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

12Feb/101

A Difference Between Democrats and Republicans – The Effects of Empathy on Political Interest

Below is a simple little graph of yourmorals.org data that I thought would be worth posting.  Interest in politics is positively correlated with empathic concern in liberals/democrats and not in conservatives/republicans.  It’s somewhat self-evident in posts like this, or debates about the role of empathy from either the Democratic or Republican side.
Can this difference be used to [...]

30Jan/100

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 [...]

27Jan/100

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 [...]

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20Nov/090

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 [...]

13Nov/094

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 [...]

16Oct/092

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 [...]

22Sep/092

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 [...]

18Sep/094

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 [...]

14Sep/090

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 [...]

9Sep/090

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 [...]