Be the Bipartisanship you want to see in the World by Supporting our next President
The point of politics is to make people’s lives better. Liberals and conservatives may disagree about how to do that, but despite the heated rhetoric, there are a number of broad goals that most anyone would agree upon. Consider a survey we recently conducted concerning liberal and conservative preferences about the kind of place they would like to live. While there are differences in terms of priorities, the top 5 desirable attributes are largely the same. Everyone wants a strong economy, safety, clean air and water, and good medical care.
Top 5 Desirable attributes in a city by ideology:
Unfortunately, roughly half of the country is going to be disappointed by the results of the next presidential election. Both history and psychology tell us that this disappointment will likely lead to some amount of demonization of whomever wins, reflexive opposition, and incivility. This may lead to outcomes that nobody wants, such as what occurred during the debt ceiling negotiations.
Thoughtful liberals, conservatives, and both presidential candidates have talked about the need to transcend partisanship in order to attempt to create better policy and a better country. The results of the next election are likely to disappoint some of these thoughtful people, yet it also represents an opportunity for them to be the change they wish to see in the world, by consciously resisting the impulse toward demonization and reflexive opposition. It represents an opportunity to back up words of bipartisanship with action, at a powerful moment when everybody will expect the opposite.
Supporting our next president does not mean that you need to support their policies. We can disagree without being disagreeable. But supporting our next president does mean that we hope they succeed at goals that we all share such as creating a safer, cleaner, healthier, and more prosperous world. It means hoping that the unemployment rate goes down, not up. It means hoping that the poor receive the help they need, whether by charity or government, and that terrorism is stopped, whether by military or diplomatic means. Whomever wins, let’s support them by truly hoping they succeed at our shared goals.
If this resonates with you, consider joining our facebook group and pass this message on to your friends. Positive change always starts with small groups of people who believe in something.
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Book Review: Brain Gain and the Is-Ought problem
Can technology make us wiser? There is something to be said for taking a theory as far as you can go with it and pushing it's boundaries, as the process is educational. Other people have taken the "technology is making us dumber" meme and pushed it and so Marc Prensky's book, Brain Gain, provides a nice counterpoint to such arguments, illustrating the myriad ways which technology enables people to process more data, faster, with fewer errors. As someone who uses technology in almost everything I do, I'm the natural audience for the benefits of technology.
However, I don't think technology can make us wiser. In Brain Gain, Prensky talks about "digital wisdom" and how technology can help us achieve it by allowing us to process complexity better. Part of my difference with Prensky is in the definition of the word "wisdom". In the book, he goes through several definitions and settles on a definition that is fairly convenient for arguing technology's impact, which is "the ability to find practical, creative, contextually appropriate, and emotionally satisfying solutions to complicated human problems." This may just be semantics, but I would define wisdom as being closer to the idea of knowing what's important, and certainly there is an important element of judging what "ought" to be that is a part of the common idea of wisdom. It is this "ought" that I believe technology cannot help us with. Technology can help us know what "is" in the world and process what "is" better. But deciding what "ought" to be is an entirely different question.
Simply put, technology can help us achieve our goals, but it cannot tell us what our goals ought to be. It is a distinction that I feel that many people who try to "systemize" the world fail to appreciate. Perhaps technology can free us from certain tasks, enabling us to humanize our remaining time such that we can concentrate on what is important. But figuring out what is important and what is not, is a process that we humans will likely have to do ourselves.
- Ravi Iyer
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How Coherence Defines Conservatism
One of the pitfalls in doing political psychology research is that it is tempting to define an ideology using the perspective of whatever you study. Researchers necessarily (and I'm sure I do this too) talk about the novelty and uniqueness of their findings in order to convince editors of journals of the objective importance of their work. In my technology career, we often think of connected variables as part of a "graph", indicating that any individual finding is likely part of a larger pattern. I believe that there are a number of psychology findings and news stories about conservatives that are actually part of a larger pattern, where each finding is actually an example of how conservatism can be defined by a desire for greater coherence.
What is coherence? It is an idea that grows from the common psychological finding that cognitive dissonance is unpleasant, so people seek to create the absence of dissonant thoughts, beliefs, and emotions in their lives. This absence of dissonance is what we can call coherence. My graduate school advisor, Stephen Read, has studied it extensively in a variety of contexts, and, in a project led by my colleague Brian Monroe, modeled a variety of social psychological findings about attitudes. My suggestion in this blog post is that, in a similar fashion, a large number of observations about conservatism can be explained by the idea that conservatives seek more coherence than liberals. Below, I will list these observations and you can judge for yourself whether there is a broader pattern.
- Psychologists have found that conservatives are more likely to create coherence between their factual beliefs and their moral beliefs. While "moral coherence" can be found in liberals and conservatives alike, conservative moral coherence is readily apparent in the news (see Akin, Todd).
- A lack of coherence is unpleasant and greater coherence may explain why conservatives are happier than liberals. This article comes from the perspective of systems justification theory, which has shown rather convincingly that conservatives are more likely to make coherent attributions of wealth (e.g. people who are rich did good things) and justice (e.g. people generally get what they deserve). It is not hard to imagine why people who walk around thinking that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people are less happy than people who think the opposite, an intepretation consistent both with systems justification theory and this article.
- A fair amount of research connects meaning to coherence, and our yourmorals data (in the below graph, using Steger's Meaning in Life Questionnaire), indicates that conservatives report more meaning in life..
- A lot of political psychology work concerns liberals greater "cognitive complexity". A quote from this paper: "There is both survey and content analytic evidence that liberals rely on more integratively complex cognitive strategies in reaching policy conclusions than do conservatives (Tetlock, 1989), suggesting that liberals may be more tolerant of cognitive dissonance...liberals receive higher scores on measures of tolerance of ambiguity..(Stone & Schaffner, 1988)." In political discourse, you can see this division played out in terms of conservative ridicule of Kerry's "for it before I was against it" in favor of the Texas straight shooter. Note that cognitive complexity can be thought of as both an indication of intelligence and an indication of lack of core beliefs.
- It is certainly more coherent to think that the group that you belong to does good things, rather than bad things, and conservatives are more likely to be more patriotic (see their identification with country results in this paper) and display more ingroup bias. In contrast, it would generate cognitive dissonance to believe that your group should apologize for past bad actions and conservatives do not seem eager to apologize.
- There is work suggesting that conservative judgments are more likely to be consistent/coherent with their emotional reactions. Jesse Graham has a number of working papers showing how conservatives are more likely to make moral judgments that are consistent with their emotional reactions, while liberals may at times, override their gut reaction with an intellectual judgment. In the news, we often see conservatives use their gut intuitions, even as liberals second guess basing judgments on coherence with the gut.
It bears noting that most of the above differences can be framed as positive or negative, depending on one's ideological desires. Coherence, by itself, is neither good nor bad, and can be both adaptive and maladaptive in different situations. One of my colleagues once said that there is value in reviewing research from a particular perspective and pushing that review as far as one can go, even if one might be wrong. There is certainly a ton of research I am unaware of and perhaps there is research showing contradictory evidence for my conclusion that conservativism is defined by coherence. Or alternatively, perhaps readers are aware of more research on liberal-conservative differences that can be explained through the lens of coherence. I would appreciate either type of information via comment or email.
- Ravi Iyer
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Like this if you are registered to vote, share it if you want to see which of your friends are registered.
The title of this post is a blatant attempt to go viral, though hopefully for a good cause. A new study recently published in Nature estimates that a similar viral message touting voting behavior, led to 340,000 more votes in the 2010 election. Human beings are naturally social creatures and if we see our close friends doing something, we're more likely to do that too. It's actually an old, well researched topic in social science, so it's not so surprising that social influence works, but what is great is that in the new modern connected world, we can actually consciously create benevolent social influence and measure it's actual impact. You've always seen it in fundraisers where people ask their friends to help them run a race for charity or in telethons, but Facebook opens up entirely new possibilities, including using social influence to get your friends to register to vote (and hopefully vote, though I'm pretty sure Facebook will have that covered again this time). Such is the purpose of this blog post or feel free to create your own version as there is nothing magical about this post. Any post with a similar title will work. Or you can make up your own title for some other pro-social cause, harnessing the power of social influence for good.
So like this post if you are registered to vote, and share it with your friends if you want to see which of them are registered! And if you don't know who to vote for, check out or Obama vs. Romney quiz at VoteHelp.org.
- Ravi Iyer
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Escaping Cycles of Extremism: What the Libyan Mob and Sam Bacile have in common.
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Which undecided voters use the internet to figure out who they should vote for?
In 2008, I co-founded VoteHelp.org as a way to help people with the question "Who should I vote for?" In 2008, it served over 500,000 people, but we didn't get any demographic information at the time, so, while valuable, I couldn't answer many of the questions I wanted to answer about the use of "candidate calculators", which is a name sometimes given to sites that allow you to enter your political opinions into a website, which then attempts to match your opinions to those of political candidates. In 2012, I added a few optional questions to the end of the quiz that asked the age, gender, political ideology, and planned candidate choice of quiz takers.
Right now, we rank #2 or #3 (I've seen both) for the search query "who should I vote for" on Google and according to Google, about 15,000 people have searched for that query over the past 30 days, with about 5000 clicking on VoteHelp.org. Some number of people do not fill out our surveys (25% bounce rate) and of those, only 30% or so fill out our optional demographics questions. Browser referral information isn't always sent, so I can only identify 470 who definitely typed in "who should I vote for" into Google to come to our site during the 2012 election, the bulk of which occurred in the last 30 days. Still, I think it's perhaps indicative of the kind of person who searches the internet for voter information.
Who is this person? The average age was 30.3 years old (SD = 11.1), with people as young as 12 and as old as 87 taking the survey. 56% of quiz takers were male. Judging by the below charts, the average person who asks Google who they should vote for really is likely to be undecided and moderate.
What do these voters care about? In order to eliminate the effects of the liberals and conservatives, I looked just at the 201 people who said they were moderate or apolitical. Here is the list of issues they care about in descending order of importance.
Issue Importance
And here are their stances on these issues, with questions they agreed to listed first, and questions they disagreed with listed last. Note that these questions were asked on a 7 point scale with 1 = strongly disagree, 4 = in the middle, and 7 = strongly agree.
Statement Agreement
What can we conclude from these analyses? It seems like the kinds of people who are asking for help on the internet are people who might be classified as populists. They appear to be mainly younger men, who want compromise in government, favor liberal policies like higher taxes on the wealthy, higher spending on education, and more corporate regulation, but also favor conservative policies like stricter immigration enforcement and stricter controls on government spending. Of course, perhaps taking the average of these undecided voters obscures differences among these voters. Also, these results are likely to generalize best to the types of individuals who are actively using the internet to figure out who to vote for, since our sample all typed in "Who should I vote for?" into Google and then took the VoteHelp quiz. On one promising note for these analyses, these results do seem to converge with the media's depiction of the voters who both campaigns appear to be trying to woo right now.
- Ravi Iyer
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Will Mitt Romney appeal to empathizers or systemizers in his Republican National Convention speech?
The Republican National Convention is going to take place this week and one of the stated goals of many republicans is to "humanize" Mitt Romney. It reminded me of this graph that I pulled from our yourmorals.org database which looks at systemizing vs. empathizing scores. Based on work by Simon Baron-Cohen, the measure concerns how much one likes to analyze and construct systems as a way of understanding the world (e.g. being fascinated by how machines work) versus trying to understand social situations and empathize with others (e.g. I am quick to spot when someone in a group is feeling awkward and uncomfortable.). Men (in general) tend to systemize, while women tend to empathize and this difference tracks rates of autism (Baron-Cohen's main line of research), which strikes 4 males for every 1 female. Men also tend to support Romney vs. Obama.
This graph shows the correlation between favorability ratings of potential 2008 presidential candidates and the difference between systemizing and empathizing scores for those candidates' supporters.
Based on our libertarians research, we would have expected Ron Paul supporters to have the highest systemizing vs. empathizing scores and certainly his supporters do have a positive, and relatively high correlation. It is similarly unsurprising that Hillary Clinton's supporters in 2008 tended to be empathizers, or that Democrats generally tend to attract empathizers, rather than systemizers. What surprised me, however, was that Mitt Romney's supporters appear to have the highest systemizing vs. empathizing difference. Does this reflect something intrinsic about Mitt Romney, or at least his image? After watching some of the Sunday shows today, I think so.
Consider this quote from ABC's This Week, by George Will, a conservative who observed that "with most politicians, the problem is their inauthenticity. His (Romney's) problem is that he is authentically what he is...he has a low emotional metabolism. That's who he is. He can't turn to the country and say I feel your pain because the pain isn't his. It's other people's. What he can say is that I can fix your pain and that should be good enough for most people, unless we are electing a talk show host".
Mike Huckabee said something similar on Fox News Sunday about likability being less important than technical skill. These are perhaps inherent admissions by some of Mitt Romney's supporters that his strength is in appealing to systemizers, and therefore, they would like frame the debate in those terms. It will be interesting to see whether Mitt Romney aims his Republican National Convention nomination acceptance speech at empathizers or at systemizers.
-Ravi Iyer
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Likely Voter Models Should Be Applied to Polls Probabilistically
One of the many great points I took from Nate Silver's recent book, The Signal and the Noise, is that people are generally bad at dealing with uncertainty. We want the weather forecaster to tell us if it's going to rain tomorrow, not that there is a 30% chance, even though that's the right answer. Nevertheless, weather forecasters have failed enough, in part because they get feedback every day, that they insist on giving us probabilities. Perhaps pollsters haven't failed enough, as they still continue to insist that they can categorically predict who is going to vote and who isn't. Since voting records are largely public (whether you voted, not whom you voted for), a recent study by Todd Rogers and Masa Aida was able to actually look at how effective it is to ask a respondent whether they plan on voting. Below is a chart showing what % of people who reported each intention actually voted.
Percentage Who Actually Vote x Reported Intention in 2008 (from Rogers & Aida)
Pollsters can predict who votes and who doesn't above chance, but in the same way that poker players probabilistically predict the likelihood of winning a hand, accepting the inherent uncertainty, pollster predictions on who votes are also likely to be wrong much of the time. Pollsters should realistically adopt the same tactics as poker players who multiply the expected outcome (the size of the pot vs. what they have to put in the pot) by the likelihood of the outcome (the odds of the right cards coming to win the hand) in order to determine their decisions. Similarly, polling would be vastly improved if pollsters weighted votes by voting intention rather than categorically deciding that a person is or is not a likely voter. What would be the result?
Right now (October 26, 2012) Romney is leading Obama in Gallup's survey 51-46 among 2700 likely voters, but they are tied 48-48 among 3,050 registered voters. If one does the math, Obama leads Romney approximately 63-25 among unlikely voters. If the pattern from the above paper remains this year (percentages are very different in non-general elections, btw), then we could apply a weight of .87 to likely voters (since 13% don't vote) and a weight of .55 to unlikely voters (since 55% do vote), which would predict that Romney would get 51% of the overall vote and Obama would get 49%, a result which pushes Gallup's result far closer to the average of other polls, where Romney has a slight lead nationally, and is slightly behind in the battleground states.
- Ravi Iyer
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