Differences Between Republicans And Democrats

20Sep/12

How Coherence Defines Conservatism

One of the pitfalls in doing political psychology research is that it is tempting to define an ideology using the perspective of whatever you study. Researchers necessarily (and I’m sure I do this too) talk about the novelty and uniqueness of their findings in order to convince editors of journals of the objective importance of [...]

Tagged as: coherence, conservatives, liberals, moral coherence, political psychology Comments Off

15Oct/11

Liberals vs. Conservatives:innocent until proven guilty?

If you are uncertain if a criminal is innocent or guilty, is it better to err on the side of innocence or guilt? Given that proof is continuous, not categorical, how much bias toward innocent until proven guilty should one have? A friend of a friend recently asked is this question to a group of [...]

Tagged as: guilt, innocence, occupy wall street 2 Comments

18Jun/11

Relative vs. Absolute Good Choices for Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians

Awhile ago, I read about a survey given to Harvard Medical school students about whether they would prefer to live in a world where they had a higher absolute amount of some beneficial good or a higher relative amount. For example, participants had a choice of living in a world where they make $100,000 and [...]

Tagged as: positional goods, relative income, relative vs. absolute goods 2 Comments

23Apr/11

Liberals place more value on being funny than conservatives and libertarians.

I’ve been watching a lot of comedy central lately and have been wondering why there does not appear to be a conservative equivalent, just as there is no popular liberal equivalent to conservative AM talk radio. Perhaps liberals value being funny more than conservatives?
To test this idea, I thought I’d look at the data from [...]

Tagged as: comedy, conservatives, liberals, libertarians 4 Comments

30Mar/11

Why should the US lead in Libya? Liberal-Conservative Value Differences.

Why should the US lead in Libya? This is a question I’ve been asking myself a number of times as I’ve heard one common criticism of Obama and our actions in Libya, specifically that we aren’t demonstrating leadership. Personally, I would like Gaddafi stopped and perhaps most importantly, I’d like us to save lives when [...]

Tagged as: charles krauthammer, libya, sarah palin, war 1 Comment

24Mar/11

Perceptions of Scarcity & Responsibility inform Budget Negotiations

I was recently asked about the psychology of scarcity and it gave me an excuse to revisit an old paper by Skitka and Tetlock (1992, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) that contains a more complex version of the model I depict below. Like many who are interested in politics, I’ve been following the recent budget [...]

Tagged as: abundance, budget deficit, keynesian economics, liberals and conservatives, scarcity 6 Comments

11Feb/11

Are liberals more neurotic than conservatives?

At our recent meeting of social psychologists, I had a few conversations about a particular facet of our data, the fact that liberals in our dataset score higher on measures of neuroticism than conservativism. The effect in our data is small, but not insignificant (d=.24 of the standard deviation). This surprised some people in that [...]

Tagged as: neuroticism 2 Comments

18Dec/10

Tony Hsieh, liberals, and libertarians prefer buying experiences to materialism – A Review of Delivering Happiness

I recently finished Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, which is partially a business book, detailing his remarkable story where he has won (selling Link Exchange to Microsoft in his 20s for $265 million) and lost (selling almost everything to turn Zappos around) fortunes. Zappos, an online shoe seller, has gone on to become the model [...]

Tagged as: tony hsieh, zappos 1 Comment

2Dec/10

The Definition of Moral Hazard and A Review of The Big Short

Wikipedia defines a moral hazard as “when a party insulated from risk behaves differently than it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk.” By this definition, the financial crisis is a classic tale of moral hazard. I recently stayed up til 3am finishing Michael Lewis’ book, The Big Short, which explains the [...]

Tagged as: michael lewis, moral hazard, the big short 3 Comments

23Nov/10

Does conflict avoidance underlie disproportionate liberal support of civility?

I recently attended a lecture by Vivian Schiller, the CEO of NPR, where an audience member asked her insights about Roger Ailes’ recent assertion (Ailes is CEO of Fox News) that NPR executives “are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want [...]

Tagged as: civility, jon stewart, partisanship 4 Comments

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