PoliPsych.com Exploring Political Attitudes Through Moral Psychology

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 [...]

30Jan/100

Hypermoralism – Morality causes ordinary people to do immoral things.

Some people believe that immoral acts are caused by amoral individuals. However, very few people are truly immoral (~1% of individuals are psychopaths). The idea of the term, hypermoralism, is to popularize the idea that morality can actually cause people to be immoral, rather than prevent them from being immoral (e.g. see this post). It’s [...]

30Jan/100

What are the psychological differences that make people liberal democrats, conservative republicans, or libertarians?

While I am definitely prototypically liberal, I know a lot of good solid people who happen to be conservative. I also live in a state (California), where some of the excesses of liberalism are self-evident. There is merit to traditionally conservative principles like respect for tradition and desire to reward those who work hard over [...]

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 [...]

3Oct/090

Moral Confabulation: What is it and why does it matter?

Given the fact that the term is not widely used and that this site now is the first google entry for “moral confabulation” (not that there is any real competition), the responsible thing to do is to properly define moral confabulation and summarize previous research.
What is moral confabulation?
Confabulation is a well studied phenomenon in psychology. [...]