I am not a big fan of "priming" experiments, the sort of thing where you prime your experimental subjects to feel something – nervous, happy, smart – and then give them a test or ask them questions. Some of the results seem ludicrous to me, and many have not replicated. But for what it's worth, several experiments have shown that if you make people afraid they become more conservative:
It has long been known in political psychology circles that people become more conservative and resistant to change when under threat of some kind.
In the November 10 TLS John Bargh of Yale reports on experiments that show what simple stimulus makes people more liberal. In his experiment, the student subjects imagined themselves with a superpower, either being completely safe from physical harm or being able to fly. Imagining they they could fly had no effect on political attitudes. But imagining that they were immune from harm made everyone more liberal:
Satisfying the basic need for physical security through the genie imagination exercise therefore had the effect of turning off, or at least reducing in strength, the need to hold conservative social and political attitudes.
This explains, he says, why liberal rhetoricians from FDR to Obama spent so much energy denouncing fear.
2 comments:
Concerning replication, verification, etc., for those interested there is the retraction watch web site. They post retractions and discussions and abstracts of papers on replication and verification issues.
http://retractionwatch.com/
Twitter account
@retractionwatch
interesting, @shadow. thanks. this site lists what i fortunately can say is the clear differentiator between scientific discourse and closed-system blather: peer-review and verifiability. this site also shows that the system is a bit flawed and needs better rigor. my dad was a research scientist and submitted many papers for journals, and peer-reviewed others' work as well. he always made time to fully read articles sent to him, but unfortunately the subjects of many papers these days are so abstruse that even those in the field of study aren't close enough to that specific topic to understand it in depth. further, at least a couple decades ago when he was active in this, there were no clear guidelines for how one peer-reviews. it was up to each reviewer to comment at will, with no particular structure.
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