andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1515 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Research psychologist John Jost reviews the recent book, “The Righteous Mind,” by research psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Some of my thoughts on Haidt’s book are here . And here’s some of Jost’s review: Haidt’s book is creative, interesting, and provocative. . . . The book shines a new light on moral psychology and presents a bold, confrontational message. From a scientific perspective, however, I worry that his theory raises more questions than it answers. Why do some individuals feel that it is morally good (or necessary) to obey authority, favor the ingroup, and maintain purity, whereas others are skeptical? (Perhaps parenting style is relevant after all.) Why do some people think that it is morally acceptable to judge or even mistreat others such as gay or lesbian couples or, only a generation ago, interracial couples because they dislike or feel disgusted by them, whereas others do not? Why does the present generation “care about violence toward many more classes of victims
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Research psychologist John Jost reviews the recent book, “The Righteous Mind,” by research psychologist Jonathan Haidt. [sent-1, score-0.154]
2 And here’s some of Jost’s review: Haidt’s book is creative, interesting, and provocative. [sent-3, score-0.098]
3 The book shines a new light on moral psychology and presents a bold, confrontational message. [sent-7, score-0.298]
4 From a scientific perspective, however, I worry that his theory raises more questions than it answers. [sent-8, score-0.063]
5 Why do some individuals feel that it is morally good (or necessary) to obey authority, favor the ingroup, and maintain purity, whereas others are skeptical? [sent-9, score-0.099]
6 ) Why do some people think that it is morally acceptable to judge or even mistreat others such as gay or lesbian couples or, only a generation ago, interracial couples because they dislike or feel disgusted by them, whereas others do not? [sent-11, score-0.553]
7 Why does the present generation “care about violence toward many more classes of victims today than [their] grandparents did in their time” (p. [sent-12, score-0.136]
8 Haidt dismisses the possibility that this aspect of liberalism, which prizes universal over parochial considerations (the justice principle of impartiality), is in fact a tremendous cultural achievement—a shared victory over the limitations of our more primitive ancestral legacy. [sent-14, score-0.185]
9 If we could just erase the borders and boundaries that divide us, then the world would ‘be as one. [sent-16, score-0.063]
10 ’ It’s a vision of heaven for liberals, but conservatives believe it would quickly descend into hell. [sent-17, score-0.364]
11 Jost also writes: Haidt draws sparingly on the details of contemporary research in social and political psychology, usually as a foil for his ostensibly above-the-fray approach. [sent-23, score-0.122]
12 These approaches all had one feature in common: they used psychology to explain away conservatism. [sent-25, score-0.097]
13 They made it unnecessary for liberals to take conservative ideas seriously because these ideas are caused by bad childhoods or ugly personality traits. [sent-26, score-0.652]
14 I suggested a very different approach: start by assuming that conservatives are just as sincere as liberals, and then use Moral Foundations Theory to understand the moral matrices of both sides. [sent-27, score-0.37]
15 166-167) This paragraph illustrates both the slipperiness of Haidt’s prose and the extent to which key issues are unresolved by his theory. [sent-29, score-0.057]
16 First, there is a great deal of empirical evidence indicating that conservatives are in fact less open to change, novelty, and complexity and are more likely to perceive the world as a dangerous place than liberals (Carney et al. [sent-30, score-0.666]
17 Second, he claims that past researchers have “used psychology to explain away conservatism,” as if there is no difference between explaining something and explaining it away. [sent-38, score-0.237]
18 Third, Haidt switches at the last moment from discussing the origins and characteristics of liberals and conservatives to the issue of sincerity, as if it were impossible to sincerely believe something that is rooted in childhood or other psychological experiences. [sent-39, score-0.629]
19 Psychological scientists recognize that questions about the social, cognitive, and motivational underpinnings of a belief system are distinct from questions about its validity (and whether it should be taken “seriously,” which is not a scientific question at all). [sent-40, score-0.248]
20 Jost is arguing that Haidt has some interesting things to say but trips up when trying to insert all of this into a particular political message about liberals and conservatives. [sent-41, score-0.242]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('haidt', 0.465), ('jost', 0.296), ('conservatives', 0.267), ('liberals', 0.242), ('childhoods', 0.138), ('inordinately', 0.138), ('plurality', 0.126), ('cling', 0.118), ('moral', 0.103), ('morally', 0.099), ('novelty', 0.099), ('book', 0.098), ('vision', 0.097), ('couples', 0.097), ('psychology', 0.097), ('overly', 0.094), ('suffer', 0.091), ('et', 0.08), ('generation', 0.079), ('complexity', 0.077), ('personality', 0.077), ('psychologist', 0.077), ('ugly', 0.075), ('explaining', 0.07), ('questions', 0.063), ('erase', 0.063), ('underpinnings', 0.063), ('righteous', 0.063), ('disgusted', 0.063), ('argumentative', 0.063), ('ancestral', 0.063), ('existential', 0.063), ('foil', 0.063), ('grapple', 0.063), ('ideals', 0.063), ('parochial', 0.063), ('sincerity', 0.063), ('psychological', 0.061), ('conservative', 0.061), ('dismisses', 0.059), ('lesbian', 0.059), ('ostensibly', 0.059), ('mocks', 0.059), ('interracial', 0.059), ('switches', 0.059), ('motivational', 0.059), ('fears', 0.059), ('seriously', 0.059), ('grandparents', 0.057), ('unresolved', 0.057)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0 1515 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-29-Jost Haidt
Introduction: Research psychologist John Jost reviews the recent book, “The Righteous Mind,” by research psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Some of my thoughts on Haidt’s book are here . And here’s some of Jost’s review: Haidt’s book is creative, interesting, and provocative. . . . The book shines a new light on moral psychology and presents a bold, confrontational message. From a scientific perspective, however, I worry that his theory raises more questions than it answers. Why do some individuals feel that it is morally good (or necessary) to obey authority, favor the ingroup, and maintain purity, whereas others are skeptical? (Perhaps parenting style is relevant after all.) Why do some people think that it is morally acceptable to judge or even mistreat others such as gay or lesbian couples or, only a generation ago, interracial couples because they dislike or feel disgusted by them, whereas others do not? Why does the present generation “care about violence toward many more classes of victims
2 0.34557441 1229 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-25-Same old story
Introduction: In a review of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, “The Righteous Mind,” William Saletan writes : You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong. . . . Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left’s electoral failures. The usual argument of these psycho-pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who
Introduction: Stephen Olivier points me to this horrible, horrible news article by Jonathan Haidt, “Why working-class people vote conservative”: Across the world, blue-collar voters ally themselves with the political right . . . Why on Earth would a working-class person ever vote for a conservative candidate? This question has obsessed the American left since Ronald Reagan first captured the votes of so many union members, farmers, urban Catholics and other relatively powerless people – the so-called “Reagan Democrats”. . . . Sorry, but no no no no no. Where to start? Here’s the difference between upper-income and lower-income votes in presidential elections: Ronald Reagan did about 20 percentage points better among voters in the upper third of income, compared to voters in the lower third. The relation between income and voting since 1980 is about the same as it was in the 1940s. Oh yeah, Haidt said something about “across the world.” How bout this: It varies. In mos
4 0.30387443 600 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-04-“Social Psychologists Detect Liberal Bias Within”
Introduction: Mark Palko asks what I think of this news article by John Tierney. The article’s webpage is given the strange incomplete title above. My first comment is that the headline appears false. I didn’t see any evidence presented of liberal bias. (If the headline says “Social psychologists detect,” I expect to see some detection, not just anecdotes.) What I did see was a discussion of the fact that most academic psychologists consider themselves politically liberal (a pattern that holds for academic researchers in general), along with some anecdotes of moderates over the years who have felt their political views disrespected by the liberal majority. I’m interested in the topic, and I’m open to the possibility that there are all sorts of biases in academic research–but I don’t see the evidence from this article that social psychologists have detected any bias yet. Phrases such as “a statistically impossible lack of diversity” are just silly. What I really wonder is what John Jo
5 0.29884812 604 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-08-More on the missing conservative psychology researchers
Introduction: Will Wilkinson adds to the discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s remarks regarding the overwhelming prevalance of liberal or left-wing attitudes among psychology professors. I pretty much agree with Wilkinson’s overview: Folks who constantly agree with one another grow insular, self-congratulatory, and not a little lazy. The very possibility of disagreement starts to seem weird or crazy. When you’re trying to do science about human beings, this attitude’s not so great. Wilkinson also reviewed the work of John Jost in this area. Jost is a psychology researcher with the expected liberal/left political leanings, but his relevance here is that he has actually done research on political attitudes and personality types. In Wilkinson’s words: Jost has done plenty of great work that helps explain not only why the best minds in science are liberal, but why most scientists-most academics, even-are liberal. Individuals with the personality trait that most strongly predicts an inclinati
7 0.12925096 1044 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-06-The K Foundation burns Cosma’s turkey
8 0.12262212 1385 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-20-Reconciling different claims about working-class voters
9 0.12056281 1323 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-16-Question 6 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
11 0.1151017 1322 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-15-Question 5 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
12 0.089896947 1664 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-10-Recently in the sister blog: Brussels sprouts, ugly graphs, and switched at birth
13 0.088519804 1169 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-15-Charles Murray on the new upper class
14 0.081956498 1892 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-10-I don’t think we get much out of framing politics as the Tragic Vision vs. the Utopian Vision
15 0.080251478 1204 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-08-The politics of economic and statistical models
16 0.078975312 2004 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-01-Post-publication peer review: How it (sometimes) really works
17 0.077556491 1819 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-23-Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” and the measurement of social and political divisions
19 0.07436125 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
20 0.07096196 1860 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-17-How can statisticians help psychologists do their research better?
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.136), (1, -0.069), (2, 0.041), (3, 0.008), (4, -0.078), (5, 0.009), (6, -0.028), (7, -0.006), (8, 0.002), (9, 0.036), (10, -0.01), (11, -0.009), (12, -0.03), (13, 0.009), (14, 0.101), (15, -0.018), (16, -0.024), (17, -0.026), (18, 0.016), (19, -0.098), (20, 0.035), (21, -0.113), (22, -0.064), (23, -0.063), (24, 0.02), (25, -0.014), (26, 0.063), (27, 0.022), (28, 0.018), (29, -0.05), (30, -0.02), (31, -0.015), (32, 0.006), (33, 0.023), (34, 0.013), (35, -0.055), (36, -0.053), (37, -0.006), (38, -0.004), (39, -0.034), (40, 0.014), (41, 0.015), (42, 0.027), (43, -0.024), (44, -0.023), (45, -0.002), (46, 0.004), (47, 0.038), (48, 0.046), (49, 0.054)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.95489115 1515 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-29-Jost Haidt
Introduction: Research psychologist John Jost reviews the recent book, “The Righteous Mind,” by research psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Some of my thoughts on Haidt’s book are here . And here’s some of Jost’s review: Haidt’s book is creative, interesting, and provocative. . . . The book shines a new light on moral psychology and presents a bold, confrontational message. From a scientific perspective, however, I worry that his theory raises more questions than it answers. Why do some individuals feel that it is morally good (or necessary) to obey authority, favor the ingroup, and maintain purity, whereas others are skeptical? (Perhaps parenting style is relevant after all.) Why do some people think that it is morally acceptable to judge or even mistreat others such as gay or lesbian couples or, only a generation ago, interracial couples because they dislike or feel disgusted by them, whereas others do not? Why does the present generation “care about violence toward many more classes of victims
Introduction: Psychology is a universal science of human nature, whereas political science is centered on the study of particular historical events and trends. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that when a psychologist looks at politics, he presents ideas that are thought-provoking but are too general to quite work. This is fine; political scientists can then take such ideas and try to adapt them more closely to particular circumstances. The psychologist I’m thinking about here is Steven Pinker, who, in writes the following on the question, “Why Are States So Red and Blue?”: But why do ideology and geography cluster so predictably? Why, if you know a person’s position on gay marriage, can you predict that he or she will want to increase the military budget and decrease the tax rate . . . there may also be coherent mindsets beneath the diverse opinions that hang together in right-wing and left-wing belief systems. Political philosophers have long known that the ideologies are rooted in diffe
3 0.78452057 1 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-22-Political Belief Networks: Socio-cognitive Heterogeneity in American Public Opinion
Introduction: Delia Baldassarri and Amir Goldberg write : Americans’ political beliefs present a long observed paradox. Whereas the mainstream political discourse is structured on a clearly defined polarity between conservative and liberal views, in practice, most people exhibit ideologically incoherent belief patterns. This paper challenges the notion that political beliefs are necessarily defined by a singular ideological continuum. It applies a new, network-based method for detecting heterogeneity in collective patterns of opinion, relational class analysis (RCA), to Americans’ political attitudes as captured by the American National Election Studies. By refraining from making a-priori assumptions about how beliefs are interconnected, RCA looks for opinion structures, belief networks, that are not necessarily congruent with received wisdom. It finds that in the twenty years between 1984 and 2004 Americans’ political attitudes were consistently structured by two alternative belief systems: one
4 0.75322783 1169 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-15-Charles Murray on the new upper class
Introduction: The other day I posted some comments on the voting patterns of rich and poor in the context of Charles Murray’s recent book, “Coming Apart.” My graphs on income and voting are just fine, but I mischaracterized Murray’s statements. So I want to fix that right away. After that I have some thoughts on the book itself. In brief: 1. I was unfair to call him a Tucker Carlson. 2. Murray talks a lot about upper-class liberals. That’s fine but I think his discussion would be improved by also considering upper-class conservatives, given that I see the big culture war occurring within the upper class. 3. Using the case of Joe Paterno as an example, I discuss why Murray’s “preach what you practice” advice could be difficult to carry out in practice. Murray on the top 5% David Frum quoted Murray as writing that the top 5% “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” In response, Frum and I both pointed out t
5 0.75113642 600 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-04-“Social Psychologists Detect Liberal Bias Within”
Introduction: Mark Palko asks what I think of this news article by John Tierney. The article’s webpage is given the strange incomplete title above. My first comment is that the headline appears false. I didn’t see any evidence presented of liberal bias. (If the headline says “Social psychologists detect,” I expect to see some detection, not just anecdotes.) What I did see was a discussion of the fact that most academic psychologists consider themselves politically liberal (a pattern that holds for academic researchers in general), along with some anecdotes of moderates over the years who have felt their political views disrespected by the liberal majority. I’m interested in the topic, and I’m open to the possibility that there are all sorts of biases in academic research–but I don’t see the evidence from this article that social psychologists have detected any bias yet. Phrases such as “a statistically impossible lack of diversity” are just silly. What I really wonder is what John Jo
6 0.74846083 604 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-08-More on the missing conservative psychology researchers
8 0.74195141 1836 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-02-Culture clash
9 0.74101412 1385 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-20-Reconciling different claims about working-class voters
10 0.72798949 1633 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-21-Kahan on Pinker on politics
11 0.72253007 1229 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-25-Same old story
13 0.70525324 1947 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-20-We are what we are studying
16 0.67096716 1204 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-08-The politics of economic and statistical models
18 0.66281098 2327 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-09-Nicholas Wade and the paradox of racism
19 0.6578849 1635 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-22-More Pinker Pinker Pinker
topicId topicWeight
[(15, 0.042), (16, 0.046), (18, 0.02), (21, 0.037), (22, 0.021), (24, 0.102), (42, 0.011), (45, 0.017), (63, 0.029), (79, 0.26), (86, 0.023), (89, 0.019), (98, 0.011), (99, 0.188)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.89688993 469 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-16-2500 people living in a park in Chicago?
Introduction: Frank Hansen writes: Columbus Park is on Chicago’s west side, in the Austin neighborhood. The park is a big green area which includes a golf course. Here is the google satellite view. Here is the nytimes page. Go to Chicago, and zoom over to the census tract 2521, which is just north of the horizontal gray line (Eisenhower Expressway, aka I290) and just east of Oak Park. The park is labeled on the nytimes map. The census data have around 50 dots (they say 50 people per dot) in the park which has no residential buildings. Congressional district is Danny Davis, IL7. Here’s a map of the district. So, how do we explain the map showing ~50 dots worth of people living in the park. What’s up with the algorithm to place the dots? I dunno. I leave this one to you, the readers.
2 0.88840437 1538 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-17-Rust
Introduction: I happened to be referring to the path sampling paper today and took a look at Appendix A.2: I’m sure I could reconstruct all of this if I had to, but I certainly can’t read this sort of thing cold anymore.
same-blog 3 0.88033879 1515 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-29-Jost Haidt
Introduction: Research psychologist John Jost reviews the recent book, “The Righteous Mind,” by research psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Some of my thoughts on Haidt’s book are here . And here’s some of Jost’s review: Haidt’s book is creative, interesting, and provocative. . . . The book shines a new light on moral psychology and presents a bold, confrontational message. From a scientific perspective, however, I worry that his theory raises more questions than it answers. Why do some individuals feel that it is morally good (or necessary) to obey authority, favor the ingroup, and maintain purity, whereas others are skeptical? (Perhaps parenting style is relevant after all.) Why do some people think that it is morally acceptable to judge or even mistreat others such as gay or lesbian couples or, only a generation ago, interracial couples because they dislike or feel disgusted by them, whereas others do not? Why does the present generation “care about violence toward many more classes of victims
4 0.87864125 939 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-03-DBQQ rounding for labeling charts and communicating tolerances
Introduction: This is a mini research note, not deserving of a paper, but perhaps useful to others. It reinvents what has already appeared on this blog. Let’s say we have a line chart with numbers between 152.134 and 210.823, with the mean of 183.463. How should we label the chart with about 3 tics? Perhaps 152.132, 181.4785 and 210.823? Don’t do it! Objective is to fit about 3-7 tics at the optimal level of rounding. I use the following sequence: decimal rounding : fitting integer power and single-digit decimal i , rounding to i * 10^ power (example: 100 200 300) binary having power , fitting single-digit decimal i and binary b , rounding to 2* i /(1+ b ) * 10^ power (150 200 250) (optional) quaternary having power , fitting single-digit decimal i and quaternary q (0,1,2,3) round to 4* i /(1+ q ) * 10^ power (150 175 200) quinary having power , fitting single-digit decimal i and quinary f (0,1,2,3,4) round to 5* i /(1+ f ) * 10^ power (160 180 200)
5 0.86708236 845 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-08-How adoption speed affects the abandonment of cultural tastes
Introduction: Interesting article by Jonah Berger and Gael Le Mens: Products, styles, and social movements often catch on and become popular, but little is known about why such identity-relevant cultural tastes and practices die out. We demonstrate that the velocity of adoption may affect abandonment: Analysis of over 100 years of data on first-name adoption in both France and the United States illustrates that cultural tastes that have been adopted quickly die faster (i.e., are less likely to persist). Mirroring this aggregate pattern, at the individual level, expecting parents are more hesitant to adopt names that recently experienced sharper increases in adoption. Further analysis indicate that these effects are driven by concerns about symbolic value: Fads are perceived negatively, so people avoid identity-relevant items with sharply increasing popularity because they believe that they will be short lived. Ancillary analyses also indicate that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, identity-r
6 0.85230803 1379 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-14-Cool-ass signal processing using Gaussian processes (birthdays again)
7 0.8356812 1126 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-18-Bob on Stan
8 0.80315745 2139 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-19-Happy birthday
9 0.79402298 1825 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-25-It’s binless! A program for computing normalizing functions
10 0.79075557 863 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-21-Bad graph
11 0.7856549 1172 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-17-Rare name analysis and wealth convergence
12 0.75915295 1786 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-03-Hierarchical array priors for ANOVA decompositions
13 0.7589736 1048 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-09-Maze generation algorithms!
16 0.70864135 1384 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-19-Slick time series decomposition of the birthdays data
17 0.70294821 1041 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-04-David MacKay and Occam’s Razor
19 0.6900664 1229 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-25-Same old story
20 0.6791234 888 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-03-A psychology researcher asks: Is Anova dead?