What is the Role of Public Health?
There was a paper published in PLOS ONE about a year ago. They were looking at [the following issue]. Let’s say I assessed your political attitudes — I could do that with, say, an authoritarian belief scale, because authoritarianism has been studied quite a bit since the end of World War II. Nobody really knew what to do with it in relation to personality, but it doesn’t matter; you can assess it with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
These people did two things: they did a cross-country survey and then within-country surveys. So if you were looking at a phenomenon, you could look at the country level — US vs. Canada — or you could go into the US and then you could look at a state level. And it’s nice to do the analysis of both levels, to see if it replicates itself across the two different conceptual strata.
And what they found was mind-boggling. It’s Nobel-prize-winning stuff, as far as I’m concerned.
The correlation between the prevalence of infectious disease in a locale and the degree to which authoritarian beliefs were held in that locale was about .7. It’s like, you never see that in the social sciences. That’s higher than the correlation between IQ and grades, which is about as good as we ever get in terms of prediction.
So it’s like, really? It’s that high? And one of the things that implies is that one of the ways to get rid of authoritarian attitudes, assuming that you want to get rid of such things, is through public health.
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