pcollins

The latter, which is why I brought it up.

At Yale Law School. The top law school in the country. At a school where the lowest graduating grade is historically a B-.

I don't see how this follows from anything stated in Jost et. al.

I subscribed to Nature at the time, but the Jost-Greenberg exchange is available online. The original Jost et. al. paper claims that 37 percent of participants were undergraduates, while the remainder spread the across the spectrum. Whatever correlation there is with age is not addressed in this discussion. It's evidence insofar as anyone can follow the inferences behind the operational definitions. Why is that worth anything, or say worth more than observing that these authors work in a field that tips overwhelmingly to the left? There's a simple matter of trust we should establish first.

The 'bullshit' is necessary, as an alternative reading might be "conservatives think and act decisively yet with a caution rooted in experience, whereas liberals are wishy washy and prone to seizing on any new thinking regardless of its merits." Does anyone doubt that Jost et. al. are poltiical liberals? No. Does that fact color some of the commentary in the paper? Yes. That doesn't mean that their findings aren't rooted in facts. After two rounds of objections and answers in the journals, the original research holds up as well as you can expect something to in the cognitive sciences without reaching the level of DSM authority.