My last post at DeSmogBlog, about conservative white men and climate change, has brought up the perennial question: Is everybody as biased as these CWMs are, just on their own pet issues? So I've done another post to at least partially tackle this issue, again at DeSmog. Here's a brief excerpt:
...let me discuss one important stab at comparing left and right wing biases, found in several studies by Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois-Chicago and her colleagues. In a well known 2002 paper (see the 5^th study), Skitka showed that liberals, unlike conservatives, update their initial views about whether a person who has contracted AIDS while knowing the risks, and engaging in unprotected sex, deserves government subsidized health care services. Conservatives and liberals have the same negative first impression of such a person—they feel personal disapproval or even revulsion. But liberals then change their minds, go against their ...
