Moral Psychology | Data Science & Psychology

26Mar/13

Your Values Predict the Stories You Choose

Human beings are storytelling animals. There is no other species that spends large amounts of time watching the lives of others – fictitious or real – through the stories we read or watch. Stories do not just relate to the entertainment we consume, but are also central to the news we read or the companies [...]

Tagged as: coherence, hedonism, marketing, maslow, narratives, personality psychology, storytelling Comments Off

23Aug/12

New Research on the Moral Psychology of Libertarians

While some followers of this blog may be familiar with some of the ideas in this paper, the final version of our publication about libertarian morality has just been published in PLOS One. You can read the full paper here. In addition, in the spirit of the Khan Academy, I created the below video summary [...]

Tagged as: conservatives, liberals, libertarians, moral psychology, personality traits, ron paul Comments Off

5Apr/12

Big Data Should Measure Value Fit

I gave a presentation at South by Southwest earlier this month. I appreciate the many people who voted for my idea, who attended my talk, and who gave me feedback via twitter or face to face afterwards. It was a great experience.
It was a great experience, not for the people I met or for the thrill of speaking , [...]

Tagged as: big data, happiness, moral psychology, semantic web, sxsw 4 Comments

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

29Dec/10

Tony Washington’s NFL Story: How wrong is brother-sister incest?

Moral psychology has no answer as to whether brother-sister incest is wrong, but I have given the below dilemma, made famous by Jonathan Haidt, many times in classes to undergraduates. It is particularly useful in that it allows people to experience, rather than just learning about, the social intuitionist approach to moral reasoning.
Julie and Mark [...]

Tagged as: disgust, jonathan haidt, moral psychology, tony washington No Comments

28Aug/10

Why do we study the psychology of libertarians?

We recently submitted a paper for publication about libertarian morality, along with co-authors Spassena Koleva, Jesse Graham, Pete Ditto, and Jonathan Haidt. The paper leverages our broad set of measures to tell a story about libertarians, which converges with previously reported findings about liberals and conservatives. Specifically, all ideological groups demonstrate the same patterns whereby [...]

Tagged as: liberals and conservatives, libertarians, partisanship, psychological reactance 2 Comments

12Jul/10

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 [...]

Tagged as: consilience, extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, moral psychology, self determination theory, sinek 1 Comment

23Jun/10

On the Morality of Torture & Utilitarianism

I personally do not believe in torture, but I have to admit that when I think of it, my mind prototypically thinks of the potential harm that might befall an innocent person caught by an unscrupulous policeman who is all too sure of his moral superiority. What would I do if I knew with 100% [...]

Tagged as: harsh interrogation techniques, moral maximizing, torture, utilitarianism No Comments

28Apr/10

What is more Immorral? Distracted Driving or Smoking Marijuana?

The answer is that it depends on whom you ask. Below is a graph based on yourmorals data where participants were randomly assigned to answer whether they agreed that “XXX is immoral” about one of seven health behaviors.

As you can see, conservatives feel that ingesting all types of substances (cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine) are [...]

Tagged as: conservatives, distracted driving, illegal drugs, liberals, moral foundations, purity, smoking marijuana 7 Comments

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