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

30Mar/111

Why should the US lead in Libya? Liberal-Conservative Value Differences.

Why should the US lead in Libya?  This is a question I’ve been asking myself a number of times as I’ve heard one common criticism of Obama and our actions in Libya, specifically that we aren’t demonstrating leadership.  Personally, I would like Gaddafi stopped and perhaps most importantly, I’d like us to save lives when [...]

24Mar/116

Perceptions of Scarcity & Responsibility inform Budget Negotiations

I was recently asked about the psychology of scarcity and it gave me an excuse to revisit an old paper by Skitka and Tetlock (1992, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) that contains a more complex version of the model I depict below.  Like many who are interested in politics, I’ve been following the recent budget [...]

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 [...]

22Feb/111

Reagan was a Union Member – Visiting his Library as an exercise in Civil Politics

Yesterday, in a strangely appropriate thing to do for President’s Day weekend, I visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.  When I first got there, I had this idea that I might need to keep a low profile considering my liberal leanings and when I told a docent there that I was from Venice Beach, I [...]

15Feb/110

Psychology is generally Continuous, not Categorical

We live in a world where we often have to make categorical decisions.  We date someone or we don’t.  We marry them or we don’t.  We hire someone or we don’t.  We pick either the Democrat or the Republican.  There is no middle ground.
Unfortunately, the world isn’t necessarily organized in that fashion.  Few would believe [...]

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11Feb/112

Are liberals more neurotic than conservatives?

At our recent meeting of social psychologists, I had a few conversations about a particular facet of our data, the fact that liberals in our dataset score higher on measures of neuroticism than conservativism.  The effect in our data is small, but not insignificant (d=.24 of the standard deviation).  This surprised some people in that [...]

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11Jan/112

You can’t put out a Fire with Gasoline – A Reaction to reactions to the Giffords Shooting

For the past few months, I have been working with Matt Motyl and Jon Haidt on a website that promotes research based methods for increasing civility in politics.  The desire to increase civility in politics is not new, having been parodied as the cliche-d dream of PhD Poli Sci students and recently promoted by Jon [...]

18Dec/101

Tony Hsieh, liberals, and libertarians prefer buying experiences to materialism – A Review of Delivering Happiness

I recently finished Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, which is partially a business book, detailing his remarkable story where he has won (selling Link Exchange to Microsoft in his 20s for $265 million) and lost (selling almost everything to turn Zappos around) fortunes.  Zappos, an online shoe seller, has gone on to become the model [...]

7Dec/100

The Case for Honesty as a Moral Foundation

I was immediately attracted to Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) due to the utility of breaking down partisan and policy differences into questions of what one values.  The idea that different people believe in different moral principles is one of those obvious ideas that is yet still under appreciated in every day life, where we attribute [...]

17Nov/102

Why is Warren Buffett liberal on the estate tax? A Review of The Snowball.

I read Warren Buffett’s authorized biography recently and the fact that I finished the book (which isn’t short) is a testament to the writing of the book and to the uniqueness of Buffett himself.  I now understand why people continue to flock to Omaha for Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings, where Buffett gives his opinion on [...]