What are the psychological differences that make people liberal democrats, conservative republicans, or libertarians?
While I am definitely prototypically liberal, I know a lot of good solid people who happen to be conservative. I also live in a state (California), where some of the excesses of liberalism are self-evident. There is merit to traditionally conservative principles like respect for tradition and desire to reward those who work hard over [...]
Separating Pro-Peace from Anti-War Attitudes using Moral Psychology Measures
I’m off to SPSP 2010 and will be presenting the below poster at the morality and justice pre-conference. It’s based on a scale I found measuring separate war and peace attitudes (Vander Linden et. al, 2008) at the main political psychology conference 2 years ago. The concept is pretty simple…I found scales that predicted pro-war and [...]
Reading Palin’s “Going Rogue” & expanding the liberal moral imagination (Lederach & Wright)
I bought Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue. As someone interested in moral confabulation, Sarah Palin is an a great case study. She has a very visceral intuitive sense of her own moral opinions (e.g. her opinion on Israeli settlements)…yet she often seems to have no preconceived notion of the source of those opinions. So [...]
What are the basic foundations of morality?
A few years ago, I was fortunate to catch a talk by Jon Haidt at the Gallup Positive Psychology Summit where he gave a wonderful talk about moral foundation theory, which seeks to determine the fundamental systems of morality. I sought to use his scale in my work and using that scale eventually grew into [...]
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 [...]
Moderates and Liberals take their time in answering Moral Psychology questions
There is evidence that liberals have more desire for cognitive complexity compared to conservatives, which can either be framed as a virtue like intelligence or a vice like flip-flopping depending on where you stand (see Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski,and Sulloway 2003). There is also evidence suggesting that extremists on both sides are the least cognitively complex.
I thought [...]
Feeling positive towards others makes you happier….unless you’re a Libertarian
Some of the group that run yourmorals.org are considering writing a paper focusing on Libertarians and so I’ve been looking at the data for triends. One consistent pattern we have found is that Libertarians (unsuprisingly) are more self rather than other oriented. They aren’t just extreme conservatives, but are qualitatively different. They seem to moralize [...]
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 [...]
J Street vs. The Weekly Standard: Is it possible to be pro-peace and pro-Israel?
A group called J Street has recently sought to question the wisdom of military action by the Israeli government. Their influence is supposed to be a counterbalance to the traditionally hawk-ish Israel lobby embodied by AIPAC. Many lobbying groups which oppose military action by Israel identify with the groups that Israel has conflicting interests with or [...]