PoliPsych.com Exploring Political Attitudes Through Moral Psychology

12Jul/100

Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories

Presented in the context of bringing together consilience from outside of psychology, a friend of mine sent me the below TED video, by Simon Sinek, which I believe has a lot in common with what much of psychology is discovering, specifically that intrinsic gut-level motivations are much more powerful than extrinsic rational motivations.  In some ways, much [...]

15Jun/101

What can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities cannot?

Some colleagues of mine were fortunate enough to gather in Herzilaya, Israel for a conference on morality, the product of which is publicly available online. As I reach the end of my graduate school career, I find myself wondering about the greater purpose of some of the research psychologists do and I found particular resonance [...]

11May/100

Wanted: Motivated Academic Writers to Help Publish Our Data

Thanks to the publicity which moral psychology (and specifically Jon Haidt’s work) has begun to receive, along with the average person’s insatiable appetite for knowledge about themselves, facilitated by the internet, we have collected a truly unique dataset at yourmorals.org. It is a large community sample and includes some reaction time data. It is non-representative [...]

4May/100

Can open government data inform voters in the 2010 election?

Unfortunately, I think the answer is no. For the last week, I’ve been attempting to update a ‘candidate calculator’ website that I helped create for the 2008 presidential election, votehelp.org. Candidate calculators are a term for quizzes or surveys which ask you questions about issues (sometimes weighted by issue importance) and then match you with [...]

30Apr/102

Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?

Last weekend (April, 2010), I attended my favorite event in Los Angeles, the LA Times Festival of Books, and picked up the book Consilience, by E. O. Wilson. Consilience literally means the “jumping together” of knowledge and Wilson talks about how there is a potential orderliness or unity of knowledge that is possible across academic [...]

19Apr/100

How to publish a Replication of Disgust & Big Five Personality Trait Correlations

I have recently been following a discussion in my discipline about the peer review process, which led me to this very interesting paper about the history of and alternatives to the peer review process in psychology.
At the same time, I’ve been working with colleagues on a paper about experiential vs. material purchasing styles, for which [...]

1Apr/106

Nate Silver and Veronique de Rugy demonstrate how a more modern peer review process could work.

As someone who was in the dot-com world for years before entering academia, I’ve always felt that the peer review process could be made far more efficient and while I’m not 100% sure what form that would take, it might look something like a recent exchange between Nate Silver, an Obama supporter who runs fivethirtyeight.com (which [...]

5Oct/090

The Business of Psychology: Will the peer review journal article system be changed by technology?

In a sense, academics have been ‘crowd sourcing’ for years.  The first documented case of peer review was in 1665 (according to wikipedia), though this only became a standard in the later part of the 20th century.  Peer review refers to the process whereby other academics review the work of potential authors of new knowledge [...]