like the name and "our mission" phrasing tell you it'll sound like. The author is an economist, not a psychologist, which reminds me of Creationism's dependence on engineers instead of biologists. Curiously, he's at the Brookings Institution, which doesn't scream "We're right-wingers pushing a right-wing agenda" like the IFS does, but the IFS wouldn't be publishing what he wrote if he hadn't given them what they wanted.
The reason I had to call it an "article" instead of a "study" or "research paper" is because it's not a study or research paper. There's no "Methods" section or "Results" section. It describes a survey but doesn't quote what most of the questions were, and describes their interpretations of the results at best instead of giving the data in tables or such. It doesn't even define its terms or what the alternatives of those terms would be even though the whole point of the article is supposed to be a comparison between those undefined terms' real-world correlations and the real-world correlations of their unnamed alternatives; it treats conservative parenting as more "disciplined" and "warm" but doesn't describe what that means "liberal" parenting would be like other than "undisciplined" and "cold", nevermind how they came to such decisions (or the fact that "disciplined" and "warm" could be interpreted as running counter to each other anyway). And what they offered to support that distinction was the only part of the article quoting any specific questions and associating any numbers with them, and even there, the questions are mostly not about actual "warmth" or "discpline" but about performativity trying to look like warmth/discipline. And to top it all off, the unwritten part we're apparently supposed to believe is correlated with that is simply about self-reported mental health, which, like a "happiness" survey, has been known for ages to only really pick up on who feels the most incentive to claim to fit such a description. (And although I haven't seen any real study trying to look into that, it certainly looks in my anecdotal experience like right-wingers & the religious are more subject to that by a pretty wide margin.)
I'll stick with what I already thought before on this one.
And the claim went against what I expected before as well, given that previous studies have consistently found conservatism more associated with worse results in nearly every practical measure of mental/sociological health in the decision-making of adults. So how is mental health among the young distributed in the opposite way? I was all set to find out something new & unexpected.
It turned out to be this article, published not in a journal of psychology or such but by the "Institute For Family Studies", whose "About Us" page is actually named "Our Mission" right in the URL. You can read their self-description at the link if you want, but I can tell you ahead of time, it'll sound exactly like the name and "our mission" phrasing tell you it'll sound like. The author is an economist, not a psychologist, which reminds me of Creationism's dependence on engineers instead of biologists. Curiously, he's at the Brookings Institution, which doesn't scream "We're right-wingers pushing a right-wing agenda" like the IFS does, but the IFS wouldn't be publishing what he wrote if he hadn't given them what they wanted.
The reason I had to call it an "article" instead of a "study" or "research paper" is because it's not a study or research paper. There's no "Methods" section or "Results" section. It describes a survey but doesn't quote what most of the questions were, and describes their interpretations of the results at best instead of giving the data in tables or such. It doesn't even define its terms or what the alternatives of those terms would be even though the whole point of the article is supposed to be a comparison between those undefined terms' real-world correlations and the real-world correlations of their unnamed alternatives; it treats conservative parenting as more "disciplined" and "warm" but doesn't describe what that means "liberal" parenting would be like other than "undisciplined" and "cold", nevermind how they came to such decisions (or the fact that "disciplined" and "warm" could be interpreted as running counter to each other anyway). And what they offered to support that distinction was the only part of the article quoting any specific questions and associating any numbers with them, and even there, the questions are mostly not about actual "warmth" or "discpline" but about performativity trying to look like warmth/discipline. And to top it all off, the unwritten part we're apparently supposed to believe is correlated with that is simply about self-reported mental health, which, like a "happiness" survey, has been known for ages to only really pick up on who feels the most incentive to claim to fit such a description. (And although I haven't seen any real study trying to look into that, it certainly looks in my anecdotal experience like right-wingers & the religious are more subject to that by a pretty wide margin.)
I'll stick with what I already thought before on this one.
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/Y9SRmos
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