Data Science & Psychology Data Science applied to Values, Morals, Politics, & things that matter.

4Apr/13

The Moral Foundations of Environmentalists

I was recently asked about the Moral Foundations scores of those who are more concerned about the environment and so I analyzed the 15,522 individuals who took the Moral Foundations Scale on YourMorals.org and also answered a question on the Schwartz Values Scale concerning how much of a guiding principle of their life it was [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

5Nov/12

Early Voting is a Social Influence Tool, so tell everyone when you vote!

As a political junkie, I’ve been reading the spin on early voting with interest as each side talks about how they are using their ground game to get people to the polls.  Some have suggested that early voting doesn’t matter as it simply gets those people who would have voted anyway to vote earlier.  That [...]

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 [...]

20Sep/12

How Coherence Defines Conservatism

One of the pitfalls in doing political psychology research is that it is tempting to define an ideology using the perspective of whatever you study.  Researchers necessarily (and I’m sure I do this too) talk about the novelty and uniqueness of their findings in order to convince editors of journals of the objective importance of [...]

12Sep/12

Escaping Cycles of Extremism: What the Libyan Mob and Sam Bacile have in common.

The recent killing of Americans in Libya by a mob of protestors who were responding to an intentionally offensive youtube video, created by Sam Bacile and friends, illustrates a fundamental truth.  Extremism begets extremism.  Killing begets killing. Violence begets violence.
It is a truth that directly relates to the cycles of incivility that we see in [...]

10Sep/12

Which undecided voters use the internet to figure out who they should vote for?

In 2008, I co-founded VoteHelp.org as a way to help people with the question “Who should I vote for?”  In 2008, it served over 500,000 people, but we didn’t get any demographic information at the time, so, while valuable, I couldn’t answer many of the questions I wanted to answer about the use of “candidate [...]

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 [...]