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Scientific Encounters
It also makes a world of difference when the scientific consensus on climate change is represented as nearly unanimous (e.g., 97%) rather than merely a large majority (e.g., 90%). The former intimidates and discourages potential dissent; the latter, not so much.
The Bray and von Storch 5th International Survey of Climate Scientists consists of over a hundred statements related to climate change and its effects. For each statement, respondents indicated their level of agreement or opinion via a seven-point scale. Around a third of the 651 respondents were involved (as author, reviewer, etc.) with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (2014 IPCC AR5).
...we tend to become more categorical in our opinions when they serve as markers of belonging to a moral community.
Living in the jungle is hard: building nests every evening, extracting the nutritious stuff from thousands of plants. That takes deliberation, reasoning, inference, problem-solving, weighing the pros and the cons.
The idea is that competing and cooperating with one's fellows takes smarts. Individual animals who are better at these social interactions are more likely to transmit their genes to future generations. Over evolutionary time, you get a smarter species.
According to various brain imaging studies, mindfulness meditation can change the brain in ways consistent with observed or self-reported improvements in concentration, memory, and mood. The same has been found with prayer, cognitive behavioral therapy and psychodynamic therapy.
According to one study, being around the rich makes us want to buy status-enhancing "visible goods", like fancy cars or clothes. And that might reduce household savings by about 3% a year for the non-rich folks.
I'll be brief: no self-respecting liberal would use the following terminology or concepts without wink wink irony: purity, decency, conformity, tradition, God as source of authority, pride of country, the rightness of gender roles, something being unnatural, chastity as virtue.
The big picture is not only about what really matters but also about how things work. People change political beliefs in part because they've come to a different understanding of how the world works. These changes in understanding often come about gradually in response to life experience and whatever narratives are available that help make sense of these experiences.
...people often change their political philosophies as they get older - and not just in lock-step with changes in their moral intuitions. Experience matters. Arguments and evidence matter. Reflection matters. Our ideas about how to make the world a better place aren't frozen in time and temperament. Of course we can't escape our psychology - but our psychology is not the absolute ruler of our politics.
...check out those libertarians: like liberals, they don't care much about Ingroup Loyalty, Respect for Authority, or Sanctity/Purity. Unlike liberals, Harm does not figure prominently in their moral universe. So what matters to libertarians?
The theory was never intended to be limited to five moral intuitions and researchers have continued to consider additional intuition candidates. Liberty is gaining acceptance as a sixth moral intuition. Conceived both as a freedom from (interference) and a freedom to (pursue happiness), Liberty is especially meaningful to libertarians. (Duh).
...pundits and partisans have embraced the idea that conservatives have one moral profile, liberals another. To simplify: conservatives are heavy on Loyalty, Sanctity, and Authority and liberals are big time in the Care department. I know many people who are quite taken with this apparent division of moral labor.
According to personality psychologist Robert McCrae, openness to experience is a broad personality construct that “implies both receptivity to many varieties of experience and a fluid and permeable structure of consciousness”
So it's more accurate to say humans are prediction machines: "devices that constantly try to stay one step ahead of the breaking waves of sensory stimulation, by actively predicting the incoming flow." (Clark, 2016)
The study authors speculated that these characteristics may foster “Openness to Experience” (OE), which has been positively correlated to paranormal beliefs in other research.
Those who are truly stuck in poverty need different kinds of government help than those who are suffering brief periods of hardship.
...research on treatment effectiveness should include a comparison condition that controls for personal factors: how the researchers interact with subjects. That means the same amount of compassion, touching, attention, encouragement, and all-around support given to subjects across groups.
Activated brain areas included the insula and amygdala, which are associated with subjective “gut feelings”, disgust, reaction to norm violations, threat detection, and evaluation of trustworthiness.
The trolley problem is a favorite of researchers studying moral decision-making. Many consider it a good test of individual differences in approaches to moral dilemmas, basically variations on Hot versus Cold decision-making: emotional versus cognitive, empathetic versus detached, aversion to directly causing personal harm versus impartial concern for the greater good.