Comments on: On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics

By: Stewart/Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity & the Psychology of Moderates | PoliPsych.com

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:27:39 +0000

[...] as well and "never settling" for imperfect moral outcomes seems like a recipe for the kind of political ugliness that we see these [...]

By: Kitsune

Kitsune — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:11:03 +0000

I’d love to keep you posted, but like I said, I want for it to be anonymous and while it isn’t posted you know my e-mail address (which is not a pseudonym) and so it wouldn’t be anonymous if I told you. But thank you very much for pointing-out those resources. While I have of course read The Happiness Hypothesis I haven’t read Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century and will order it ASAP.

By: Ravi

Ravi — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:48:45 +0000

Personally, I think an experiential aspect to a moral education would be essential. When I teach about morality, I often use the Haidt’s Brother-Sister incest dilemma and Greene’s trolley problems as ways to show moral irrationality at an experiential level as people feel the discomfort. Jon Haidt’s book has some good resources too: http://www.happinesshypothesis.com/beyond-teaching.html and Jonathan Glover’s book: Humanity, A Moral History is an interesting book too. I think anything that challenges existing beliefs (e.g. helping liberals understand conservatives and vice versa) is helpful and framing things as challenges to existing beliefs might make it seem more value neutral. Please keep me posted on your efforts as I’m quite interested in where they lead.

By: Kitsune

Kitsune — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:13:17 +0000

But a good moral education wouldn’t have to advocate value pluralism, only help people realize that it motivates many people. As a hobby I’ve always wanted to create a basic moral education course, and even registered a domain anonymously so that I could anonymously post it some day. It is deeply upsetting to me that all of the things I’ve been able to find on the topic have been commercial and have focused on indoctrinating values rather than cultivating moral wisdom. Do you have any suggestions about where to look? What do you think the most important parts of a moral education would be? What do you think the biggest pitfalls would be?

By: Ravi

Ravi — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:02:42 +0000

I think moral education is a promising direction…and hopefully we can take some of the recent findings of moral psychology and integrate them into social psychology courses. The trick, I think, is to find a way to do it that isn’t perceived as brainwashing kids to be either liberal or conservative. Indeed, value pluralism itself may generally correlate with conservativism.

By: Kitsune

Kitsune — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:18:56 +0000

Intergroup Contact Theory is great, but logistically a nightmare. And it seems like the reason it works is because it corrects, to a degree, the caricatures that people create of the people they view as members of the outgroup. What’s wrong with moral education, learning about value pluralism, learning about social psychology, etc.? Do these effects persist after awareness? Are they not dampened at all by awareness?