Four toes into the universe of political psychology

[Jackpine Radical]

The following set of clippings & commentary is intended as a super-brief introduction to four writers on various aspects of political psychology. It is intended to trigger curiosity & thought about how people acquire, retain and change attitudes, beliefs & values, & suggest possible insights about how one may increase the likelihood of rational thinking (e.g. by reducing fear).

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

The book's central thesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The book delineates cognitive biases associated with each type of thinking, starting with Kahneman's own research on loss aversion. From framing choices to substitution, the book highlights several decades of academic research to suggest that people place too much confidence in human judgment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

Paul Piff & Dachel Keltner

One gem as a sample of their work--

Having less, giving more: the influence of social class on prosocial behavior.
Piff PK1, Kraus MW, Côté S, Cheng BH, Keltner D.
Author information
Abstract
Lower social class (or socioeconomic status) is associated with fewer resources, greater exposure to threat, and a reduced sense of personal control. Given these life circumstances, one might expect lower class individuals to engage in less prosocial behavior, prioritizing self-interest over the welfare of others. The authors hypothesized, by contrast, that lower class individuals orient to the welfare of others as a means to adapt to their more hostile environments and that this orientation gives rise to greater prosocial behavior. Across 4 studies, lower class individuals proved to be more generous (Study 1), charitable (Study 2), trusting (Study 3), and helpful (Study 4) compared with their upper class counterparts. Mediator and moderator data showed that lower class individuals acted in a more prosocial fashion because of a greater commitment to egalitarian values and feelings of compassion. Implications for social class, prosocial behavior, and economic inequality are discussed.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20649364

Drew Westen

Westen begins by noting that recent research has shot holes through the theory of the dispassionate rational mind that emerged from the 18th-century Enlightenment. People rely upon emotion to drive the decision-making process and reach conclusions that make them feel good.
Reason and rationality, therefore, play a limited role in political decisions. “The dispassionate mind of the 18th-century philosophers,” Westen says, “allows us to predict somewhere between 0.5 and 3 percent of the most important political decisions people will make over the course of their lives.”
He then goes on to assert that Democrats have been losing because they have been appealing to the rational part of the mind. They issue laundry lists of policies and offer arguments with evidence. They don’t realize how the images they are presenting set off emotional cues that undermine their own campaigns.

Jonathan Haidt

Haidt sounds annoyingly like Pollyanna channeling Rodney King, but he has done some interesting and insightful work in the area of differences in values systems between (particularly) religious conservatives and liberals.

From Amazon—

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

[Eleanors38]

1. Piff & Keltner as well as Western are on the money.

As a corollary, I would add that the rational realm of politics, beyond limited formal debate settings, is both uncreative, and insensitive as to how people feel. We should concede that the Right for now is more sophisticated and imaginative.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. I've served as an expert in many court criminal cases, and

my experiences with both juries and many judges has served to confirm my belief in Kahneman's model as well. That is, as a scientific expert, I keep trying to lay out fairly complex realities using System 2 analysis only to have the "deciders of fact" respond with System 1 thinking, reacting to their gut feelings about anything from the defendant's race to the contents of a TV crime show they saw the night before.

[demwing]

3. Kicked & Rec'd /nt

[rhett o rick]

4. Thank you very much. We need a book list here in PRG. nm