Political Psychology | Data Science & Psychology

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 [...]

Tagged as: environment, moral foundations, peter singer, universalism 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

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

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

Tagged as: incivility, libya, osama bin laden, war Comments Off

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 [...]

Tagged as: 2012 election, candidate calculators, conservatives, liberals, votehelp.org 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

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