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Category: political orientation

Persuasion: Do you want to be effective or just feel righteous?

Persuasion: Do you want to be effective or just feel righteous?

A recent article in The Atlantic reports fascinating research on the relative effectiveness of typical and moral-framing based approaches to persuading people of an opposing political orientation to see value in alternative positions. The upshot is that there are verifiably effective methods for getting around entrenched, reflexive opposition.

Lakoff introduces FrameLab

Lakoff introduces FrameLab

In this FB post, copied below. The first podcast can be found here. “By popular demand, it’s the FrameLab Podcast — a podcast about politics, language, and your brain. In Episode 1, [I] discuss the conservative moral hierarchy and how Republicans really think. And I answer some of the questions you submitted via Facebook and Twitter. Excerpt: This is a fight for freedom. Conservatives want to take the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ and say that they mean that you’re free to take advantage of…

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Liberals and conservatives are not equivalently biased

Liberals and conservatives are not equivalently biased

Here is a meta-analysis called “Ideological asymmetries and the essence of political psychology” by John T. Jost, Political Psychology, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2017. This is in part a response to a previous meta-analysis posted on this blog that found both liberal and conservatives equally biased. It’s interesting how liberals, when basing their so-called biases on science and facts, are declared equivalently biased to those whose biases are based on factors other than the foregoing, including authoritarianism and fear responses. …

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Are We Racists?

Are We Racists?

BMAI friends. The following ramble is my first cut at making sense of the grave role racial (and other) bias is playing in the world today. This was prompted by comments I see daily from my family and friends on social media. Thinking about the great lack of self- and group-awareness many of the commenters display, I turned my scope inward. How do my own innate, evolved biases slant me to take my group’s and my own privileges for granted and…

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Poor understanding correlates with religious/supernatural belief

Poor understanding correlates with religious/supernatural belief

According to this article in Applied Cognitive Psychology. The summary follows. The entire article can be accessed at Sci-Hub. “Although supernatural beliefs often paint a peculiar picture about the physical world, the possibility that the beliefs might be based on inadequate understanding of the non-social world has not received research attention. In this study (N = 258), we therefore examined how physical-world skills and knowledge predict religious and paranormal beliefs. The results showed that supernatural beliefs correlated with all variables that were…

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