8/10/16

The moral foundations of conservatives and liberals.

Some years ago, my hubby (whom I affectionately refer to as The Mac Geezer) and I went to see the Jim Carrey film, Liar, Liar.  I was bored beyond belief.  TMG was rolling in the aisles and laughing till the tears poured out his eyes, something he NEVER does.  It was like we were sitting next to each other but seeing two different movies.  The plot involves a man who finds himself, to his horror, suddenly incapable of lying.  Here’s a clip.

It went on like this for. two.hours. Rolls eyes. 

The difference between the Geezer and me is kinda like how liberals and conservatives can look at the same event and see it in totally different ways.  Take gay marriage, for example. Liberals tend to see this as a given and describe it as marriage equality.  Some deeply religious conservatives see it as evil and describe gay sex as an abomination.  That’s some split, considering they’re both looking at the same thing.

There are lots of reasons why this happens: differences in personalities, differences in deeply felt beliefs about how families are structured, and differences in moral foundations.  Today I’m going to touch on the issue of moral foundations.

Based on lots and lots of research (I’ll put a few links at the bottom), societies tend to share a few common moral foundations. 

· CARE/HARM. Because of this, we are sensitive to signs of suffering and need in others.  “…it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.”  

· FAIRNESS. It makes us altruistic. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters. But primarily for liberals, it makes us want to be sure that all people are treated equally and fairly.

· LOYALTY.  This foundation makes us sensitive to how well others are team players.  It makes us especially fierce in dealing with those who violate our trust or sell us out to the enemy. It’s the force behind conformity, especially in the face of adversity.

· AUTHORITY. We recognize those who have higher or lower rank than us and respond accordingly. It makes us respectful of authority and of the rules of relationships, like reciprocity.

· SANCTITY. This makes us value purity and sanctity, like adherence to Biblical laws that evolved thousands of years ago. A good example are the Jewish dietary laws that designate various foods and mixtures of foods as unclean. It also makes us wary of symbolic objects and threats.

If you want to see how these things are measured, I've set up a little questionnaire based on some of the research questions.  If you like, give it a shot. It'll take about 10 minutes. LINK.

I’ll wait or you can just continue to read. 

Are you done?  Great!  Here’s what researchers found when they gave this test to liberals and conservatives:  

You don't have to be a statistician to see that strongly liberal people (that's the folks on the left of the political identity line) score much higher on statements about issues of harm and fairness and not so much about the other three foundations.  Strongly conservative people (the folks on the far right of the line) score much higher on things like respect for authority and purity/sanctity. 

In general, and over many types of studies, what the research shows is that liberals care most about equality and caring for others.  Strongly conservative people tend, overall, to feel about the same about all five foundations.  So when it comes to something like gay marriage, liberals see it as a fairness issue. Conservatives see it as a purity/sanctity issue. As a result, their opinions can be very different.  However, conservatives also care about fairness (just not as much as liberals), so if you describe it as marriage equality instead of gay marriage, it’s easier for them to get on board. Just don’t show them two guys kissing.

Anyway, the next time you see a very liberal or very conservative pundit saying something that sounds just crazy to you, see if you can figure out what moral foundation they’re drawing from to make that judgment. It’ll help understand where they’re coming from. Doesn’t mean you have to agree.  And in fact, some pundits are actually pulling stuff out of their behinds, but still, give it a shot.

Much of this is drawn from these two papers and from Richard Haidt's The Righteous Mind

http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/GHN2009.pdf

http://righteousmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ch07.RighteousMind.final_.pdf

8/7/16

Famous Faces

So which of these famous people do you think published an article on psychology?

I'll give you a minute ...

Yes, you're right!  All of them!  I was surprised, too, when this very long list showed up in my inbox this morning from the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. I am excited to share my favorites with you. And I think at least a third of them touch on the topic of politics and influence as well as psychology.

Some of these are obvious, right?  Carl Sagan was a scientist, but mostly he published about astrophysics and planetary science.  However, in the mid 1980s he wrote a lovely and entertaining article called  “Night walkers and mystery mongers: Sense and nonsense at the edge of science” for the magazine The Skeptical Inquirer. It wasn't really a journal, hardly a magazine, but the Sagan article is just as relevant today as it was then.  The beginning description of the second century con man Alexander of Abonutichus could have been written about people today.  Anti-vaxers and climate change skeptics take note. You can find the article HERE. It's a fun read.


Albert Einstein was a scientist, too, but he was also acquainted with Sigmund Freud.  They published a series of letters in which they discussed the causes of war and possible ways of preventing it. Freud invokes his idea of "Thanatos" or a death instinct, which is not generally considered to be valid today.  Nevertheless, the letters are compelling.  You can find them HERE. 



So much for the obvious.  But how about the rest of these folks?



Mayim Bialik plays the brainy girlfriend of fellow nerd Sheldon on Big Bang Theory.   I had no idea she had a doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA. She published what was probably her dissertation research on brain imaging during affective and linguistic prosody conditions. No, I don’t know what that means, either, but I’m impressed!




(Totally off topic, but did you know that Brian May, of Queen, has a doctorate in astrophysics? He started on it before Queen became famous and finally went back and finished his dissertation in 2007. There's an asteroid named after him!!!)

The Dalai Lama teamed up with one of my heroes, social psychologist Paul Ekman,  in a series of conversations looking at the linkages between Buddhism and the science of emotion. Ekman delayed his retirement to supervise some serious research on the relationship between meditation and emotional responses, which the Dalai Lama sponsored. The authors feel that mindfulness-based meditation can help enhance compassion, which is a touchstone for the Dalai Lama. I’ve read their book. It’s fascinating and has increased my appreciation for both men. Amazon has it HERE. 

Colin Firth, yes that Colin Firth, Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice fame, commissioned a study on the relationship between various parts of the brain and political leanings. He and his coauthors found a tie between conservatism and greater amygdala size (related to sensitivity to threat) while liberalism was related to greater size in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which is in turn related to increased ability to manage conflict. This sounds, and is, really technical, but if you want to have a go at it, you can find the article HERE.I hope to have a more user friendly blog on brains and politics later.   

I read this several years ago. Their research was part of a growing realization that brain structure was related to political leanings.  And then you have to wonder, if politics is biology, then can your political philosophy be inherited?  Political leanings run in families, after all...

Benjamin Franklin.  If Colin Firth is my current swoon, Franklin is my historical swoon. You can keep your Hamilton. If I had a time machine, I'd be headed straight towards 18th century Philadelphia.  

Back in the 1700s, the King of France, Louis XVI, asked then-ambassador Franklin, along with chemist Lavoisier and physician Guillotin (the man who popularized the device that would execute Lavoisier a few years later; the French Revolution was full of irony...), to investigate the claims of Frans Anton Mesmer regarding what he called “animal magnetism”. Mesmer said that he could use this magnetism to cure diseases and well as other infirmities.   They concluded that Mesmer’s claims, “…were not legitimate and instead were attributable to the effects of imagination, belief, and suggestion.” On the other hand, hypnosis, as mesmerism is known today, has more widespread acceptance.  You can find the text of Franklin's report, in English, HERE. 

American poet and writer Gertrude Stein studied under William James (the Father of Psychology!) at Harvard.  She was looking at how the unconscious, slight hand movements of the players can send the planchette skittering across the Ouija board. Who knew? Stein's paper is HERE.  






Teller, of Penn and Teller fame, collaborated with The Amazing Randi and others on an article “on how knowledge of magic can inform the psychological study of perception, attention, and memory.” Magicians are really good at misdirection, and their knowledge can help psychologists better understand things like inattentional blindness and change blindness.

Here’s an example.  Can you figure out WhoDunnIt?

That's change blindness.  Here's another example. Pay attention to the rules and follow the directions in the video.

That's inattentional blindness.  You get so focused on one thing that really obvious stuff just slips by.

I hope you enjoyed this brief journey through psychology geekdom.  The original article on famous people and psychology is this one:
Lilienfeld, Scott O. and Lynn, Steven J. (2016) You'll never guess who wrote that: 78 surprising authors of psychological publications. Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 11 no. 4, 419-441.

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8/2/16

Red States/Blue States

While I was watching the conventions these last few weeks, I noticed, yet again, that the Republicans got the red power ties and the Democrats didn’t.  What’s up with that? And then: What makes a power tie? And more importantly, who decided who got which color? And how did that happen?

So let’s start with power ties. Colors have different meanings in different societies, but at least in western cultures, colors that stand out, like red (and yellow and pink), make the person wearing them more “salient” or noticeable. And salient people are seen as more powerful.  Thus the power tie.  It works for dresses, too. On the other hand, blue looks great on TV and is considered the most popular color.

But on to the political parties. Why red and blue? How did that come about?  Turns out, it’s mostly about television. Color television. Here’s a little summary sheet of how the networks reported presidential election results state by state from 1960 to 2000.

                      Washington Post

As color television became more commonplace, networks were able to use colored maps to show how the vote was going. For quite a while, the Republicans were mostly blue. Amazingly, this was likely a leftover from the Civil War, when the northern troops, the army of Lincoln, wore blue, so blue became Republican. Grover Cleveland even used blue to denote Republicans in his 1888 run for the White House because he felt it identified him with The Union.  Politically, red has been seen as the color of revolution, which dates back to the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. The color represents anger and the blood of those who died seeking freedom from oppression.

“Red, the color of angry men, Black, the dark of ages past!”

The Red and Black Song: Les Miserables 

2012                                                       Les Miserables

Until we get to the 2000 Bush/Gore contest. CBS had been using red for Republicans and blue for Democrats since the 1988 mid-term elections. As the tally of votes went on for days and days (Remember the hanging chads?) and the colored maps were shown for days and days, consensus eventually developed. Here's how:

"The colors for United States electoral maps did not get standardized until the 2000 election, when the New York Times and USA Today both used red for Republicans and blue for Democrats.  According to Archie Tse, who was senior graphics artist at the New York Times in 2000, "“I just decided red begins with ‘r,’ Republican begins with ‘r.’ It was a more natural association. There wasn’t much discussion about it.  Paul Overberg, the database editor who made USA Today's online electoral map in 2000, indicated that he assigned red to the Republicans and blue to the Democrats, because of the large number of Republican states in the Mountain West region of the U.S.  According to Overberg, "If it had been flipped, the map would have been too dark,” he said. “The blue would have been swamping the red. Red is a lighter color.""

www.quora.com

Finally, Tim Russert of Meet the Press coined of the term red states/blue states, and so it has been ever since.

Here’s a sample of what it looked like as the colors evolved:

1968 NBC                              Washington Post

1976 ABC                                Washington Post

1980                                  Smithsonian Magazine

1984  CBS                                 Washington Post

1992                                              ABC

2000                                          NBC

2016