News Commentary | Data Science & Psychology

14Dec/12

How to Prevent Mental Illness: Help others with their stressful life events

I’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile, not just in response to the recent tragedy in Connecticut, but anytime I read an article about homelessness or people who are mentally disturbed. Many people wonder what we can do to address the mentally ill, whether it is to prevent them from engaging in violence [...]

Tagged as: homeless, how to prevent mental illness, medical model, mental illness Comments Off

24Nov/12

When is investment banking immoral? A review of Greg Smith’s book, Why I left Goldman Sachs.

On Thanksgiving evening, I started reading Greg Smith’s book, Why I left Goldman Sachs late in the afternoon. I finished it around midnight. It’s a relatively easy read with a relatively straightforward message: That Wall Street, as exemplified by Goldman Sachs’ evolution, has increasingly become a place where we send many of our brightest students [...]

Tagged as: goldman sachs, greg smith, investment bankers, new york times, wall street Comments Off

21Nov/12

On Mitt Romney and The X-Files

Those of you interested in political psychology and data science might enjoy my latest post on the Ranker Data Blog entitled Mitt Romney Should Have Advertised on the X-Files. In it, I explore correlations between liking Mitt Romney and liking various TV Shows on lists on Ranker.com, replicating analyses which the Obama campaign purportedly conducted [...]

Tagged as: data science, mitt romney, obama, political psychology, x files Comments Off

18Nov/12

The Gaza Conflict and Being Pro-Peace rather than Anti-War

One of my favorite Mother Theresa quotes is: “I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be there.”
The current conflict in Gaza between Hamas and Israel requires the thoughtful liberal to navigate a few [...]

Tagged as: anti war demonstrations, gaza, hamas, mother theresa, peace, political psychology, soldiers, war Comments Off

8Nov/12

Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and Paul Krugman need to get out of Maslow’s Basement.

Losing an election is tough and I have immense empathy for those who have a heartfelt vision for their country that was not fulfilled on election day. Most people who care deeply about the election, Democrats and Republicans, do so out of a real desire for the country to do better and it’s unfortunate that [...]

Tagged as: bill o reilly, billionaires, bipartisanship, conservatives, election day, free stuff, liberals, maslow, obama, paul krugman, romney, sarah palin Comments Off

26Oct/12

Likely Voter Models Should Be Applied to Polls Probabilistically

One of the many great points I took from Nate Silver’s recent book, The Signal and the Noise, is that people are generally bad at dealing with uncertainty. We want the weather forecaster to tell us if it’s going to rain tomorrow, not that there is a 30% chance, even though that’s the right [...]

Tagged as: obama, registered voters, romney, uncertainty, voting records Comments Off

19Oct/12

Be the Bipartisanship you want to see in the World by Supporting our next President

The point of politics is to make people’s lives better. Liberals and conservatives may disagree about how to do that, but despite the heated rhetoric, there are a number of broad goals that most anyone would agree upon. Consider a survey we recently conducted concerning liberal and conservative preferences about the kind of place they [...]

Tagged as: bipartisanship, debt ceiling, demonization, incivility, liberals and conservatives, next presidential election, partisanship Comments Off

3Oct/12

In Defense of Akin: Moral Coherence is common.

Recently, some of my collaborators (Brittany Liu and Pete Ditto) published a paper on moral coherence, which is when people fit their factual beliefs to their moral beliefs. It is a phenomenon very similar to what I’ve called moral confabulation (I like their term better, so have adopted it). It is a specific example of [...]

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

13Sep/12

Like this if you are registered to vote, share it if you want to see which of your friends are registered.

The title of this post is a blatant attempt to go viral, though hopefully for a good cause. A new study recently published in Nature estimates that a similar viral message touting voting behavior, led to 340,000 more votes in the 2010 election. Human beings are naturally social creatures and if we see our [...]

Tagged as: obama, romney, votehelp.org Comments Off

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