Political Skullduggery

In the "no kidding" department we must place the results of a conference held by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

The scholars at the conference presented papers which studied the psychological underpinnings behind voter preference.

Lo and behold, they discovered that people who were more distrustful of blacks tended to vote Republican.

(A) study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes -- subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.

That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.

Hell, they could have saved a lot of time and money simply by having a conversation with a typical Bush supporter.

For their study, Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson culled self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial bias that measures the speed of people's associations between black or white faces and positive or negative words. The researchers examined correlations between explicit and implicit attitudes and voting behavior in all 435 congressional districts.

The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.

The Republican party has known about this for many years. That's why they used to always campaign on the issue of "law and order."

Now, with their new winning strategy of "security", they appeal to several types of racial prejudice.

It provides more hate for their campaign dollar.