William's favorite URL

One stalker frequent visitor to this blog is a guy named William. William has a PhD (in music, I think) and he is a proud Liberal. Chief among his traits, however, is that he is a critic of Conservatives and Conservatism, and the most common blunt object he uses to "criticize" Conservatives is a study from several years ago "finding" that Conservatism was--maybe not a mental disorder, but certainly a mental/psychological/emotional shortcoming. The study was called Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition. Here's the URL to a press release on the study. Here's William's even cruder take on the study.

To be candid, I don't read much of what William writes, though I do read his comments on my blog and typically skim his posts at tennesseefree.com. And I have only cursorily read his attacks on me and Religious Conservatives (here was where it may have started; note to self: William typically ramps up these attacks at the beginning of summer)--the guy just doesn't have much credibility in light of his "public" antics and demonstrated character.

In any event, I thought I'd look into his study a bit (I've learned that William's arguments/attacks have a nice way of falling apart or diminishing if you look into them at all), and I found a clinical psychologist's splendid analysis and dissembling of the political-science-disguised-as-psychology that william clings to. In sum, Psychologist Shawn Smith points to three serious methodological flaws in the "study." But you should read it for yourself.

There's another of Psychologist Shawn Smith's articles on the subject here.