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 [...]

23Apr/113

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 [...]

27Feb/116

Psychological Correlates of Feelings Toward Labor Unions among Liberals

I have been reading a great deal lately about the labor battle in Wisconsin lately.  As someone who rarely has had a traditional job, I have never had a well formed opinion about unions and it has been an interesting opportunity to think about the role of unions in society.  There have been a great [...]

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 [...]

17Aug/100

Is belief in the Protestant Work Ethic related to attitudes toward rich and poor?

Recently, a call went out to people who study social psychology to examine the relationships between belief in the protestant work ethic (e.g. “I feel uneasy when there is little work for me to do.”) and measures of prejudice or political attitudes regarding poverty or HIV/AIDS. Researchers from Stony Brook University wanted to aggregate the [...]

21Jul/100

The Psychology of the JournoList “Scandal”: Mirror Image Stereotypes

As a regular reader of political blogs, I could not help but notice that a number of my favorite sites were writing about the same thing, specifically, their participation in a discussion group called JournoList, which included numerous media members such as Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight and Politico writer Ben Smith, both of whom I [...]

23Jun/100

On the Morality of Torture & Utilitarianism

I personally do not believe in torture, but I have to admit that when I think of it, my mind prototypically thinks of the potential harm that might befall an innocent person caught by an unscrupulous policeman who is all too sure of his moral superiority. What would I do if I knew with 100% [...]

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 [...]