… Pop culture depictions generally show torture to be effective at eliciting actionable intelligence, often in a ticking time bomb scenario that fails to reflect reality. Similarly, public opinion polls ask about support for torture under the presumption that it works. What impact does framing torture as effective have on […] Read more »
What Is Torture? Our Beliefs Depend In Part On Who’s Doing It.
… This week’s Senate report on U.S. interrogations is the latest stage in a decade-long debate. Americans have talked about torture in different ways, including debating whether to call it torture at all. The Bush administration avoided that language after 9/11 partly because the United States had signed on to […] Read more »
In Canvassing, Messenger Is as Important as Message, Study Finds
See also (from May 2015): Author of Study on Changing Views of Gay Marriage Seeks Its Retraction Gay political canvassers can soften the opinions of voters opposed to same-sex marriage by having a brief, face-to-face discussion about the issue, researchers reported on Thursday. The findings could have implications for activists […] Read more »
How to reduce partisan gridlock
… Social psychological research shows that inviting partisans to affirm their sense of self-worth can help them escape political traps. Defensive partisan reactions, such as blindly opposing the other side’s ideas, are largely driven by the desire to see one’s political group — and, by extension, oneself — as moral, […] Read more »
The Battle for Your Brain
… Our tendency toward partisanship is likely the result of evolution—forming groups is how prehistoric humans survived. That’s helpful when trying to master an unforgiving environment with Stone Age technology. It’s less so when trying to foster a functional democracy. Understanding the other side’s point of view, even if one […] Read more »
The Climate Swerve
Americans appear to be undergoing a significant psychological shift in our relation to global warming. I call this shift a climate “swerve,” borrowing the term used recently by the Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt to describe a major historical change in consciousness that is neither predictable nor orderly. … Of […] Read more »