The study has however become much celebrated in Green/Left quarters, with the ineffable Monbiot in the vanguard. Monbiot’s entry into the discussion has however energized a few ripostes from conservatives, with the most amusing point being that after Leftists telling us for decades that IQ scores are meaningless they suddenly have done an 180 degree turn and treat them as highly meaningful!

I thought I might add something to what I regard as the two best conservative responses to the original article. The first is in The Telegraph and makes a number of good points, all of which are worth reading.

I want to say more about just one of them: The point that IQ was measured during childhood (10 or 11 years of age) and that such measures are unreliable. That is however a matter of degree and of purpose. They are accurate enough to be a useful guide to who will benefit from a selective (more demanding) education, for instance.

An interesting aspect of scores at that age, however, is what I call the chimpanzee effect. In brief, this effect is that dummies mature faster so a relatively high score in childhood can lead to a relatively low score in adulthood. So it is quite possible that the high scorers in the data used by the Canadian authors became relatively low scorers later on. So if the high scorers in that body of data were later found to be liberals, it is quite possible that the same people were dummies in later life! So the data could be said to show the opposite of what the authors claim. The data could be said to suggest that it was the liberals who were the dummies.

That is all just speculation, however, The truth is that the data are incapable of telling us which way around it went at all.

That little point is really just a bit of fun, however. The second article by statistician Briggs is by far the most pointed. Briggs had a strong enough stomach to read the whole article. And when he did, he basically found that the authors had misrepresented their results. The correlations with IQ were in fact negligible. They were statistically significant but statistical significance is only a correction for small sample size and the sample sizes in the data used by the Canadians were large.

So statistical significance is irrelevant. It is other forms of significance we have to look at. Let me put it this way: What the Canadians found was (roughly) that out of 100 high IQ people, 51 would be liberals and 49 would be conservatives. Such a near-even split means of course that IQ is essentially irrelevant to ideology, or is not a socially or scientifically significant predictor of ideology.

Now we come to “racism”. The correlations between conservatism and racism were more substantial. Briggs rightly detects the flaw in that. The correlation is between WHAT THE AUTHORS SAY is conservatism and racism and there is no external validation of either measure. So all I want to do is draw attention to something I set out long ago: That even eminent Leftist psychologists have NO IDEA what conservatism is. A much noted paper in the field even identified Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro as conservatives! Can you get any madder than that? So it is no wonder that when they use their questionnaires to predict how people will vote, they find that “conservatives” AS IDENTIFIED BY THEM are just as likely to vote Democrat as Republican (for instance). How clueless can you get? What is going on of course is that Leftist psychologists swallow hook line and sinker of Leftist propaganda about conservatives. They believe that conservatives really are as Leftist propaganda describes them. It would appear that they never bother to talk to any actual conservatives to find out what they really think.

By contrast, I am a conservative so a questionnaire that I devised based on a thorough knowledge of what conservatism actually is, did what the Leftist questionnaires could not: Provided a substantial prediction of vote. See here. So once again the arrogance and ignorance of the Left has led them to a false understanding of reality and scientific work that is futile and useless. The work by the two Canadian authors certainly tells us NOTHING about the correlations with conservatism. I have written more extensively elsewhere about the relationship between conservatism and IQ.

For reference, the Canadian study is: “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact” by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

I made some technical remarks about her research on 24th. but readers may also be interested in an alternative to her kneejerk reaction to the old “white Australia policy”. See here for a more philosophically sophisticated look at the issues involved

A PERTH professor whose study found people who fly Australian flags on their cars are more racist than those who don’t, says she has received over 70 critical emails which include demands that she go back to her “own country”.

Brunei-born University of WA Professor Farida Fozdar [Judging by the name she is ethnically an Indian Muslim], who moved to Australia when she was seven, said she was shocked by the national reaction to her study which also spread as far India and the United States.

“Some emails have been quite polite and I’ve been able to reply and we’ve actually had quite a positive interaction out of it which, I really really value,” Professor Fozdar said.

“But some are straight out lots of swear words and suggesting that I should go back to where I came from.

“I’ve also had a couple of emails from people implying that I’m the Grinch that killed Christmas and that now nobody is going to fly a flag because they think it shows that they’re racist.”

Professor Fozdar, a sociologist and anthropologist, said that although the study was reported “relatively accurately” in the media, some people have misinterpreted its findings.

“What has struck me most is that the media has reported the research relatively accurately in most cases, perhaps apart from some headlines, but people have taken it up in the wrong way,” Professor Fozdar said.

“People have taken it as though I was saying that anyone who flies a flag on their car for Australia Day is racist and that flying the flag generally is a racist thing to do and that certainly wasn’t what I was saying.”

Professor Fozdar said the study revealed flag-flyers were significantly less positive about Australia’s ethnic diversity than “non-flag flyers” but that the attitude is not shared by all Australians.

“The fact that there were significant differences doesn’t mean that everybody who flys the flag feel negative towards minorities but it means that a larger proportion of them did compared with people that weren’t flying flags,” she said.

Professor Fozdar said many people ignored her findings that the majority of both flag-flyers and non-flag flyers, interviewed by her research team, felt positive about Australia’s ethnic diversity.

“But that’s not what gets picked up by people,” she said. “That statistic was there, in a lot of media reports, but people took out of it that I’m saying they shouldn’t fly a flag for Australia Day because it’s racist and that we shouldn’t celebrate Australia Day. “That was just nowhere in the research and so that is what has surprised me.”

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

(The Politico) It was a tense moment on the tarmac.

President Obama, alighting from the stairs of Air Force One in Phoenix this afternoon, was greeted by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who handed him an envelope and the two exchanged what appeared to be some heated sentiments. At one point, she pointed her finger at him.

Asked afterward what happened, Brewer said, “He was a little disturbed about my book, Scorpions for Breakfast.

“I said to him that I have all the respect in the world for the office of the president. The book is what the book is. I asked him if he read the book. He said he read the excerpt,” she said, according to a pool report. “He didn’t feel that I had treated him cordially. I said I was sorry he felt that way but I didn’t get my sentence finished. Anyway, we’re glad he’s here. I’ll regroup.”

She didn’t get her sentence finished because Testy President decided he would walk away. Since Obama and the Democrats continually blame Bush, imagine the way Bush would be treated had Bush pulled this stunt with a sitting US governor in their own state…..except, Bush wouldn’t pull this.

The pool reporter, POLITICO’s Carrie Budoff Brown, said the scene was far from the norm. Aside from the pointing, they appeared to talk over each other and he appeared to walk away from her while they were still talking.

Brewer said the president brought up the book.

The book includes a passage in which Obama wasn’t particularly cordial to Brewer (via Hot Air)

“It was though President Obama thought he could lecture me, and I would learn at his knee,” the governor wrote, calling his tone “patronizing.”

“He thinks he can humor me and then get rid of me,” Brewer wrote.

Questioned about the different description, the governor said she did not lie.

“I mean, we weren’t yelling at one another, screaming at one another,” she said.

“But it was a pretty one-sided conversation,” Brewer said. “He was, I believe, condescending. And he was lecturing me about what we were going to do and how we were going to do it.”

As Allahpundit writes, being condescending, patronizing, and testy just sounds so unlike Obama. Doug Powers points out that Obama has had a similar exchange with Bobby Jindal. Wizbang wonders why Obama is so touchy. Nice Deb has lots of videos. Unshockingly, Outside The Beltway says Brewer was wrong for not just sitting there and taking Obama’s scolding. I guess she should have also gotten back in the kitchen and made Obama a sandwich, too.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Psychological research has found that religious people feel great about themselves, with a tendency toward higher social self-esteem and better psychological adjustment than non-believers. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this is only true in countries that put a high value on religion.

The researchers got their data from eDarling, a European dating site that is affiliated with eHarmony. Like eHarmony, eDarling uses a long questionnaire to match clients with potential dates. It includes a question about how important your personal religious beliefs are and questions that get at social self-esteem and how psychologically well-adjusted people are. Jochen Gebauer of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Constantine Sedikides of the University of Southampton, and Wiebke Neberich of Affinitas GmbH in Berlin, the company behind eDarling, used 187,957 people’s answers to do their analyses.

As in other studies, the researchers found that more religious people had higher social self-esteem and where psychologically better adjusted. But they suspected that the reason for this was that religious people are better in living up to their societal values in religious societies, which in turn should lead to higher social self-esteem and better psychological adjustment. The people in the study lived in 11 different European countries, ranging from Sweden, the least religious country on the planet, to devoutly Catholic Poland. They used people’s answers to figure out how religious the different countries were and then compared the countries.

On average, believers only got the psychological benefits of being religious if they lived in a country that values religiosity. In countries where most people aren’t religious, religious people didn’t have higher self-esteem. “We think you only pat yourself on the back for being religious if you live in a social system that values religiosity,” Gebauer says. So a very religious person might have high social self esteem in religious Poland, but not in non-religious Sweden.

In this study, the researchers made comparisons between different countries, but another study found a similar effect within one country, between students at religious and non-religious universities. “The same might be true when you compare different states in the U.S. or different cities,” Gebauer says. “Probably you could mimic the same result in Germany, if you compare Bavaria where many people are religious and Berlin where very few people are religious.”

SOURCE

The original journal article is “Religiosity, Social Self-Esteem, and Psychological Adjustment: On the Cross- Cultural Specificity of the Psychological Benefits of Religiosity” by Jochen Gebauer et al.

Two things to note: 1). As is so common in psychological research, the “sample” is in fact no sample at all. We have no idea how representative of the community at large are “Lonely Hearts”; 2). The assessment of mental health appears to have been rudimentary. A few queries about self-esteem and depression are a poor substitute for a proper mental health survey such as the MMPI. So again, the results must be taken with rock-salt.

Setting aside those reservations however, the interpretation also seems to make an assumption that may not be correct. The assumption is that only positive rewards are at work. It may be the other way around. The difference in interpretation is not large but it may be important.

I live in Australia, which, like Norway, is a very irreligious place, where regular churchgoers are something of a rarity. So I may have some insight into the results from Norway above

So I would summarize the research findings above as showing that religion does normally make you happier but that only shows up in places where it is accepted. Where religion has little acceptance and may be mocked (as it not uncommonly is in Australia) the social “punishment” for religious belief may cancel out that happiness. It may be bias against religious people that was the key driver of the national differences observed above.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes

Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact

Gordon Hodson et al.

Abstract

Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.

SOURCE

What the article ignores is that the mental gymnastics required by political correctness are considerable. A simple soul who sees a lot of black crime is likely to have a low opinion of blacks and say so. But, as is often said, some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual would believe them. And concluding that chronic black criminality is all Whitey’s fault is one such idea. So all the study really shows is that brighter people are more able to absorb the counterintuitive but politically correct cult that the elite have made normative in society. Only simpler people take their views from observable reality.

And we must also note that we are talking here about ADMITTED attitudes. And where some attitudes are much decried — as are racially-denominated attitudes — the truth of any admissions can only be speculated on. It could well be that attitude to blacks (say) is the same at all levels of IQ but only the simpler members of society are foolish enough to admit what they really think.

I could go on but I think it is already clear that this study proves nothing.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

I have to say, I am getting a bit sick and tired of this nonsensical lament about how rotten it is that those running for president are “rich” people. Stop it right now, America. The fact is that we’ve never really had a poor man as president so talking about it as if it is news that rich people often seek the presidency is stupid. Not only that, but today it is impossible for a poor or even middle class man to run for president anyway, so get this populist silliness out of your minds right this instant.

The latest in this onslaught of populist foolishness is the New York Times (unsurprisingly) with an article full of serious tones on how hard it is going to be for two Harvard educated, Richie-Riches like Obama and Romney to win over those “blue collar Americans.”

“Both are Harvard-educated millionaires,” The Times begins sonorously. “Both have been criticized as elitist and technocratic. Both have struggled to handle the populist anger coursing through politics.”

Of course, much of that anger is fostered by the Old Media constantly harping on that “anger” by writing daily stories indulging themes of class warfare as if it is some sort of legitimate political discussion in this, a capitalist-based society.

The worst part about this line of discussion is that it seems to suppose that it is all somehow “news” that rich people run for president. Not only have rich people always been the most common candidates for the White House, but the simple fact of the matter is we’ve never had a dirt poor president. Further, it is virtually impossible that we could — especially today.

So, let’s just get over this silly discussion, shall we?

Now, we have had several presidents that weren’t in the upper quintile of America’s rich, to be sure. But we’ve never had a president that could be classified as without financial support when he took office. We also haven’t even had a president who could have been considered lower class or even middle class when he started his campaign.

Certainly not every president was a millionaire (even adjusted for the economics of his day), but the largest portion were very rich. And those that weren’t extremely rich in their day (like Lincoln, for instance) were still far richer than the average American (like Lincoln, for instance). Additionally, those that weren’t themselves rich had the sort of lives that running for office did not negatively impinge on their own personal livelihood.

Let’s take Woodrow Wilson, for instance. He was not wealthy, mind you, but he also had few living expenses to worry about. As president of Princeton and Governor of New Jersey he was given a place to live. When he became president he then had the White House to live in. He had a series of books from which he made not inconsiderable sums and he was paid in a higher income bracket for his work than the average American of his day. The lowest one could consider Wilson is upper middle class, but his support system of colleges and government positions often removed from him the need to pay mortgages and other living expenses.

Calvin Coolidge was also not a rich man. But his father was and this helped Calvin early in life go to college and become an attorney. He made a nice living from his writing and owned some nice real estate free and clear of debt. He was also at the least upper middle class if not well off.

You see, even our poorest presidents still owned land and businesses and were far from penury while in office The worst of the lot seems to have been McKinley and Grant. McKinley once went bankrupt during the depression of 1893 and Grant’s finances were in bad shape until, at the end of his life, he wrote the well-received autobiography that made he and his family a tidy sum.

But let’s ask how a poor or even middle class person could run for president?

How many of you can afford to drop whatever it is you do for a living to go traipsing about the country for two or three years or more in order to run a nation-wide campaign for the White House? How many middle class (or poor) people can afford to stop making a living to campaign and can afford to stop worrying about their mortgage, their school loans, their water bill, their car insurance — in short how many middle class folks can afford to run for office and forget about their own personal and family expenses back home so that they can spend enough time on the campaign trail to build a voter base big enough to allow them to win both the primaries and a general election?

Let’s also not forget that if someone else come in to help the candidate’s family and pay their expenses while he runs for office, everyone would be crying about how that candidate was bought by whom ever it was that paid his bills while he ran. Plus, it’s illegal anyway!

We need to remember that our presidents have usually been leading national figures, anyway. Rarely do people become leading national figures from the depths of the poor house! Usually they are people that have attained some high station in life and America’s presidents have nearly all been someone of national renown. Our presidents were not notorious, but notable and success breeds riches in most cases. Let’s face it, people that rise to the heights of national prominence usually have more than a few shekels to rub together! They can afford to run for president and nearly all of our presidents were in that fortunate situation.

And today? Today it takes even more money to run for president because campaign finance laws are so Byzantine that self-funders are the first ones that have the capability to step up to the plate. And thanks to whiners like John McCain, we’ve set up a system where rich people are nearly the only ones that can afford to run for president!

Also consider this: do we want a person that couldn’t even make enough money for his family to be secure while he runs for office to become our president? Do we want a guy that can’t even succeed at that minimum rate of success living in the White House and guiding our nation?

Here is another thing to consider. Our founders meant the world of politics to be one of public service. To do that one must have already made his nut in life and had found himself with enough time on his hands and money in the bank to serve the country instead of serving himself.

Do we want people that need to grub for money to be president? Wouldn’t we be just as afraid that such a person would scramble to enrich himself while in office so that once out of office he had enough to live on? Wouldn’t this invite corruption?

Lastly, why is it so bad to want the best, brightest and most successful people to be our leaders? There was a day when being successful was something people admired. But that was before the media decided that capitalism was evil and rich people had to be both pilloried and plundered at the same time (and the logical end game of that meme is personified in the anti-capitalist, anti-success, anti-American Barack Obama).

The whole point here is to ask only this question: if you don’t want evil rich people to run for president, who can run for president and how do you expect them to do it?

So, come on, people. Stop this incessant whining about rich people running for office. It really is a stupid thing to focus on.

Obama? Why, he’s the middle class warrior, isn’t he? He’s the veritable man of the people, darn it. He has beer summits and he chows down on burgers and fries just like us reg’lar folks. Gone are the arugula days, the million-dollar vacations and secret Hollywood star-studded Halloween parties…. one out of three ain’t bad, anyway. On the other hand, perhaps all those claims of Obama’s middle class appeal are a bit of a show. If Obama’s new high-end, très chic campaign gear is any indication, he’s driving right for the vaunted One Percent.

With such famous haute couture designers as Vera Wang and Diane Von Furstenberg, team Obama is offering designer tote bags at $85, t-shirts with the hefty rice tag of $55, and a “Thakoon-designed silk scarf” that will set you back $95. With all that you’ve hardly got the sort of gear you might wear to a beer summit.

It’s all part of the Democrat Party’s “Runway To Win” campaign to raise cash for the cause.

As to the Republicans, t-shirts on Mitt Romney’s website cost no higher than $30, Newt’s t-shirts are only $20 — or you can get an embroidered polo for $40 — and Ron Paul charges even less offering his Ts for the low, low, dime-store prices of $17 and $18.

It is just a small thing, of course, but it tends to add to the long list of proof that Democrats speak out of both ends of their… well, their mouths. On one hand they pretend at being the party of the people, yet here they are catering to the one percent with campaign gear that most Americans could not justify paying for. It is just a piece with the whole picture of the elitist Democrat Party, to be sure.

The list of designers for this new Democrat-wear (and at these prices it’s a bit hard to even use the word democratic in the title) is filled with a who’s who of today’s hottest names in fashion: Tory Burch, Marc Jacobs, Beyonce & Tina Knowles, Derek Lam, Jack McCollough & Lazaro Hernandez, Tracy Reese, Narcisco Rodriguez, Rachel Roy, Thakoon Panichgul, Grace Tsao-Wu & Laura Kofoid, Diane Von Furstenberg, Marcus Wainwright & David Neville, Jason Wu, Altuzarra, Richard Blanch, Eddie Borgo, Georgina Chapman & Keren Craig, Sean Combs, Prabal Gurung, Monique Pean, Russell Simmons and Vera Wang.

Apparently, Mitt Romney and his surrogates want you to know that you should not vote your conscience or your principles this primary election. You should vote for Mitt Romney, instead. That is the message from Romney surrogate State Senator Gary Lambert in New Hampshire, anyway.

“This is not about picking your favorite, it’s not about picking someone you like. It’s not about picking someone even with your own beliefs and principles. This is about picking a person that can beat Barack Obama, period,” Lambert said at the Nashua New Hampshire Republican City Committee meeting on Friday.

We shouldn’t be voting for candidates with whom we agree on the issues? We shouldn’t be picking our “favorite”? What about principle? What about important policy issues? Aw, fergit it all. Never mind Romney’s long liberal political record. Never mind his near daily flip flops on the issues. Never mind his disdain for Reagan and the Tea Party movement. Never mind his claim that he’ really a “progressive” politician. Just vote Mitt, you dolts!

So, what exactly do we need all these messy darn elections for in the first place, then? If big chiefs like Lambert have already decided for us who is the guy why do we need to bother voting at all, eh? We have the big thinkers and genius politicos like Lambert to do the thinking for us, after all. We should just sit back and let the elites like Lambert run our lives for us because, heck, we all is jess tooo stoopit ta do it fer r-selves.

New Hampshire State Senator Gary Lambert is the kind of east coast, establishment, Rockefeller Republican that rank and file Republicans hate, and for good reason. He is an arrogant cuss that imagines you should shut up and do what he says. And he says shut up and vote for Mitt.

Lambert, who recently announced he will not be running for reelection, did not help Mitt Romney’s reputation at all here. Romney is desperate to reach rank-and-file voters but this is not helping him do that. Romney has softened his button-down image by appearing frequently without a suit jacket, he’s allowed his usually well coiffed hair to get mussed, and he’s tried to appear more like an every man. But his reputation as the candidate being forced on the GOP by establishment minders has not been erased. Lambert brought it all roaring right back to the fore with his poorly worded attempt to come to Romney’s support.

CNS News got the scoop:

Gary Lambert is the worst example of the sort of arrogant GOP elites. These are the kind of people that the Party would be well advised to keep in the background, far, far away from microphones. Better yet, let’s just not elect these sort of ignoratti to office in the first place.

He does make extended reference to a concept from social science — delay of gratification — but as my paper on that subject showed, most of the generalizations put forward in that research field are false. So he is leaning on a broken reed there too. Deferment of gratification is only weakly generalizable so even if a skeptic were a “non-deferrer” in one way, it would be unlikely to explain his skepticism. So Biegler is ignorant of the facts there too. Perhaps he should do some real research some day, instead of just pontificating

Instant gratification is a powerful, but flawed, human motivator.

IF YOU are down a blind alley searching for that perfect Christmas gift for your climate sceptic friend, you could do worse than slinging them a book on Emotional Intelligence. Why? Research is mounting that your friend is the victim of one of the brain’s many computing glitches. More particularly, he has been derailed by an emotional response that is at best unhelpful and at worst catastrophic. He has capitulated to the pleasure of the here and now.

In his recent book Brain Bugs, psychology professor Dean Buonomano summarises a wealth of evidence that when it comes to putting off rewards, many of us suck. In the most famous study, back in the 1960s, Walter Mischel sat unsuspecting toddlers at tables laid with a single marshmallow. They could eat it now or receive an extra one if they waited a short time. Some rug rats unceremoniously demolished the treat without delay, while others exercised supreme self-control and resisted temptation until the appointed moment. Follow-up of the youngsters two decades later found those who showed restraint had better college admission scores. Other studies have linked weakness of will with obesity and addiction.

From a food-gathering perspective, it is simply irrational to forgo a double treat for the sake of a few minutes’ wait. But, of course, we expect most four-year-olds to act irrationally and, in so doing, they mirror adult behaviour from our own evolutionary past. In our primordial history, when futures were predator-ridden and uncertain, it made sense to grab the food now rather than wait for a bigger, but later, chow-down. This is an example of temporal discounting, where greater rewards in the future are tagged with lesser value in virtue of their temporal distance.

Adults remain prone to temporal discounting. Given the choice of $100 now or $120 in a month, most take the money and run, sacrificing what amounts to an annual return on their one-month investment of 240 per cent. How could we be so dumb? It turns out that the allure of the immediate reward is strongly reinforced by emotions at the more pleasant end of the spectrum. Put simply, it often feels better to be rewarded straight away than to wait.

Climate scepticism is a strong candidate example of temporal discounting. A truckload of science supports global warming and its attendant perils. Yet, addressing this temporally far-flung threat, while generating distant benefit for our planet’s inheritors, will cost us real pleasure now. Self-imposed measures to reduce our carbon footprint do not bring universal glee, and the carbon tax will hit both our wallets and our wellbeing.

But one of the reasons for the astounding reproductive success of humans is our capacity to bring our cortical computing power, and its rationality, to bear on our insistent emotions, Plato’s unruly horse.

Many emotions still help and validly guide action, such as the fright one feels when a car whizzes dangerously close as we cross the road. But others need reining in when faced with compelling evidence on future prospects. The ability to apply rational foresight to limit the sway of short-term emotional reward is a true intelligence.

The task is difficult, not least because many of our emotional decisions are backed by post hoc – but aberrant – rationalisation. Nowhere is this writ larger than in the domain of marketing and consumer behaviour. For example, a large body of evidence shows that the emotional reward of status enhancement fuels prestige-car purchases. Yet most of us either wilfully deny this, or simply lack introspective access to our true motivations. Instead we convince ourselves that it was the eight air bags or the stability control that clinched it.

In the climate realm, fabrication is also rife. Enthralled by their emotional biases, sceptics mouth desperate appeals to the corruptibility of scientists, or to the fallibility of climate prediction models.

To err is human and we should forgive many their inability to constrain the draw of the emotions. But this failure is inexcusably egregious in our politicians who are steering the ship for the long voyage, not just around the next reef. To those who still succumb to immediate gratification at the expense of our long-term good, I say welcome any Christmas gifts on brain bugs and emotional intelligence with open arms. Our grandchildren’s future could depend on it.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

(SMH) IF YOU are down a blind alley searching for that perfect Christmas gift for your climate sceptic friend, you could do worse than slinging them a book on Emotional Intelligence. Why? Research is mounting that your friend is the victim of one of the brain’s many computing glitches. More particularly, he has been derailed by an emotional response that is at best unhelpful and at worst catastrophic. He has capitulated to the pleasure of the here and now.

…In the climate realm, fabrication is also rife. Enthralled by their emotional biases, sceptics mouth desperate appeals to the corruptibility of scientists, or to the fallibility of climate prediction models.

To err is human and we should forgive many their inability to constrain the draw of the emotions. But this failure is inexcusably egregious in our politicians who are steering the ship for the long voyage, not just around the next reef. To those who still succumb to immediate gratification at the expense of our long-term good, I say welcome any Christmas gifts on brain bugs and emotional intelligence with open arms. Our grandchildren’s future could depend on it.

If you want to buy your alarmist friends a Christmas gift, I suggest you purchase the Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook, and tell them to implement all 77 ideas. Better yet, buy them nothing, because all the CO2 caused by Christmas is evil in their minds, and giving them nothing would reduced their carbon footprint.