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 first impulses, and decide that the person deserves to be treated equally anyway. Conservatives don’t. But Skitka showed in a more recent study that there are contexts in which conservatives, too, go against what you might expect. For instance, and as the last study implied, conservatives usually tend to think that there are no “extenuating circumstances”—that you’re personally responsible for what you do and how things turn out, whether you’re a criminal or someone on welfare or someone who knowingly contracts AIDS. However, in the newer study, Skitka showed that conservativesdo consider extenuating circumstances (or what she calls "situational" factors rather than "dispositional" factors) when members of a group that they support, like the military or the police, are accused of wrongdoing. However, I will note Skitka and her colleagues did not detect conservatives actually changing their views when confronted with new or contradictory evidence—e.g., seemingly definitive proof that soldiers or police had actually done something wrong. She just caught them going against their general tendency to make "dispositional" rather than "situational" attributions. Honestly, you could argue just as easily that she captured flip-flopping (or, special pleading on behalf of the military and the police) as that she captured open-mindedness and flexibility. In any case, while I agree that everybody has biases, I'm not sure that means I must also agree that everybody is equally biased. To butcher George Orwell, why couldn't it be the case that all humans are biased, but are some humans are more biased than others?
You can read further here.
