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0 pointsp-e-w2y ago0 comments

What constitutes "conservatism" for the purpose of this study was based on self-assessment of participants, who were exclusively Americans and Italians.

In both the US and Italy, conservative ideas are strongly associated with the religious right (Evangelical in the US, and Catholic in Italy). This at minimum means that the results of this study do not necessarily transfer to other societies, but more likely suggests that those two nationalities were deliberately chosen to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

notahacker2y ago· 1 in thread

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the choice to select participants from Italy and the United States might be influenced considerably more by the author holding research positions at Italian and US universities than the nature of hypothesis they were testing...

vacuity2y ago

The authors should at least note caveats such as that. It doesn't seem like they did in the "Limitations and future directions" section. The article seems to just take the conclusion as given.

The initial description of conservatism in the study:

  According to the ‘rigidity of the right’ perspective, politically conservative beliefs are paired with cognitive and even perceptual rigidity (e.g., Jost et al., 2003; Tetlock et al., 1985).

In the US, perhaps things were more straightforward at the time of those references, but it seems disingenuous to not consider the recent political climate.

klyrs2y ago

I agree, the study did not attempt to define conservatism in a universal context devoid of societal context, but instead sampled from two countries with somewhat similar notions of conservativism.

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