America’s long history of anti-science has dangerously undermined the COVID vaccine

Peter Hotez

The Dallas Morning News

Originally published 15 Aug 21

Here is an excerpt:

America’s full-throated enthusiasm for vaccines lasted until the early 2000s. The 1998 Lancet publication of a paper from Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, which wrongly asserted that the measles virus in the MMR vaccine replicated in the colons of children to cause pervasive developmental disorder (autism), ushered in a new era of distrust for vaccine.

It also resulted in distrust for the U.S. Health and Human Services agencies promoting vaccinations. The early response from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was to dismiss growing American discontent for vaccines as a fringe element, until eventually in the 2010s anti-vaccine sentiment spread across the internet.

The anti-vaccine movement eventually adopted medical freedom and used it to gain strength and accelerate in size, internet presence and external funding. Rising out of the American West, anti-vaccine proponents insisted that only parents could make vaccine choices and they were prepared to resist government requirements for school entry or attendance.

In California, the notion of vaccine choice gained strength in the 2010s, leading to widespread philosophical exemptions to childhood MMR vaccines and other immunizations. Vaccine exemptions reached critical mass, ultimately culminating in a 2014–2015 measles epidemic in Orange County.

The outbreak prompted state government intervention through the introduction of California Senate Bill 277 that eliminated these exemptions and prevented further epidemics, but it also triggered aggressive opposition. Anti-vaccine health freedom groups harassed members of the Legislature and labeled prominent scientists as pharma shills. They touted pseudoscience, claiming that vaccines were toxic, or that natural immunity acquired from the illness was superior and more durable than vaccine-induced immunity.

Health freedom then expanded through newly established anti-vaccine political action committees in Texas and Oklahoma in the Southwest, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest, and Michigan and Ohio in the Midwest, while additional anti-vaccine organizations formed in almost every state.

These groups lobbied state legislatures to promote or protect vaccine exemptions, while working to cloak or obscure classroom or schoolwide disclosures of vaccine exemptions. They also introduced menacing consent forms to portray vaccines as harmful or toxic.

The Texans for Vaccine Choice PAC formed in 2015, helping to accelerate personal belief immunization exemptions to a point where today approximately 72,000 Texas schoolchildren miss vaccines required for school entry and attendance.

The info is here.

Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think

Brian Gallagher and Kevin Berger
Nautil.us
Originally published 14 Feb 19

Here is an excerpt:

When it comes to misinformation, twas always thus. What’s changed now?

O’Connor: It’s always been the case that humans have been dependent on social ties to gain knowledge and belief. There’s been misinformation and propaganda for hundreds of years. If you’re a governing body, you have interests you’re trying to protect. You want to control what people believe. What’s changed is social media and the structure of communication between people. Now people have tremendous ability to shape who they interact with. Say you’re an anti-vaxxer. You find people online who are also anti-vaxxers and communicate with them rather than people who challenge your beliefs.

The other important thing is that this new structure means that all sorts of influencers—the Russian government, various industry groups, other government groups—have direct access to people. They can communicate with people in a much more personal way. They can pose on Twitter and Facebook as a normal person who you might want to interact with. If you look at Facebook in the lead up to the 2016 election, the Russian Internet Research Agency created animal-lovers groups, Black Lives Matter groups, gun-rights groups, and anti-immigrant groups. They could build trust with people who would naturally be part of these groups. And once they grounded that trust, they could influence them by getting them not to vote or by driving polarization, causing more extreme rhetoric. They can make other people trust them in ways that would have been very difficult without social media.

Weatherall: People tend to trust their friends, their family, people who they share other affinities with. So if the message can look like it’s coming from those people, it can be very effective. Another thing that’s become widespread is the ability to produce easily shareable visual media. The memes we see on Twitter or on Facebook don’t really say anything, they conjure up an emotion—an emotion associated with an ideology or belief you might have. It’s a type of misinformation that supports your beliefs without ever coming out and saying something false or saying anything.

The interview is here.

The Sex Premium in Religiously Motivated Moral Judgment

Liana Hone, Thomas McCauley, Eric Pedersen,
Evan Carter, and Michael McCullough
PsyArXiv Preprints

Abstract

Religion encourages people to reason about moral issues deontologically rather than on the basis of the perceived consequences of specific actions. However, recent theorizing suggests that religious people’s moral convictions are actually quite strategic (albeit unconsciously so), designed to make their worlds more amenable to their favored approaches to solving life’s basic challenges. In six experiments, we find that religious cognition places a “sex premium” on moral judgments, causing people to judge violations of conventional sexual morality as particularly objectionable. The sex premium is especially strong among highly religious people, and applies to both legal and illegal acts. Religion’s influence on moral reasoning, even if deontological, emphasizes conventional sexual norms, and may reflect the strategic projects to which religion has been applied throughout history.

From the Discussion

How does the sex premium in religiously motivated moral judgment arise during development? We see three plausible pathways. First, society’s vectors for religious cultural learning may simply devote more attention to sex and reproduction than to prosociality when they seek to influence others’ moral stances. Conservative preachers, for instance, devote more time to issues of sexual purity than do liberal preachers, and religious parents discuss the morality of sex with their children more frequently than do less religious parents, even though they discuss sex with their children less frequently overall. Second, strong emotions facilitate cultural learning by improving attention, memory, and motivation, and few human experiences generate stronger emotions than do sex and reproduction. If the emotions that regulate sexual attraction, arousal, and avoidance (e.g., sexual disgust) are stronger than those that regulate prosocial behavior (e.g., empathy; moralistic anger), then the sex premium documented here may emerge from the fact that religiously motivated sexual moralists can create more powerful cultural learning experiences than prosocial moralists can.  Finally, given the extreme importance of sex and reproduction to fitness, the children of religiously adherent adults may observe that violations of local sexual standards to evoke greater moral outrage and condemnation from third parties than do violations of local standards for prosocial behavior.

The research is here.

The primeval tribalism of American politics

The Economist
Originally posted May 24, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The problem is structural: the root of tribalism is human nature, and the current state of American democracy is distinctly primeval. People have an urge to belong to exclusive groups and to affirm their membership by beating other groups. A new book by the political scientist Lilliana Mason, “Uncivil Agreement”, describes the psychology experiments that proved this. In one, members of randomly selected groups were told to share a pile of cash between their group and another. Given the choice of halving the sum, or of keeping a lesser portion for themselves and handing an even smaller portion to the other group, they preferred the second option. The common good meant nothing. Winning was all. This is the logic of American politics today.

How passion got strained

The main reason for that, Ms Mason argues, is a growing correlation between partisan and other important identities, concerning race, religion and so on. When the electorate was more jumbled (for example, when the parties had similar numbers of racists and smug elitists) most Americans had interests in both camps. That allowed people to float between, or at least to respect them. The electorate is now so sorted—with Republicans the party of less well-educated and socially conservative whites and Democrats for everyone else—as to provide little impediment to a deliciously self-affirming intertribal dust-up.

The article is here.

Why Partisanship Is Such a Worthy Foe of Objective Truth

Charlotte Hu
Discover Magazine
Originally published February 20, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Take, for example, an experiment that demonstrated party affiliation affected people’s perception of a protest video. When participants felt the video depicted liberally minded protesters, Republicans were more in favor of police intervention than Democrats. The opposite emerged when participants thought the video showed a conservative protest. The visual information was identical, but people drew vastly different conclusions that were shaded by their political group affiliation.

“People are more likely to behave in and experience emotions in ways that are congruent with the activated social identity,” says Bavel. In other words, people will go along with the group, even if the ideas oppose their own ideologies—belonging may have more value than facts.

The situation is extenuated by social media, which creates echo chambers on both the left and the right. In these concentric social networks, the same news articles are circulated, validating the beliefs of the group and strengthening their identity association with the group.

The article is here.

The Vanishing "Values Voter"

McKay Coppins
The Atlantic
Originally posted December 7, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

For decades, the belief that private morality was essential to assessing the worthiness of politicians and public figures was an animating ideal at the core of the Christian right’s credo. As with most ideals, the movement did not always live up to its own standards. So-called “values voters” pursued a polarizing, multi-faceted agenda that was often tangled up in prejudice and partisanship. They fiercely defended Clarence Thomas when he was accused of sexually harassing Anita Hill, for example, and then excoriated Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

But even when they were failing to hold their own side accountable, they still clung to the idea that “character counts.” As recently as 2011, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” But by the time Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, that number had risen sharply to 72 percent. White evangelicals are now more tolerant of immoral behavior by elected officials than the average American. “This is really a sea change in evangelical ethics,” Robert P. Jones, the head of the institute and the author of The End of White Christian America, recently told me.

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“The way evangelicals see the world, the culture is not only slipping away—it’s slipping away in all caps, with four exclamation points after that. It’s going to you-know-what in a handbasket,” Brody told me. “Where does that leave evangelicals? It leaves them with a choice. Do they sacrifice a little bit of that ethical guideline they’ve used in the past in exchange for what they believe is saving the culture?”

The article is here.

Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan
NBER Working Paper No. 22611
September 2016

Abstract

Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we

analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games

played by a prominent college team in the state. We investigate the behavior of judges, the

conduct of whom should, by law, be free of personal biases and emotions. We find that

unexpected losses increase disposition (sentence) lengths assigned by judges during the week

following the game. Unexpected wins, or losses that were expected to be close contests ex-ante,

have no impact. The effects of these emotional shocks are asymmetrically borne by black

defendants. We present evidence that the results are not influenced by defendant or attorney

behavior or by defendants’ economic background. Importantly, the results are driven by judges

who have received their bachelor’s degrees from the university with which the football team is

affiliated. Different falsification tests and a number of auxiliary analyses demonstrate the

robustness of the findings. These results provide evidence for the impact of emotions in one

domain on a behavior in a completely unrelated domain among a uniformly highly-educated

group of individuals (judges), with decisions involving high stakes (sentence lengths). They also

point to the existence of a subtle and previously-unnoticed capricious application of sentencing.

The paper is here.

Here Are the Feels That Make Internet Things Go Viral

By Drake Baer

The Science of Us

Originally posted May 25, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Across the two languages, the researchers found, the stories that were most widely shared were high in “dominance,” or the feeling of being in control. Posts that make you feel happy or inspired are high in dominance, the research says, while stories that make you feel sad are disempowering. (This is also why “21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity” is perhaps the finest BuzzFeed post of all, and like all quality vintages, it only gets better with age).

While dominance led to sharing in this data set, arousal (the feeling of being upset or excited, as indicated by giving angry affective feedback) predicted commenting. So if a story makes you really upset — as perhaps may be exploited by a presidential candidate or two — you’ll be more likely to comment, providing further explanation for why internet comments tend toward viciousness.

The article is here.

Empathy is a moral force

Jamil Zaki
FORTHCOMING in Gray, K. & Graham, J. (Eds.), The Atlas of Moral Psychology

Here is an excerpt:

More recently, however, a growing countercurrent has questioned the utility of empathy in driving moral action. This argument builds on the broader idea that emotions provide powerful but noisy inputs to people’s moral calculus (Haidt, 2001). Affective reactions often tempt people to make judgments that are logically and morally indefensible. Such emotional static famously includes moral dumbfounding, under which people’s experience of disgust causes them to judge others’ actions as wrong when they have no rational basis for doing so (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006). Emotion drives other irrational moral judgments, such as people’s tendency to privilege physical force (a “hot” factor) over more important dimensions such as harm when judging the moral status of an action (Greene, 2014; Greene et al., 2009). Even incidental, morally irrelevant feelings alter moral judgment, further damaging the credibility of emotion in guiding a sense of right and wrong. (Wheatley & Haidt, 2005).

In sum, although emotions play a powerful role in moral judgment, they need not play a useful role. Instead, capricious emotion-driven intuitions often attract people towards internally inconsistent and wrong-headed judgments. From a utilitarian perspective aimed at maximizing well being, these biases render emotion a fundamentally mistaken moral engine (cf. Greene, 2014).

Does this criticism apply to empathy? In many ways, it does. Like other affective states, empathy arises in response to evocative experiences, often in noisy ways that hamper objectivity. For instance, people experience more empathy, and thus moral obligation to help, in response to the visible suffering of others, as in the case of Baby Jessica described above. This empathy leads people to donate huge sums of money to help individuals whose stories they read about or see on television, while ignoring widespread misery that they could more efficaciously relieve (Genevsky, Västfjäll,
Slovic, & Knutson, 2013; Slovic, 2007; Small & Loewenstein, 2003). Empathy also collapses reliably when sufferers and would-be empathizers differ along dimensions of race, politics, age, or even meaningless de novo group assignments (Cikara, Bruneau, & Saxe, 2011; Zaki & Cikara, in press).

The chapter is here.

Moral Nativism and Moral Psychology

By Paul Bloom
The Social Psychology of Morality 01/2012
DOI: 10.1037/13091-004

ABSTRACT

Moral psychology is both old and new. Old because moral thought has long been a central focus of theology and philosophy. Indeed, many of the theories that we explore today were proposed first by scholars such as Aristotle, Kant, and Hume. Young because the scientific study of morality—and, specifically, the study of what goes on in a person's head when making a moral judgment—has been a topic of serious inquiry only over the last couple of decades. Even now, it is just barely mainstream. This chapter is itself a combination of the old and the new. I am going to consider two broad questions that would have been entirely familiar to philosophers such as Aristotle, but are also the topic of considerable contemporary research and theorizing: (1) What is our natural human moral endowment? (2) To what extent are moral judgments the products of our emotions? I will have the most to say about the first question, and will review a body of empirical work that bears on it; much of this research is still in progress. The answer to the second question will be briefer and more tentative, and will draw in part upon this empirical work.

The article is here.

Emotional and Utilitarian Appraisals of Moral Dilemmas Are Encoded in Separate Areas of the Brain

Cendri A. Hutcherson, Leila Montaser-Kouhsari, James Woodward, & Antonio Rangel
The Journal of Neuroscience, 9 September 2015, 35(36): 12593-12605
doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3402-14.2015

Abstract

Moral judgment often requires making difficult tradeoffs (e.g., is it appropriate to torture to save the lives of innocents at risk?). Previous research suggests that both emotional appraisals and more deliberative utilitarian appraisals influence such judgments and that these appraisals often conflict. However, it is unclear how these different types of appraisals are represented in the brain, or how they are integrated into an overall moral judgment. We addressed these questions using an fMRI paradigm in which human subjects provide separate emotional and utilitarian appraisals for different potential actions, and then make difficult moral judgments constructed from combinations of these actions. We found that anterior cingulate, insula, and superior temporal gyrus correlated with emotional appraisals, whereas temporoparietal junction and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex correlated with utilitarian appraisals. Overall moral value judgments were represented in an anterior portion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Critically, the pattern of responses and functional interactions between these three sets of regions are consistent with a model in which emotional and utilitarian appraisals are computed independently and in parallel, and passed to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex where they are integrated into an overall moral value judgment.

Significance statement

Popular accounts of moral judgment often describe it as a battle for control between two systems, one intuitive and emotional, the other rational and utilitarian, engaged in winner-take-all inhibitory competition. Using a novel fMRI paradigm, we identified distinct neural signatures of emotional and utilitarian appraisals and used them to test different models of how they compete for the control of moral behavior. Importantly, we find little support for competitive inhibition accounts. Instead, moral judgments resembled the architecture of simple economic choices: distinct regions represented emotional and utilitarian appraisals independently and passed this information to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex for integration into an overall moral value signal.

The entire article is here.

Are Arguments about GMO Safety Really About Something Else?

By Gregory E. Kaebnick
The Hastings Center Blog
Originally published August 28, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Saletan is trying to examine the impact of GMOs in more or less this objective way. Perhaps, however, the fiercer, dyed-in-the-wool opponents of GMOs are looking beyond health and safety, strictly construed in terms of quantifiable aspects of human well-being, to something else. One possibility is that they are indeed focused on health and safety but are put off by something about the particular form of the threat. Moral psychologists such as Paul Slovic and Daniel Kahneman have noted that the perception of a risk’s severity does not cleanly track the quantifiable outcomes. Different ways of dying may be perceived as better or worse, even though death is the measurable outcome in both cases. After September 11, 2001, air travel dropped significantly and many people who might have been expected to fly in planes, and safely reach their destinations, went by car instead and died in automobile accidents. Viewed strictly in terms of the quantifiable risk of death, the decision to go by car looks silly. But maybe, the risk assessor (and scholarly critic of risk assessment) Adam Finkel has proposed, what put people off flying was not the risk of death alone but the prospect of “death preceded by agonizing minutes of chaos and the awful opportunity of being able to contact loved ones before the grisly culmination of another’s suicide mission.”

The entire article is here.

The curious tale of Julie and Mark: Unraveling the moral dumbfounding effect

Edward B. Royzman, Kwanwoo Kim, Robert F. Leeman
Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 4, July 2015, pp. 296–313

Abstract

The paper critically reexamines the well-known “Julie and Mark” vignette, a stylized account of two college-age siblings opting to engage in protected sex while vacationing abroad (e.g., Haidt, 2001). Since its inception, the story has been viewed as a rhetorically powerful validation of Hume’s “sentimentalist” dictum that moral judgments are not rationally deduced but arise directly from feelings of pleasure or displeasure (e.g., disgust). People’s typical reactions to the vignette are alleged to support this view by demonstrating that individuals are prone to become morally dumbfounded (Haidt, 2001; Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy, 2000), i.e., they tend to “stubbornly” maintain their disapproval of the act without supporting reasons. In what follows, we critically reassess the traditional account, predicated on the notion that, among other things, most subjects simply fail to be convinced that the siblings’ actions are truly harm-free, thus having excellent reasons to disapprove of these acts. In line with this critique, 3 studies found that subjects 1) tended not to believe that the siblings’ actions were in fact harmless; 2) notwithstanding that, and in spite of holding a number of “counterargument-immune” reasons, subjects could be effectively maneuvered into exhibiting all the trademark signs of a morally dumbfounded state (which they subsequently recanted), and 3) with subjects’ beliefs about harm and standards of normative evaluation properly factored in, a more rigorous assessment procedure yielded a dumbfounding estimate of about 0. Based on these and related results, we contend that subjects’ reactions are wholly in line with the rationalist model of moral judgment and that their use in support of claims of moral arationalism should be reevaluated.

The entire article is here.

Online processing of moral transgressions: ERP evidence for spontaneous evaluation

Hartmut Leuthold, Angelika Kunkel, Ian G. Mackenzie and Ruth Filik
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci (2015)
doi: 10.1093/scan/nsu151

Abstract

Experimental studies using fictional moral dilemmas indicate that both automatic emotional processes and controlled cognitive processes contribute to moral judgments. However, not much is known about how people process socio-normative violations that are more common to their everyday life nor the time-course of these processes. Thus, we recorded participants’ electrical brain activity while they were reading vignettes that either contained morally acceptable vs unacceptable information or text materials that contained information which was either consistent or inconsistent with their general world knowledge. A first event-related brain potential (ERP) positivity peaking at ∼200 ms after critical word onset (P200) was larger when this word involved a socio-normative or knowledge-based violation. Subsequently, knowledge-inconsistent words triggered a larger centroparietal ERP negativity at ∼320 ms (N400), indicating an influence on meaning construction. In contrast, a larger ERP positivity (larger late positivity), which also started at ∼320 ms after critical word onset, was elicited by morally unacceptable compared with acceptable words. We take this ERP positivity to reflect an implicit evaluative (good–bad) categorization process that is engaged during the online processing of moral transgressions.

The article is here.

How do people change their minds about issues?

By Brian Turner
ethicalsystems.org
Originally published

Here is an excerpt:

2) Pay attention to social intuitionism and speak to the “elephant” first.  One of the three main points of moral psychology is that intuitions come first and strategic reasoning comes second.  Unless we have a system for doing otherwise, we pretty much just go with our gut feeling and then confabulate. This means we subconsciously come up with reasons to justify our position that our mind conveniently serves us as “reasoned” evidence rather than the knee-jerk response that it actually is.

In other words, the person has to like you, or at least not dislike you, before they’ll be open to your message.  If the person doesn’t like you and you try to present your idea, it doesn’t matter how persuasive, articulate or evidence-based your comments are, they’re not going to change their mind.

This is one of the reasons why you can defeat every counterpoint that someone makes about your argument and they still won’t listen to you – you can’t intellectually bludgeon someone into changing their mind.

The entire blog post is here.

Editor's note: This blog post relates psychotherapy as well as other forms of persuasive communication.

Moral decision-making and the brain

NEURO.tv - Episode 11
Published on Aug 16, 2014

What experiments do psychologists use to identify the brain areas involved in moral decision-making? Do moral truths exist? We discuss with Joshua D. Greene, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of Moral Tribes.

The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence

In some jobs, being in touch with emotions is essential. In others, it seems to be a detriment. And like any skill, being able to read people can be used for good or evil.

Adam Grant
The Atlantic
Originally published January 2, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Emotional intelligence is important, but the unbridled enthusiasm has obscured a dark side. New evidence shows that when people hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others. When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.

Social scientists have begun to document this dark side of emotional intelligence. In emerging research led by University of Cambridge professor Jochen Menges, when a leader gave an inspiring speech filled with emotion, the audience was less likely to scrutinize the message and remembered less of the content. Ironically, audience members were so moved by the speech that they claimed to recall more of it.

The authors call this the awestruck effect, but it might just as easily be described as the dumbstruck effect. One observer reflected that Hitler’s persuasive impact came from his ability to strategically express emotions—he would “tear open his heart”—and these emotions affected his followers to the point that they would “stop thinking critically and just emote.”

The entire story is here.

Why We Should Choose Science over Beliefs

By Michael Shermer
Scientific American
Originally published September 24, 2013

Ever since college I have been a libertarian—socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility. I also believe in science as the greatest instrument ever devised for understanding the world. So what happens when these two principles are in conflict? My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts. This is called motivated reasoning, in which our brain reasons our way to supporting what we want to be true. Knowing about the existence of motivated reasoning, however, can help us overcome it when it is at odds with evidence.

The entire article (and comments below it) is here.

Response to Critics of The Moral Landscape

By Sam Harris
His Blog
January 29, 2011

Here are two excerpts:

The problem posed by public criticism is by no means limited to the question of what to do about misrepresentations of one’s work. There is simply no good forum in which to respond to reviews of any kind, no matter how substantive. To do so in a separate essay is to risk confusing readers with a litany of disconnected points or—worse—boring them to salt. And any author who rises to the defense of his own book is always in danger of looking petulant, vain, and ineffectual. There is a galling asymmetry at work here: to say anything at all in response to criticism is to risk doing one’s reputation further harm by appearing to care too much about it.

These strictures now weigh heavily on me, because I recently published a book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, which has provoked a backlash in intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) circles. I knew this was coming, given my thesis, but this knowledge left me no better equipped to meet the cloudbursts of vitriol and confusion once they arrived. Watching the tide of opinion turn against me, it has been difficult to know what, if anything, to do about it.

(cut)

For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

The entire blog post is here.

Emotions Come to Fore in Political Wins and Losses

By Richard Friedman
The New York Times 
Originally published November 12, 2012

Just one look at the dejection on the faces of Romney supporters or the jubilation of Obama supporters on election night should tell you that politics is first and foremost a very emotional affair.

Ann Romney was crying while her husband delivered his terse concession speech, not because a majority of Americans voted against his economic policy, but because of the personal — and highly public — rejection of Mitt Romney as their next president.

Nor were President Obama’s supporters ecstatic because his health care policy would not be overturned. Rather, both camps were in the grip of powerful emotions akin to the passion of spectators rooting for their team at a sporting event.

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But political affiliation is not driven by ideas alone. Most people do not choose a political party by carefully analyzing its policies or even its track record for competence. Instead, some social scientists argue that people select their political party in early adulthood the way they choose their friends or social groups: They go for the party that has people who resemble themselves.

Once you’ve selected your party, you are likely to retrofit your beliefs and philosophy to align with it. In this sense, political parties are like tribes; membership in the tribe shapes your values and powerfully influences your allegiance to the group.

So strong is the social and emotional bond among members of a political tribe that they are likely to remain loyal to their party even when they give it low marks for performance. Yankees fans don’t jump ship when their team loses any more than Republicans switch parties when they lose an election.

The entire blog post is here.