. Statistically most people who are open are liberals. This is a fact.
You generally vote you personality. not because you have "great" ideas

Statistically most people who are open are liberals. This is a fact. — Caleb Mercado

And all cats are girls, yes I agree

It's identity politics with extra steps.

Now with a shiny veneer of pseudo-science to make it seem legitimate!

you know nothing about personality psychology (Big five). Forget indentity politics. Individual is the salvation too the state (that is what the west got right).

No pseudo-science. Have you even read how they got to the conclusion? Probably not. You dismiss so quickly with your arrogance. Good luck with that. The arrogance of the intellect is shining here

you know nothing about personality psychology — Caleb Mercado

How dare you, I am a proud Gemini

read about big five, fool.

read about big five, fool. — Caleb Mercado

Yes I've watched 2 out of 3 winners of the Big Five: It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Both are fantastic. Haven't seen The Silence of the Lambs though.

It’s been awhile since I read Righteous Minds but I seem to recall the ‘foundations’ being regarded as social constructs. Constructs that are based on moral intuitions that we all possess. You’re against this intuitionism? — praxis

Yes. I'm not quite sure my full critique of Haidt's position is quite appropriate here, but in summary, I think he's right to invoke the factors he has in playing into political decisions (though that's pretty self-evident), but he's wrong to treat them as foundational.

The problem is that we're already interpreting behaviours (and self-report) from within a cultural context, so to say "X behaviour is innate" is to identify behaviour x as an instance of X (where x is the instance and X is the model of instances). That very identification is culturally mediated. So when you say

We each have particular conditioning or ingrained habits. I can't see how that's disputable. — praxis

I don't really agree. We have instances of specific behaviours, but identifying them as examples of trait X depends on our model of X which itself is formed by our language and cultural upbringing.

Haidt's 'moral tastes' are an attempt to classify behaviours (and self-reports) as if such a classification could be done outside of the history and speech acts that each of those terms have attached to them. For 'harm and 'care' to have any meaning (to take his fist axis as an example), they have to already accept the identification of those terms with behaviours. They don't come empty first for us to then say "I wonder what might fit in these categories".

So rather than some set of tastes existing as natural kinds which then inevitably lead someone to some behaviour exemplary of a particular political persuasion, I'd say that a person's political position will dictate how they interpret the behaviours an assign them to motivating morals according to publicly available narratives. I can't find a free copy, I'm afraid, but if you have any institutional access, you might be interested in Stephen Reicher's paper rejuvenating Moscovician social representation model for political psychology.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2011.00834.x

Thanks Jordan Peterson. Say hi to Tammy. :joke:

I’m not sure I understand how one can authorize violence and condemnation against an other while at the same time considering their perspective and actions to be legitimate. As Ken Gergen wrote “ those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.” — Joshs

Because contextual legitimacy doesn't mean that resolution is reachable. Just because I can see how someone might have arrived at a position, it doesn't have any bearing on the methods by which I'd have to bring about a change. I can understand how a psychopath ended up that way if I see a lesion in the vm prefrontal cortex, that doesn't mean I can now diffuse his rage with talking.

One can defend oneself against a wild animal without condemning them , because we see their behavior as legitimate and natural. — Joshs

Indeed, but that's because the condemnation would have no effect on an animal. We're a social species, ostracisation is our main tool for setting group rules, so condemnation works. Look at how riled neo-liberals on this site are that we don't take their arguments seriously, they shouldn't care to debate with such obvious moral reprobates, but they do, because they want to be in the beard-stroking intellectuals gang.

For you the idea of a legitimate perspective , an internal logic to a worldview , is incoherent There are only fragmented and arbitrary bits of conditioned habits, so a ‘tough love’ is justified to change the reinforcement contingencies , habits, propositional narratives. — Joshs

Yeah, that's not far off.

Considering psychology is largely a garbage science anyway, one has to admire the foresight of philosophers in ditching it early on. — StreetlightX

Well, if replication is an issue for you, what's your alternative?

If I'm supporting an argument for mitigating circumstances to reduce the sentence of a young offender the crown want to make an example of, on the ground that his behavioural choices were affected by his social environment, what exactly do you think I should bring to bear in that? Žižek? You think the judge is going to give a shit what some random polemicist thinks? What about government policy, risk analysis, charitable intervention strategies...

What exactly is your brilliant non-psychological solution to the questions which inevitably hinge on how people are likely to react to their social and environmental circumstances? Guess? Use our brilliant 'gut feelings' (which mysteriously vary depending on how much power we wield)? Trust to philosophers who we, for some reason, assume immune to bias and just 'tell it how it is'?

All these digs at the old linear models you and Maw think are these fantastic coup de grâce are thirty years out of date. Even the standard textbooks warn against them, let alone any serious researcher.

Just because our models have to be non-linear, stochastic, and break down completely at higher levels of integration, doesn't mean we throw them away. Models of weather and climate are likewise non-linear stochastic and break down at higher levels of integration. The weather forecast for next week is little better than guesswork. It's influenced by too many factors that cannot be included in the model, but if I'm climbing a mountain tomorrow I'd be an idiot not to take it into account.

What exactly is your brilliant non-psychological solution to the questions which inevitably hinge on how people are likely to react to their social and environmental circumstances? — Isaac

Well communism obviously. But barring that, literally anything else but psychology. Seriously. Want people to live good lives? Give 'em good public transport and social services. Design cities with well integrated zoning. Fund schools and public housing, tax the fuck out of the rich and out of cooperations, greenify all public space, and dincentivize, to the point of strangulation, carbon emissions. Rethink the monetary system. Do the utmost to ignore psychology because all of this ought to be indifferent to it. Or maybe use a bit of psychology to pick out the right colors for public infrastructure or something. Maybe for some interpersonal problems we can use a few of you. But most of the funds ought to go to psychiatrists, and you all ought to get whatever is leftover. Maybe. But only once the public parks are fully funded and maintained. You can have some input on how they are designed, but your opinion comes in last, after the children, who will be taken far more seriously. You get final say between picking either pirate ship or fire truck design. Otherwise, rigorously ignore psychology, or better, actively exclude psychologists from any and all consideration of any good life, ever.

Otherwise we can replace all psychologists with a coin flip machine considering you guys can replicate only about half of what happens in that 'science' anyway. Would be cheaper too.

That is rubbish. If you throw out psychology you throw out all of social science. Weird thing too do. Also one of the great discoveries from psychology is iq. You definitely see the difference in people and we can measure it reliably. If you test the same group twice the correlation is so high it’s like measuring the same people twice.

And you think you will have a great life if all is given too you. You will destroy it so quickly just too make something different happen. Nobody takes pleasure in unearned “status” let’s say. It’s something creepy about it.

And communism killed more people than the nazi’s.

However, if that someone has the statistics to back up his conclusion then his investigation can hardly be dismissed as "nonsense". — Apollodorus

Seems that we have to use statistics to get the attention of Apollodorus.

Better yet, let's use regression analysis. It's even more scientific!

In the end there's a golden rule: understand the limitations of your methodology.

There's really nothing wrong with using psychology in looking at politics if we have a broader understanding about what effects politics and how politics works. Hence the better researchers are quite subtle and tactful on just what implications can you drive from let's say evolutionary political psychology, the field concerned with the application of evolutionary psychology to the study of politics. Psychology can say something, but it doesn't explain everything. People can easily accept that, but especially when they are ignorant of the subject at hand, this fact can be forgotten easily. At worst, the dubious researcher will make broad claims, which then catch the public eye.

You can get an insight using social psychology on how some segment of the voting population behaves. Yet their voting behavior will be influenced far more by the economy: if either the economy is roaring and people are better off than before or if the economy is collapsing and everyone feels it can explain more the behavior in the voting booth than personal traits of the voters. The real misuse happens when one forgets or sidelines other factors (like the economy) or basically forgets history itself, everything that has happened before. This typically happens when the broader context isn't so familiar to the researchers themselves and when complex developments are explained by simple causes.

A well known example of this the "Great stirrup controversy", where a historian called Townsend White argued in his book from 1962 "Medieval Technology and Social Change" that feudalism took hold because of the spread of the stirrup in the cavalry. The argument went that the stirrup enabled heavy cavalry and shock combat, the cavalrymen could fight better from the saddle with stirrups, which in turn prompted the Carolingian dynasty of the 8th and 9th centuries to organize its territory into a vassalage system, rewarding mounted warriors with land grants for their service.

It's a quite eccentric claim, starting from the fact that there had been armoured heavy cavalry in Antiquity (Romans called them aptly oven men) and "shock combat" wasn't anything new. I think the reason why the argument came so popular was because few historians ride horses and even fewer understand that stirrups aren't so essential as Townsend White argues. Likely the Princeton professor wasn't an avid horseman himself, but appears to have made a bunch of surprising claims. Yet here you can see that minor details can capture the eye and the imagination of the public.

In the end there's a golden rule: understand the limitations of your methodology. — ssu

It wasn't my methodology. It was a line of inquiry suggested by Psychology Today and other publications. If it turns out to be wrong, so be it. I don't care. As I said, you carry on, don't let me interrupt your conversation.

That is rubbish. If you throw out psychology you throw out all of social science. — Caleb Mercado

Correct. Unfortunately, as can be seen here, the left uses "psychology" and "science" to demonize the right but they scream blue murder the minute the same methods are applied to themselves.

one of the great discoveries from psychology is iq — Caleb Mercado

This and female hysteria, absolutely.

Thanks, Isaac, that’s helpful.

If you throw out psychology you throw out all of social science. — Caleb Mercado

Your little personality traits theory isn't psychology.

Your little personality traits theory isn't psychology. — frank

And presumably you're the new C G Jung?

I can understand how a psychopath ended up that way if I see a lesion in the vm prefrontal cortex, that doesn't mean I can now diffuse his rage with talking. — Isaac

I understand that you don’t see political perspectives and moral systems this way, but just as a hypothetical , what if instead of connecting such complex ways of thinking with reductive causes like lesions in the brain, or reinforcement contingencies, we saw them as akin to scientific theories? That is, if we saw every social-political-ethics stance as the manifestation of an underlying ‘scientific’ theory that was constructed by the person on the basis of the evidence as they interpreted it? Would you then agree that coercion, condemnation, peer pressure and violence would not be particularly effective in changing their theoretical view? Can such methods change the theories of good scientists?

Again, I know the idea of an integrated gestalt-based personal foundation for social understandings conflicts with your conditioning-based approach, but I just want to suggest that it explains why countries under the weight of sanctions and international
condemnation can dig i. their heels rather than succumb to the ‘shaping’ effect of internetional pressure.

We're a social species, ostracisation is our main tool for setting group rules, so condemnation works. Look at how riled neo-liberals on this site are that we don't take their arguments seriously, they shouldn't care to debate with such obvious moral reprobates, but they do, because they want to be in the beard-stroking intellectuals gang. — Isaac

Group rules and ostracization only work when those being ostracized have enough overlap of their thinking with the dominant group. It has the opposite effect when the two parties have profoundly different worldviews.

Conservatives and liberals interact online all the time in the U.S. on comment sections and blogs, but studies have show that rather than causing them to come closer to the other’s point of view, it simply reinforces their differences.
It is impossible for someone to be successfully cajoled or threatened to some behavioral goal if that form
of behavior is based on a certain complex underlying understanding the the person has not arrived at. All you will end up with, at best, is a clever soul who learns how to ape the superficial aspects of your ways of acting in order to keep out of trouble. But in the meantime that person will strategize how to gain power in order to overthrow what they never bought into to begin with. And in terms of that person’s day to day intimate behavior with friends and family , they will implicitly continue to behave in the ways that intrinsically make sense to them. Even pigeons have been known to outfox reinforcement contingencies.

Conservatives and liberals interact online all the time in the U.S. on comment sections and blogs, but studies have show that rather than causing them to come closer to the other’s point of view, it simply reinforces their differences. — Joshs

That was exactly one of the points I was making. Being confronted with opposite views does tend to make you more aware of your own and reinforce them when you start defending them. And it seems that psychology, innate or acquired, does play a role in it.

Besides, in a society that aims to enforce diversity, the tensions that arise between groups holding different views tend to be more and more accentuated.

And communism killed more people than the nazi’s. — Caleb Mercado

This is not a helpful observation; it provides almost no insight. Firstly - was it a competition? Secondly, Communism lasted decades, Nazism just over one decade.

Being confronted with opposite views does tend to make you more aware of your own and reinforce them when you start defending them. And it seems that psychology, innate or acquired, does play a role in it. — Apollodorus

I hold to a different approach to psychology that one that sees behavior as innate or acquired. One could say that it is both at the same time, or neither. I hold with psychologist George Kelly that a person’s psychological
processes are channelized by the way that they anticipate events. And the way we anticipate
events is organized as a functionally integral system of anticipations that is our worldview. The relative stability of this system , rather than ‘traits’, makes us resistant to coercion and conditioning from outside forces, but it is not a frozen template. If events don’t validate our hypotheses, our system can crumble if we don’t reconstrue. What is validating to the left is not validating to the right , because the underlying worldviews are so different.

in a society that aims to enforce diversity, the tensions that arise between groups holding different views tend to be more and more accentuated. — Apollodorus

On the other hand, Jim Crow laws, for example, didn't seem to ease the tensions in race relations very well. Perhaps those Southern Democrats weren't up to date on the latest political psychology journals.

The relative stability of this system , rather than ‘traits’, makes us resistant to coercion and conditioning from outside forces, but it is not a frozen template. — Joshs

Well, "traits" is perhaps not the most useful term to use in this context. But how is this system built, supported and maintained, and what role do "traits" play in any of this? Do "traits" exist or not and if yes how do they relate to this system of anticipations?

On the other hand, Jim Crow laws, for example, didn't seem to ease the tensions in race relations very well. Perhaps those Southern Democrats weren't up to date on the latest political psychology journals. — praxis

Quite possibly. What I had in mind was diversity of political or cultural views. Diversity seems to be incompatible with unity. There was less disunity and conflict before the introduction of political parties.

how is this system built, supported and maintained, and what role do "traits" play in any of this? Do "traits" exist or not and if yes how do they relate to this system of anticipations? — Apollodorus

The system is built from experience. No event ever duplicates a previous event , so the system is always adapting and accommodating itself to the novelties it encounters by creating new categories and subcategories to make sense of events. if there must be some recognizable aspect or feature of an event , some similarity between it and a subordinate category of the system in order for it to be seen. Emotional crises are the result of the encounter with experience that the e system cannot assimilate on the basis of likeness and similarity on any level.

We see this clearly in today’s polarized political environment. Neither side can subsume the other’s thinking enough to see its validity for the other side.

What people think of as ‘ traits’ may correspond to variations from one person to the next in styles of organizing events, but in most cases , the concept of trait is used incorrectly to explain behavior that is the result of the content of one’s system. ‘ Emotionality’ of various sorts is a function of how comprehensively and assimilatively one’s system can cope with events. That’s a function of what one understands, the content of ones system , not some stylistic feature of engaging with the world.

Birth order, proneness to anger , shyness, extroversion can be studied in any culture, but have no direct bearing on the content of one’s outlook. and thus of one’s politics. If you want to know why someone believes a certain way, you’re better off asking them than assuming f secret traits. They will most likely be able to tell you why they think the way they do.

Birth order, proneness to anger , shyness, extroversion can be studied in any culture, but have no direct bearing on the content of one’s outlook. and thus of one’s politics. If you want to know why someone believes a certain way, you’re better off asking them than assuming f secret traits. They will most likely be able to tell you. — Joshs

But people may choose to hide the reasons behind their views, depending on the culture. Brits might be less open that Americans, and Scandinavians might not even talk to you. Or, they may simply not know those reasons. Views are often inculcated through upbringing and education. Once they've become part of the system, of the psychological makeup, it may be difficult for somebody to consciously isolate, identify, and analyze them in any meaningful way. And what if subconscious memories from previous lives, or genetic factors, play a role?