Scientific ideology

Scientific ideology is a term once used for forms of scientific endeavour that also had ideological consequences, whether recognised or not.The term was originally based on Marx's treatment of British political economy.  Ricardo's stuff wasn't blatantly ideological, it is just that he did not question many of the underlying assumptions about the object of his inquiry -- that the market system alone must explain surplus value, that there was no other scientific kind of value except exchange value, and so on.

Psychology rarely attains even the status of economics, but it can present all the trappings of science, especially statistical data. A recent example is a quite well-developed study of cultural tightness vs cultural looseness by two US psychologists.One article based on the work is reported in the GUardian today:

Here’s the science behind the Brexit vote and Trump’s rise 

'The science' consists of classic psychological scale construction, where a number of items are chosen as signifiant indicators of some underlying variable and these are consolidated or intercorrelated. There is one massive multi-authored study published in Science making the basic case that a number of measures of attitudes and behaviours can be grouped in terms of an underlying notion of cultural tightness or looseness (quite close to degrees of tolerance of deviation from cultural norms, not that different from the famous studies of authoritarianism, but see below). A more manageable and later study cited in the Guardian piece  gives the flavour:

This research demonstrates wide variation in tightness-looseness (the strength of punishment and degree of latitude/permissiveness) at the state level in the United States, as well as its association with a variety of ecological and historical factors, psychological characteristics, and state-level outcomes. Consistent with theory and past research, ecological and man-made threats such as a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater disease prevalence, fewer natural resources, and greater degree of external threat predicted increased tightness at the state level. Tightness is also associated with higher trait conscientiousness and lower trait openness, as well as a wide array of outcomes at the state level. Compared with loose states, tight states have higher levels of social stability, including lowered drug and alcohol use, lower rates of homelessness, and lower social disorganization. However, tight states also have higher incarceration rates, greater discrimination and inequality, lower creativity, and lower happiness relative to loose states. In all, tightness-looseness provides a parsimonious explanation of the wide variation we see across the 50 states of the United States of America

It might well be worth exmining the precise details of the questions used in the scales, the internal correlations  that consolidate them, whether any 'weak' predictors were excluded, and how the whole structure of the argument avoids circularity: the underlying variables of tightness cannot be demonstrated as an empirical result if they guided the empirical research in the first place. 

But leave all that to one side for now and get back to the Graun. Did the variables explain different voting patters for Trump? Another piece suggests so. Indeed, the headline suggests that the Trump team somehow knew the results of the study: 'Trump Won by Following This Psychological Formula

Trump’s campaign capitalized on a basic scientific principle that manifests time and time again in our cultural psychology research: When people perceive threats, they show a greater desire for tight rules and for strong leaders who say they can create social order and coordination. Leaders who have strong autocratic tendencies, like Trump, fit this bill. Trump wasn’t just a strong personality; he fostered a culture of threat and fear and in doing so, rode the wave of a changing culture of a significant portion of the American population...our survey found cultural tightness to predict Trump support with 44 times the power of people’s preference for authoritarianism [we still dont know how accurate that is of course, and how was support for Trump actually measured?]

The study departs from scientific analysis altogether to get partisan. This is quite unlike the more 'balanced' discussion of the social aspects of tightness in the more academic piece above. It gets paranoid and darky-arty in spelling out 'a formula' used by politicians like Trump: 

1. Create an atmosphere of threat and fear.2. Pander to the vulnerable.3. Attack existing civil institutions.4. Convince voters that you are the only person who can lead the revolution to restore order.

This sort of activism always leads to massive suspicion about the actual research and how the terms were defined, of course, but my main objection is to an extension far too far: 'Cultural tightness was a driving force when Britain voted to leave the European Union this past June and when the Law and Justice Party won Poland’s parliamentary elections last year', the Trump piece declares, and the Guardian piece adds: 'Fearful voters also drove the UK’s Brexit decision and the candidacies of far-right or autocratic politicians in Poland, Russia, the Philippines, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Italy.'
No studies are cited here. There is a statement that research has been done on M Le Pen in France: 'Our research confirms that the strongest Trump supporters, as well as the supporters of Marine Le Pen in France, believe their country is threatened', but that link leads only to a piece on Le Pen in the Guardian
There is no study of how the measurements might 'predict' a Brexit vote, nor distinguish between strongest and weakest supporters. The whole thing makes sense, as usual, only if we see Brexiteers and Trumpites alike as some group of intolerant crypto-racists unable to adapt to change. Ironically, we seem to have learned rather a lot about the perceived threats and vulnerabilities of liberals again, and how the Grudnia attempts to increase the cultural tightness of its own position.