Sam Harris’ TED video and the danger of liberal atheist moral absolutism
A fellow graduate student recently shared the below Sam Harris TED video with me and I was quite surprised at the premise of the talk. In it, Sam Harris gives a spirited defense of moral absolutism, the idea that there are objective truths about what we should and should not value. Below is the video.
Harris [...]
The Psychology of Aggression and the Ugliness of the Health Care Reform Debate
Most people are not violent people. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes very little sense for a species to kill members of it’s own species. Soldiers in war have to be trained out of their natural impulse not to fire weapons. For the vast majority of people, aggression is a last resort and I’m guessing [...]
Does trait anxiety make your more or less likely to support war & aggression?
Recently, one of the grad students in my department gave a brownbag talk about the relationship between fear and aggression. On the one hand, one might expect fear to lead to aggression as one perceives threat to a greater extent and responds accordingly. On the other hand, fear is associated with withdrawal and so we [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Methland by Nick Reding: Moral Maximizing and the Drug War
I just finished Methland, by Nick Reding, an in-depth portrait of the fall and hopeful rise of a small American town, Oelwein, Iowa, and a few individuals touched by the meth epidemic there. What makes the book most powerful are the portraits that Reding is able to draw of the town having spent 4 years [...]
Does gratitude promote a sense of fairness and equality?
Gratitude has been theorized to be a moral emotion, yet it has largely been studied for it’s hedonic benefits rather than it’s effect on moral reasoning. I had done some previous analyses on our data at yourmorals.org where scores on the Gratitude quotient scale were positively related to most all measures of moral reasoning. By [...]
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 [...]
Democrats and Republicans agree that Justice & Fairness are about Equity, not Equality or Impartiality
I was browsing CNN today and I decided to expand my moral imagination by watching Glenn Beck Speak at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting. I was surprised how reasonable his message sounded to me, as I my previous impression of him was not good.
I believe that people should be able to get what they deserve [...]