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

18Jun/112

Relative vs. Absolute Good Choices for Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians

Awhile ago, I read about a survey given to Harvard Medical school students about whether they would prefer to live in a world where they had a higher absolute amount of some beneficial good or a higher relative amount.  For example, participants had a choice of living in a world where they make $100,000 and [...]

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 [...]

30Oct/100

Women vs. men – differences on moral psychology measures

I made a recent post summarizing the differences between liberals and conservatives from our YourMorals dataset, using the effect size differences between groups and sorting the results from those constructs that are most associated with liberals to those constructs most associated with conservatives.  I was asked a followup question as to whether the differences found [...]

27Oct/100

Differences between white male liberals and white male conservatives

I was recently forwarded a question about the differences that exist between Democrats and Republicans amongst white men.  The question was framed by the fact that white men appear to be leaving the Democratic party at fairly high rates and it would be useful to pinpoint the variables that lead some white men to desert [...]

11Oct/102

Maximizing is better (for your happiness) in the moral rather than material domain.

Whenever I bring up the concept of maximizing (“never settling for less than the best”), the discussion inevitably evolves into thinking about what domains a given person maximizes in.  For example, I definitely don’t maximize in terms of my clothing choices, but am more of a maximizer in my career choice.  Actually, even within my [...]

3Jun/100

Armando Galarraga demonstrates the relationship between happiness and forgiveness

Watching baseball can be a frivolous pursuit and a distraction from psychology research, but last night something happened which demonstrated a psychological finding far more effectively than any study or paper.
Armando Galarraga, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, was very close to pitching a perfect game. For non-baseball fans, its a very rare occurrence, comparable [...]

11May/100

Wanted: Motivated Academic Writers to Help Publish Our Data

Thanks to the publicity which moral psychology (and specifically Jon Haidt’s work) has begun to receive, along with the average person’s insatiable appetite for knowledge about themselves, facilitated by the internet, we have collected a truly unique dataset at yourmorals.org. It is a large community sample and includes some reaction time data. It is non-representative [...]

19Apr/100

How to publish a Replication of Disgust & Big Five Personality Trait Correlations

I have recently been following a discussion in my discipline about the peer review process, which led me to this very interesting paper about the history of and alternatives to the peer review process in psychology.
At the same time, I’ve been working with colleagues on a paper about experiential vs. material purchasing styles, for which [...]