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Will Mitt Romney appeal to empathizers or systemizers in his Republican...
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...
View ArticleIn Defense of Akin: Moral Coherence is common.
Recently, some of my collaborators (Brittany Liu and Pete Ditto) published a paper on moral coherence, which is when people fit their factual beliefs to their moral beliefs. It is a phenomenon very...
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Be the Bipartisanship you want to see in the World by Supporting our next...
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...
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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...
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Early Voting is a Social Influence Tool, so tell everyone when you vote!
As a political junkie, I’ve been reading the spin on early voting with interest as each side talks about how they are using their ground game to get people to the polls. Some have suggested that early...
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Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and Paul Krugman need to get out of Maslow’s...
Losing an election is tough and I have immense empathy for those who have a heartfelt vision for their country that was not fulfilled on election day. Most people who care deeply about the election,...
View ArticleThe Gaza Conflict and Being Pro-Peace rather than Anti-War
One of my favorite Mother Theresa quotes is: “I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be...
View ArticleOn Mitt Romney and The X-Files
Those of you interested in political psychology and data science might enjoy my latest post on the Ranker Data Blog entitled Mitt Romney Should Have Advertised on the X-Files. In it, I explore...
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When is investment banking immoral? A review of Greg Smith’s book, Why I left...
On Thanksgiving evening, I started reading Greg Smith’s book, Why I left Goldman Sachs late in the afternoon. I finished it around midnight. It’s a relatively easy read with a relatively...
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How to Prevent Mental Illness: Help others with their stressful life events
I’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile, not just in response to the recent tragedy in Connecticut, but anytime I read an article about homelessness or people who are mentally disturbed. Many...
View ArticleWhen should we believe social science findings?
Recently, some colleagues of mine forwarded me this article from the Weekly Standard concerning the use of social science to delegitimize conservatism. There are some valid points in this article that...
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Psychological Differences between Cell Phone and Landline users presents a...
When the NY Times or Gallup reports that Obama or Romney has a lead in the polls, how do they know this? Typically, they pay people to randomly call people and they extrapolate from this sample, using...
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