Tuesday
15Jul2008
"The Return of Religion" by Roger Scruton
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 12:55PM Interesting article by the British philosopher Roger Scruton in a Swedish (I think) online magazine called Axcess.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 12:55PM Thursday
03Jul2008
Are Conservatives Stupider than Liberals?
Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 10:52PM This piece appeared last fall, in the online magazine Slate. William Saletan, no conservative ideologue (he's the author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War), demolishes an exceptionally stupid study that purports to show that "liberals" are "more sensitive and responsive to information that might conflict with their habitual way of thinking." Saletan points out the absurd operationalizations of key concepts -- like "information," "habit," and "complexity" -- that the researchers engage in. The conclusion to the piece is great:
The conservative case against this study is easy to make. Sure, we're fonder of old ways than you are. That's in our definition. Some of our people are obtuse; so are some of yours. If you studied the rest of us in real life, you'd find that while we second-guess the status quo less than you do, we second-guess putative reforms more than you do, so in terms of complexity, ambiguity, and critical thinking, it's probably a wash. Also, our standard of "information" is a bit tougher than the blips and fads you fall for. Sometimes, these inclinations lead us astray. But over the long run, they've served us and society pretty well. It's just that you notice all the times we were wrong and ignore all the times we were right.
In fact, that's exactly what you've done in this study: You've manufactured a tiny world of letters, half-seconds, and button-pushing, so you can catch us in clear errors and keep out the part of life where our tendencies correct yours. And now you feel great about yourselves. Congratulations. You haven't told us much about our way of thinking. But you've told us a lot about yours.
Sunday
08Jun2008
Welcome!
Sunday, June 8, 2008 at 07:39PM Thanks for checking out my new blog. As the title and subtitle have probably already told you, the main focus of this blog is the relation of psychology and politics, more specifically, what psychology (and the other social sciences) can tell us about political phenomena. I've been interested in this intersection since I was an undergraduate majoring in political science and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Chicago (where I also had the opportunity to take some courses in political psychology), but in the past few years the subject has seemed more and more urgent. Partly that's because of the greater urgency of many political issues, both domestic and global. More importantly, though, it's because psychologists have recently taken an increased interest in political phenomena, and much of the recent work seems to me to be wrongheaded and ideologically-driven to varying degrees. (Of course, much of it is great, and the good stuff is equally a motivator for my interest in the subject.)
Some of the specific subjects that are currently occupying a disproportionate share of my attention and research, and which I'll likely be writing about in this blog:
- How people perceive candidates for political office and other individuals -- a topic sometimes called political person perception.
- How people form opinions, attitudes, beliefs, etc. about foreign policy, and the specific form that those opinions take (e.g., attitudinal dimensions, models, "postures").
- The conditions, both at the individual level and the social level, that produce terrorism and other forms of political violence, including ethnic conflict, genocide, and intra-group conflict.
- The relationships between morality and politics. For example, are people's political beliefs and commitments best explained by a metaphor-based model, like George Lakoff's? Or do other approaches to morality, such as the "moral foundations theory" that Jon Haidt and I (and others, especially Jesse Graham) have developed, do a better job?
- Methodologies for studying political psychology. My impression is that a LARGE proportion (perhaps the great majority) of psychological research on politics (especially on attitudes and beliefs) relies on large-sample surveys or questionnaire-based studies, and thus explanation tends to consist of demonstrating correlations between different scales. One of the things I'm interested in is the potential of other, less well-known, methods to illuminate aspects of political psychology that aren't captured in trait-based methods -- for example, Q methodology, repertory grid analysis, cultural consensus theory, and other methods more used by cognitive anthropologists.
