It looks like here you have inadvertently provided a good argument for the opposite of what you wanted.

That's odd, it looks to me as if you're taking a rather loose analogy in a direction somewhere away from the topic. Getting back on topic:

My point was that "conservatism" isn't a thing — it's a label, and that people's responses to that label have to do with what they take it as referring to.

It's been noted elsethread that the survey has serious problems. One of them is that it doesn't ask what the surveyed psychologists think they are talking about when they say "conservative". If you ask someone, "What do you think about conservatives?" you will get different answers based not only on what that person's values are, but what they think "conservative" means.

If scientists use "conservative" to mean "a person who values religious doctrine over scientific results", then you are ill-advised to represent yourself as "conservative" when trying to get a job from a scientist. Especially if you don't mean that when you say "conservative"!

Note the difference between "scientists use 'conservative' to mean 'a person who values religious doctrine over science'" and "scientists think that conservatives value religious doctrine over science". The latter implies that scientists are referring to an objective class of "conservatives" whereas the former considers that scientists may not be referring to the same set of people when they say "conservative" that someone else refers to by that word.

I think we have a problem of sneaking in connotations here.