One of the most interesting aspects of political psychology concerns the gap between the reasons for which people believe they hold their political opinions and the real causes of their holding those opinions. Typically, that gap generates another one – between the content of arguments a person makes for her political position and the real motivation for her holding that position. Recent work in moral and political psychology indicates that the moral drives that cause people to favor various p...

Many people who favorably view Donald Trump and politicians like him, talk up his “authenticity” or his “telling it as it is”. Even many of those who profoundly dislike his politics, his manner, or both, grudgingly admit to the appeal of his “what you see is what you get” quality. Yet and at the same time, many of his supporters – and almost all of their opponents – simultaneously recognize the blatant falsity of many of his statements. On the surface, there is a paradox. How can so many peopl...

One of my recent articles, “The Mistake You Make in Every Political Argument” (Mistake) made the claim that most political arguments that seem to turn on a disagreement over moral values actually hinge on a disagreement about empirical facts. Mistake was shared by thousands of people of all political persuasions because they saw power in its diagnosis of, and prescription for, our incessant talking past each other when it comes to politics. That article was always intended to be the first of t...

We’ve all been sufficiently frustrated by the gap between the values someone espouses and the policies they support that we’ve gotten into political arguments to help them see their error. Perhaps, if we’re more honest about our own motivation, we just reacted to get rid of that visceral dissonant feeling that “something that wrong just can’t be allowed to stand.” And no doubt, whenever you do that, you lay out a clear, fact-based, logically consistent case for the correct view. You’ve probabl...

Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor of psychology who in the last year has become North America’s most popular public intellectual, has spent many decades studying tyranny and its antecedents. As a result, he frequently warns his audiences of the unparalleled destructive power of “ideological possession." As someone who has long been writing about the threat posed by this all too prevalent epistemic disease, I am delighted to see the attention that is now being paid to it. Ideological poss...

Margaret Thatcher once said that “politics at its purest is philosophy in action." As someone who gave her name to a political age that represented a very clear break from what came before and fundamentally changed a nation – according to both her admirers and her critics - she may have earned the right to be taken seriously. As a self-identified member of the loosely defined liberty movement and someone professionally concerned with political psychology and persuasion, I often find myself spec...

They say you always remember your first time. The first time I was sexually assaulted, I was sixteen years old. I had not long started a job working as a kitchen porter at a third-rate pub-restaurant and had been moved from the kitchen to the restaurant floor to wait tables, in which role I had a new manager. My manager liked the shape of my ass in the tight black pants I had to wear and let me know it with a spank as I went about my work and an explicit comment as if her behavior needed any ...

It’s Not What You Believe. It’s How You Believe It George Orwell’s novel 1984 has been selling in large numbers to people scared of a lurch toward authoritarianism in the USA. I recently noted that both that book and Animal Farm were written not as a warning against a particular political ideology but against the implementation of any ideology, however progressive, by people who think themselves too smart to have to test their politics against the emotions, sentiments and experiences of those t...

Complying with the tax code costs the United States a cool trillion dollars per year. That’s the entire GDP of Mexico, wasted because of the sheer complexity of our tax code, which runs to 74,000 pages or so when taken with the IRS policies and parts of the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) that bear directly on it. And let’s imagine that we outsourced all the work done by Americans to comply, so that we could spend our time doing more good for ourselves and each other: it would require the who...