Studies don't actually seem that wrong to me - a lot of them could be subsumed by Haidt's moral foundations theory ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt#Moral_Foundations_Theory , which makes use of those same spider-on-face studies and which many reactionaries broadly endorse), others by my theory about survive/thrive dichotomy ( http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ ), still others by Openness to Experience on Big 5, which is known to be correlated with politics and *maaaybe* involves cognitive tradeoff between trusting priors and trusting posteriors ( see http://lesswrong.com/lw/e25/bayes_for_schizophrenics_reasoning_in_delusional/ ). We know that a lot of political disposition is inherited and these sorts of considerations seem like one way that could happen. So the main point of this part of the article seems to be that some liberal psychologists (especially when taken out of context and then mocked) sound like they're very hostile to conservativism (which they probably are, but I predict if they looked at what they said in the studies instead of media interviews it would be a lot less damning). But the studies themselves seem pretty good.

The part with racism - you've got to remember that most racists aren't like you. The sort of racism that reads a bunch of studies and concludes a moderate racial difference in some personality variables is a lot different from the type of racism that forms a lynch mob to kill the one black person in town who runs a small store and isn't hurting anybody - and that 99% of racists in the world are probably the second type. It would not surprise me if that was associated with various forms of threat and negative feeling and poor reasoning ability, just as it would not surprise me if there were liberal things that were associated with that as well (let's say tendency toward class war type attitudes). If the Radish article had focused on how psychologists are too liberal to investigate the class war type stuff, I would be on the same page as it. As it is, it seems to take studies that are broadly correct and insult people for doing them.

Also, been studying psychology/psychiatry for ten years now, never heard anyone claim that racism should be a personality disorder, expect that most people would find this ridiculous. This is very likely cherry-picking one guy who said something dumb, and it's not obvious to me if he was even metaphorical or not.

The attempt to tie in the Frances/DSM-5 controversy about politics or racism is just weird.