A woman has never come closer to the presidency than Hillary Clinton did in winning the popular vote in November. Yet as women march in Washington on Saturday, many of them to protest the presidency of Donald Trump, an important obstacle to the first woman president remains: the hidden, internalized […] Read more »
The Price of Certainty
It’s alarming to see how polarized politics have become in the United States. The wider the gulf grows, the more people seem to be certain that the other side is wrong. Certainty can be a dangerous thing. Two years ago, I met the social psychologist Arie Kruglanski while researching a […] Read more »
Why Does This Election Have Us So Down? Social Science May Have An Answer
U.S. politics have long been marked by disagreement and even rancor. But 2016 feels worse than usual. NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast offers one explanation why, from deep in our psychological frameworks. NPR Read more »
Why Facts Don’t Unify Us
According to the Pew Research Center, the nation is more polarized than at any time in recent history. While some of the issues dividing us boil down to ideology and preference, there is at least one on which hard science should have a strong say — climate change. But do […] Read more »
Politics and personality: most of what you read is malarkey
… For many political psychologists, it seems abundantly clear that traits and politics go together. There’s evidence that many aspects of personality develop quite early in life and have a genetic component, but we don’t become actively political until we are older. So it’s sensible to assume that the one […] Read more »
Key ingredients of opposition to free trade? Prejudice and nationalism
… Many observers have noted that Donald Trump’s anti-trade language is decidedly “us versus them.” In Britain, the “leave” movement’s campaign against economic openness was infused with anti-foreign sentiment. A series of studies by both economists and political scientists confirms this link between nationalistic sentiment and opposition to global markets. […] Read more »