I do wish I had the URL for the study that claimed that contrary evidence made "conservatives" react in a backlash way. As I said, I don't know how much credence to give it, since there was only some sketchy mention of controls, and the report didn't even give a good idea of how "conservative/liberal" was operationally defined. I am sorry that Fanusi Khiyal finds it irritating that I would mention it, but after all I was only saying that the subject needs more research.

Thanks memphis matt for that link to Harris, who might also be interested in seeing (or doing) such research:

[from http://www.edge.org/discourse/vote_morality.html#harriss]
He (Haidt) admonishes us to get it into our thick heads that many of our neighbors "honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats." ... There are names for this type of "preference," one of the more polite being "ignorance."
[and]
We know from many lines of converging research that our feeling of reasoning objectively, in concordance with compelling evidence, is often an illusion.

What Harris says here adds substance to my concern that there is, within our "moral" discussion, room for questioning the validity of the "reasoning" on which it is supposed to be based. I have never felt that the commonly claimed philosophical separation of "ought" from "is" was justifiable, as it seems an invitation to dogmatists to derive their "oughts" from what "isn't". We need to start from a common notion of how we come to call something true (or even likely true), and that's what science has always been about -- how to catch ourselves and shake ourselves loose when we start believing in the illusion of objectivity we like to construct around both our received knowledge and our new conjectures. Science is not independent of moral judgments; to even try to do science IS a moral judgment.