http://www.polipsych.com Political, Moral, and Positive Psychology Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:27:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I recently saw 3 posts on fivethirtyeight.com which may seem unrelated to many, but to my admittedly biased perception, which seeks supporting evidence for my thesis that the differing goals of harm reduction vs. productivity increase, underlie much of observed political divisions.  These were three interesting and convergent findings.  This ... http://www.polipsych.com/2009/04/23/three-polls-which-point-to-differing-underlying-fairness-principles-driven-by-differing-goals/ 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 ... http://www.polipsych.com/2008/09/18/world-vs-country-focus-for-obama-vs-mccain-supporters/ 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 ... http://www.polipsych.com/2008/07/10/cluster-analysis-of-votehelp-data-for-the-2008-political-psychology-conference/ Are you an aggrieved Clinton supporter considering voting for McCain? I have to confess that I had thoughts of voting for McCain over Clinton if she had won....but I hope I would have eventually come around upon comparing their issue positions on things that matter. I just revamped votehelp to compare ... http://www.polipsych.com/2008/06/22/votehelp-updated-to-be-obama-vs-mccain-candidate-calculator/ I have to confess my bias that I have always been skeptical of the merits of democracy promotion, especially via military means. So when I red this essay about Obama's proposed foreign policy focus on dignity promotion over democracy promotion, I got excited....Psychologists have routinely shown how people get ... http://www.polipsych.com/2008/03/25/democracy-promotion-vs-dignity-promotion/ 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 ... http://www.polipsych.com/2008/03/15/what-do-moral-psychology-scales-say-about-supporters-of-obama-and-clinton/ 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 ... http://www.polipsych.com/2008/02/20/regression-analyses-of-clintonobamaclinton-loyalty-obama-fairness/ 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 ... http://www.polipsych.com/2008/02/13/20/ I recently attended SPSP, the main conference for personality and social psychologists, and met with the people who I work with on yourmorals.org. Among the things we discussed at the meeting was the idea of reporting results that touch on current events in a more timely fashion, rather than ... http://www.polipsych.com/2008/02/13/moral-foundation-facts-about-barack-obama-and-hillary-clinton-supporters/ I had to do a presentation relating some of my current work on yourmorals.org to some of the history of moral psychology and in doing so, I created this graph.  It doesn't include all the respondents on yourmorals.org as we changed our politics measure at one point and this graph ... http://www.polipsych.com/2007/11/27/liberals-vs-conservatives-on-the-schwartz-values-scale/