Unpublished Results | Data Science & Psychology

7May/13

Personality Types in Business: Conscientious CEOs & Open Technologists

Part of my job at Ranker is to talk to other companies about our data. While people often talk about how “big data” is revolutionizing everything, the reality of the data marketplace is that it still largely revolves around sales, marketing, and advertising. Huge infrastructures exist to make sure that the most optimal ad for [...]

Tagged as: big data, conscientiousness, marketing, openness to experience, technology Comments Off

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

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

26Aug/12

Will Mitt Romney appeal to empathizers or systemizers in his Republican National Convention speech?

The Republican National Convention is going to take place this week and one of the stated goals of many republicans is to “humanize” Mitt Romney. It reminded me of this graph that I pulled from our yourmorals.org database which looks at systemizing vs. empathizing scores. Based on work by Simon Baron-Cohen, the measure concerns how [...]

Tagged as: empathy, libertarians, mitt romney, obama, republican national convention Comments Off

12Jul/12

Where to live? Liberal, conservative, & libertarian criteria differ.

In a line of research led by Matt Motyl, at the University of Virginia, we’ve been exploring ideological differences in preferences for where one lives. This project is informed by a few ideas already out there.

The observation that cities are getting more and more partisan, as depicted in the Big Sort.
Richard Florida’s ideas about creating people-city [...]

Tagged as: conservatives, ideological differences, liberals, libertarians, richard florida Comments Off

28May/12

Psychological Differences between Cell Phone and Landline users presents a challenge for polls

When the NY Times or Gallup reports that Obama or Romney has a lead in the polls, how do they know this? Typically, they pay people to randomly call people and they extrapolate from this sample, using established statistical methods, to make generalizations to the population. Some groups won’t respond, especially young adults who often [...]

Tagged as: big 5, cellphone users, ny times, obama, personality traits, psychological differences, romney No Comments

25Apr/12

Empathizing vs. Systemizing – A Book Review of Tattoos On The Heart

I recently read this article from Fast Company about Father Greg Boyle’s work at Homeboy Industries, and just like every other time I’ve encountered stories of this work, it ended with me in tears. It reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about Tattoos On The Heart, which just might be my favorite book [...]

Tagged as: empathy, greg boyle, homeboy industries, unconditional love No Comments

18Feb/12

Big 5 Personality Traits of would-be Owners vs. Renters

I feel as if sometime in the early 2000s, society collectively decided that it was better to own a home than rent. Property values went up and it seemed like people were willing to go to great personal difficulty simply for the sake of being an owner. It probably didn’t hurt that property values kept [...]

Tagged as: big 5, home ownership, openness to experience, personality traits 4 Comments

18Jun/11

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 [...]

Tagged as: positional goods, relative income, relative vs. absolute goods 2 Comments

23Apr/11

Liberals place more value on being funny than conservatives and libertarians.

I’ve been watching a lot of comedy central lately and have been wondering why there does not appear to be a conservative equivalent, just as there is no popular liberal equivalent to conservative AM talk radio. Perhaps liberals value being funny more than conservatives?
To test this idea, I thought I’d look at the data from [...]

Tagged as: comedy, conservatives, liberals, libertarians 4 Comments

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