Why do linguists do this kind of stuff?

[mjbarefoot]

 Quoted from this:
"Such vulgar psychologising is best captured in the writings of George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff imagines he is being insightful when he writes about the differences between red and blue voters; in fact he is recycling a caricatured version of Theodor Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality. Lakoff

Comments

[flurious]

hey, remember deusisms? I think that article is a prime example of one.

[bbsy]

I suppose someone could find the people who were in Ainsworth's Strange Situation experiment and ask them what their political affiliations are. Or poll people and sort them based on whether the parenting styles they grew up with were authoritarian, authoritative, or permissive.

It seems like the results might not be statistically significant, but who knows? And psychology has too many mediating/lurking variables.

That said, why is it nonsense? I guess it is making a lot of wild inferences, and hinging voting patterns too heavily on this possible phenomenon.

People's worldviews, and consequently perspectives, can be shaped by their environment during development to some extent - what they end up considering most important in life, what causes they end up being passionate about. And most voters' decisions do seem to pivot on a few issues.

[bbsy]

Happy birthday.