As I’ve watched  The Prayer Palace the past couple of weeks in traditional media, blogs and forums, I’ve alternated between being flummoxed, being angry and feeling sorrow and grief. Betrayal of trust and attending confusion is tough to watch. Reaction is tough to watch. Ignorance is tough to watch.

What remains most difficult is to see people cease to struggle with information and dig their heels in.  This being the internet, watching us get our exercise jumping to conclusions can be disconcerting. The disconnect between a traditional media source doing an investigative series and how that series is perceived by those most directly affected has always set me back on my heels a bit. I suspect it always will.

One advantage of having a blog is that I can post links that require I push myself a bit. The act of posting is a reminder I need to read what I’ve linked too, and it’s a form of discipline like following through on a ‘to do’ list.

I am pleased to see Professor Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba put this book online. His study of authoritarian personalities satisfies the rigors of academic thought while presenting us with information we don’t need graduate level understanding to dissect.
From Altemeyer’s introduction to The Authoritarians:

The second reason I can offer for reading what follows is that it is not chock full of opinions, but experimental evidence.  Liberals have stereotypes about conservatives, and conservatives have stereotypes about liberals.  Moderates have stereotypes about both. Anyone who has watched, or been a liberal arguing with a conservative (or vice versa) knows that personal opinion and rhetoric can be had a penny a pound.  But the arguing never seems to get anywhere.  Whereas if you set up a fair and square experiment in which people can act nobly, fairly, and with integrity, and you find that most of one group does, and most of another group does not, that’s a fact, not an opinion.  And if you keep finding the same thing experiment after experiment, and other people do too, then that’s a body of facts that demands attention.  Some people, we have seen to our dismay, don’t care a hoot what scientific investigation reveals.  But most people do.  If the data were fairly gathered and we let them do the talking, we should be on a higher plane than the current, Sez you!

Sez me, I’ve got some reading to do.:^)