The values of people who are “Spiritual, but not Religious”
Some people in psychology have a theory that everyone wants to study themselves. I don’t really have a religious category that fits. I grew up going occasionally to a protestant church and I occasionally go to a new-age church in Los Angeles. If I had to pick a category, I might pick “Spiritual, but not [...]
Moral confabulation: when you dislike something so much that you make up stuff
I would like to coin the term moral confabulation (ok, I didn’t coin it first…there are 23 google results for it…but I’d like to popularize it) and I’ve now added it as a category on this site. Confabulation is the formation of false beliefs or memories. In the moral realm, one confabulates when ones emotional gut reaction [...]
Robustness of Liberal-Conservative Moral Foundations Questionnaire Differences
All social science research faces questions about the external validity of the results. Much social psychology research is done on students and so the natural question is whether those findings generalize to non-student populations. Even representative surveys of the population face questions about validity due to the assumptions which go into what representative means. Since [...]
Three polls which point to differing underlying fairness principles driven by differing goals
I recently saw 3 posts on fivethirtyeight.com which may seem unrelated to many, but to my admittedly biased perception, which seeks supporting evidence for my thesis that the differing goals of harm reduction vs. productivity increase, underlie much of observed political divisions. These were three interesting and convergent findings. This thesis was first put forth [...]
World vs. Country focus for Obama vs. McCain supporters
These results aren’t really surprising, but Obama and McCain supporters have different ideas about who they identify with, based on Sam McFarland’s Identification with All Humanity Scale.
Specifically, those who plan to vote for McCain identify most with their country while those who plan to vote for Obama identify most with the world as a whole.
More [...]
Cluster analysis of VoteHelp Data for the 2008 Political Psychology Conference
Below are the results of a cluster analysis of VoteHelp.org data which I used to identify subgroups within the traditional liberal and conservative dimensions. The groups identified were:
Social issue liberals (cluster 1 in excel sheet)
Environment & education liberals (cluster 2 in excel sheet)
Law and order conservatives (cluster 3 in excel sheet)
Social issue conservatives (cluster 4 [...]
What do moral psychology scales say about supporters of Obama and Clinton?
Draft by Ravi Iyer, Sena Koleva, Jesse Graham, and Peter Ditto
The 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary has featured 2 candidates, Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with very similar political positions who nevertheless have garnered enthusiastic support [...]
more on Obama vs. Clinton and the Moral Foundations of their supporters
I shared this post with my colleagues and was asked if the result (Hillary supporters are “loyal” or structure oriented democrats who score higher on authority/ingroup/purity) would hold for just democrats or just people who are very interested in the election. It turns out that the pattern does indeed hold when we just include [...]
moral foundation facts about barack obama and hillary clinton supporters
I recently attended SPSP, the main conference for personality and social psychologists, and met with the people who I work with on yourmorals.org. Among the things we discussed at the meeting was the idea of reporting results that touch on current events in a more timely fashion, rather than focusing solely on academic publications. [...]
Liberals vs. Conservatives on the Schwartz Values Scale
I had to do a presentation relating some of my current work on yourmorals.org to some of the history of moral psychology and in doing so, I created this graph. It doesn’t include all the respondents on yourmorals.org as we changed our politics measure at one point and this graph only represents our newest subjects. [...]