https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=K4XFwWCVTx8
If trade openness is a common feature on the left, why is it that they become so intractable and totalitarian in practice? What happened to openness? You know, the answer to that is I don’t know. I don’t know. You know, I was just starting to engage in that research when my research enterprise essentially came to a shuddering halt because my university career became untenable. My suspicions are that openness is a good predictor of moderate leftist attitudes and remains that way, but that at some point the leftist proclamations become so extreme that new predictors predict those attitudes. Now, we have some evidence for that. Like we know, for example, that the proclivity to abide by left-wing authoritarian attitudes, which would be the willingness to impose leftist views by force, let’s say, that that’s associated with low verbal intelligence, a feminine temperament, being female and having been exposed to politically correct processes of indoctrination. We also know from research that wasn’t done in my lab that dark, the dark tetrad personality traits, Machiavellianism, which is manipulativeness, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, that’s the desire for unearned attention, and sadism are also features that are much more common among those who purport to hold left-wing authoritarian ideas. So I would say that the left is not a homogeneous political category and that as the leftist attitudes become more extreme, they rigidify, and within that rigid population, the personality predictors of leftist liberalism flip and switch. And so, but I haven’t seen a systematic evaluation of that yet. Now, it’s a great research question, you know, if what you would do is you’d segregate, you’d have to develop a scale that indicated intensity of conviction in relationship to leftist principles, and you could do that psychometrically. You’d have to develop a corpus of leftist beliefs, and then you’d have to rank order them for severity, right, and that would be something like an estimate of their, of the proclivity of the holder of that viewpoint to believe that it’s acceptable to impose them by force. Then you’d have to subdivide the leftists into categories of severity and look differentially at personality predictors across the span of intensity of belief. But nobody’s done anything that sophisticated yet. So it’s an open question, and if you’re, I don’t know why you’re asking this question, you know, it looks like you’ve got some knowledge. It’s an excellent research, and for any research question, anybody who’s listening, who’s doing graduate work in psychological research, especially in social psychology or personality psychology, that’s a real wide-open area of investigation and a real important one.