The values of people who are “Spiritual, but not Religious”
Some people in psychology have a theory that everyone wants to study themselves. I don’t really have a religious category that fits. I grew up going occasionally to a protestant church and I occasionally go to a new-age church in Los Angeles. If I had to pick a category, I might pick “Spiritual, but not [...]
Robustness of Liberal-Conservative Moral Foundations Questionnaire Differences
All social science research faces questions about the external validity of the results. Much social psychology research is done on students and so the natural question is whether those findings generalize to non-student populations. Even representative surveys of the population face questions about validity due to the assumptions which go into what representative means. Since [...]
Moderates and Liberals take their time in answering Moral Psychology questions
There is evidence that liberals have more desire for cognitive complexity compared to conservatives, which can either be framed as a virtue like intelligence or a vice like flip-flopping depending on where you stand (see Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski,and Sulloway 2003). There is also evidence suggesting that extremists on both sides are the least cognitively complex.
I thought [...]
Feeling positive towards others makes you happier….unless you’re a Libertarian
Some of the group that run yourmorals.org are considering writing a paper focusing on Libertarians and so I’ve been looking at the data for triends. One consistent pattern we have found is that Libertarians (unsuprisingly) are more self rather than other oriented. They aren’t just extreme conservatives, but are qualitatively different. They seem to moralize [...]
World vs. Country focus for Obama vs. McCain supporters
These results aren’t really surprising, but Obama and McCain supporters have different ideas about who they identify with, based on Sam McFarland’s Identification with All Humanity Scale.
Specifically, those who plan to vote for McCain identify most with their country while those who plan to vote for Obama identify most with the world as a whole.
More [...]
Cluster analysis of VoteHelp Data for the 2008 Political Psychology Conference
Below are the results of a cluster analysis of VoteHelp.org data which I used to identify subgroups within the traditional liberal and conservative dimensions. The groups identified were:
Social issue liberals (cluster 1 in excel sheet)
Environment & education liberals (cluster 2 in excel sheet)
Law and order conservatives (cluster 3 in excel sheet)
Social issue conservatives (cluster 4 [...]
What do moral psychology scales say about supporters of Obama and Clinton?
Draft by Ravi Iyer, Sena Koleva, Jesse Graham, and Peter Ditto
The 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary has featured 2 candidates, Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with very similar political positions who nevertheless have garnered enthusiastic support [...]
regression analyses…Clinton = Loyalty & Obama = Fairness
Jon Haidt, the most public advocate of Moral Foundation Theory wondered….
very interesting. I wonder if regression analysis would give cleaner results here. It does seem that clinton supporters always show the more liberal profile. What would happen if you compute a difference score between liking for clinton and liking for obama, and then [...]
more on Obama vs. Clinton and the Moral Foundations of their supporters
I shared this post with my colleagues and was asked if the result (Hillary supporters are “loyal” or structure oriented democrats who score higher on authority/ingroup/purity) would hold for just democrats or just people who are very interested in the election. It turns out that the pattern does indeed hold when we just include [...]
J Street vs. The Weekly Standard: Is it possible to be pro-peace and pro-Israel?
A group called J Street has recently sought to question the wisdom of military action by the Israeli government. Their influence is supposed to be a counterbalance to the traditionally hawk-ish Israel lobby embodied by AIPAC. Many lobbying groups which oppose military action by Israel identify with the groups that Israel has conflicting interests with or [...]