#psychopolitics — Public Fediverse posts

If this checks out, it'll be quite an interesting pattern of #psychopolitics:

Country-Level Conservative Syndrome

It has become increasingly common in cross-cultural psychology to treat countries as units of analysis. Thus, for each measure, scores of all individuals from the same country are averaged. These countries’ arithmetic mean scores are then used in the analyses, which, for most part, are similar to those carried out with the individuals. A typical finding is that, for the same variables, the correlations among the countries are higher than among the individuals. Consequently, at the country-level, a strong social Conservatism factor tends to appear implying that instead of being unrelated, Morality and Nastiness, together with Religiosity, define the same Conservative Syndrome (see Stankov & Lee, 2016b).

Conservative, Liberal, and In-Betweens Countries

We have applied latent profile analyses to countries using three different selections of variables from our pool. Thus, Stankov and Lee (2016b) employed three factor scores from the analyses of social attitudes, Stankov (2016b) used factor scores from broader factors of Religiosity, Nastiness/ Social Dominance, and Social Awareness/Morality, and Stankov (2016a) used 12 factor scores measuring social axioms, social norms, and social attitudes. In all three analyses, the same clas- sification of 33 countries did appear and we use the term psychological continents to label these groups. The following groupings of 33 countries have been reported:

• Liberal continent (mostly Europe): Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Canada, and Australia (ConQ = 91.87);
• In-between countries: Russia, Poland, Ukraine, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Morocco, Singapore, China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan (ConQ = 98.30);
• Conservative continent (mostly Southern hemisphere): Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Argentina, and Peru (ConQ = 105.73).

To estimate magnitude of the differences on the Conservative Syndrome, individuals’ conser- vatism scores were calculated and transformed into a scale with mean = 100 and SD = 15—that is, an IQ-like score that can be called Conservative Quotient or ConQ. Stankov (2016a, Table 4) reported mean ConQ scores for each country. The averages for the countries belonging to the same continent are in the parentheses within the above bullet points. The overall difference between the Liberal and the Conservative continents is 13.86 ConQ points or slightly less than 1 standard deviation and corresponding to what is considered to be a large effect size of .924 (13.86 / 15). Needless to say, the difference between the top- and the bottom-level countries is much more pronounced.

Somewhat riskily, the authors then dabble in the concept of country-level cognitive performance, which has been much wraught with "race science" abuse over the past century. I'm happy to see, at least, that they're using PISA scores as a major metric, which avoid a number of the issues with "IQ testing" by, not least of the stinking pile, openly presenting as a collective metric of education rather than a mystical individual and immutable brain property, but I haven't yet had time to analyse their methods in depth, so, here's a 🏮 lampshade, just in case.

Countries’ Conservative Syndrome and Cognitive Performance

At the countries’ level, the correlations between Conservative Syndrome and cognitive perfor- mance are also negative. Thus, fluid intelligence (Gf, measured with the Number Series test) correlated −.39 and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) mathematics achievement scores correlated −.47 with Conservatism. It is necessary to point out that, due to a small number of countries with scores on both measures, these correlations are significant at .05 but not at .01 level. Also, they are significant for Religiosity component of Conservatism only; Nastiness and Morality are not related to cognitive ability at the country level.

Poor and Less Democratic Countries Tend to Score High on Conservative Syndrome

Stankov and Lee (2016b) reported that the average gross domestic product (GDP) of countries from the liberal continent is about 7 times bigger than the GDP of the conservative continent. Our findings also indicate that GDP and UN’s human development index have significant negative correlations (−.64 and −.73, respectively) with conservatism. Finally, the same size of correlations obtains for measures of political stability, rule of law, government effectiveness, control of corruption, democracy index, and happiness. Clearly, when faced with uncertainty that may be associated with the change of status quo, people from poor and less democratic countries tend to opt for security that is associated with their current situation.

Conservatism and Major Dimensions of Cross-Cultural Differences

Although our measures of Conservative Syndrome contained social norms scales proposed by the GLOBE project (House et al., 2004), we also calculated country-level correlations with several other measures employed by the researchers in cross-cultural psychology. Among the best known is the work of Hofstede (2001). Two Hofstede’s dimensions showed correlations signifi- cant at the .01 level with Conservative Syndrome: Individualism/Collectivism (−.63) and Power Distance (.58). These are meaningful correlations, indicating that people living in conservative countries tend to be more collectivistic and they tend to be more accepting of larger differences between powerful and powerless members of their societies (Stankov, under review). Furthermore, Stankov et al. (2014) pointed out that Conservative Syndrome can be understood as a diagonal of the Inglehart and Welzel (2005) two-dimensional model that orders countries with respect to (a) Traditional values versus Secular-Rational values and (b) Survival values versus Self-Expression values. In this schema, conservative countries score high on Traditional and Survival values. Therefore, countries high on Conservative Syndrome endorse Traditional/Survival values and those that are low on Conservative Syndrome endorse Secular-Rational and Self-Expression values.

The next caveatous section heading happens to serve as a convenient teaser:

Differences Between Individuals Are Larger Than Differences Between Countries

Source: https://annas-archive.gl/md5/0d44e2915163234d381f01e1dec9f67b. Yes, I, too, am worried that the author, one L. Stankov, cites a certain L. Stankov so extensively. Sometimes, this can indicate problems. But sometimes, it genuinely indicates a narrow specialty, and, indeed, Bob Altemeyer had to cite his own earlier works quite a bit in his later research, because of the relative smolness of the collective of researchers advancing understanding of Right-Wing Authoritarianism at the time.