A Politics & Moral Psychology Blog Exploring Political Attitudes Through Moral Psychology

21Apr/110

Jon Kyl’s Moral Confabulation is something we all do.

Lately, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have been having fun with Jon Kyl’s bizarre response to an error he made on the senate floor in saying that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion.  The real figure is 3% and his bizarre response was that his use of the 90% figure was “not intended [...]

30Mar/111

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 [...]

24Mar/116

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 [...]

27Feb/116

Psychological Correlates of Feelings Toward Labor Unions among Liberals

I have been reading a great deal lately about the labor battle in Wisconsin lately.  As someone who rarely has had a traditional job, I have never had a well formed opinion about unions and it has been an interesting opportunity to think about the role of unions in society.  There have been a great [...]

10Feb/1116

Can liberal academics study conservative ideology?

Recently, Jon Haidt gave a talk at the main social psychology conference about the statistically impossible lack of diversity in social psychology, meaning that the vast majority of social psychologists are liberal, with a smattering of libertarians or moderates and close to zero self-identified conservatives. This talk was covered in this New York Times [...]

17Jan/116

Rush Limbaugh says Civility is the New Censorship

Rush Limbaugh recently talked explicitly about calls for civility in the media, saying that “civility is the new censorship”.  In a sense, he is correct, in that when liberals (myself included) talk about civility, we specifically mean people like Limbaugh, whose livelihood is based on demonization of the opposing political viewpoint.  I have to admit [...]

11Jan/112

You can’t put out a Fire with Gasoline – A Reaction to reactions to the Giffords Shooting

For the past few months, I have been working with Matt Motyl and Jon Haidt on a website that promotes research based methods for increasing civility in politics.  The desire to increase civility in politics is not new, having been parodied as the cliche-d dream of PhD Poli Sci students and recently promoted by Jon [...]

29Dec/100

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 [...]

2Dec/103

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 [...]

23Nov/104

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 [...]