Salon.com > Chris Mooney

Conservatives and liberals drink different beer

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 19:15:00 +0000

It was probably inevitable, but it’s striking nonetheless. In a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, Vishal Singh of New York University’s Stern School of Business and his colleagues apply an ever-growing body of research on the psychological traits of liberals and conservatives to their consumer choices. The result? A stark left-right difference when it comes to favoring well-established brands, like Coca-Cola or Tide, over the new and generic products that are trying to compete with them.

In their study (paywall version here), Singh and his colleagues examined a vast set of sales data across 416 U.S. counties — from 135 different supermarket chains and 1,860 individual stores over a six-year period. Within this huge mass of consumerism, the researchers zoomed in on sales in the consumer packaged industry — products ranging from laundry detergents to frozen pizzas to toothpastes and razors. As they note in their study, this industry features the regular introduction of many new products and brands, and also many generics trying to compete with the established brands.

Study: Right twists facts

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 19:31:00 +0000

Last week, the country convulsed with outrage over Missouri Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s false suggestion that women who are raped have a special bodily defense mechanism against getting pregnant. Akin’s claim stood out due to its highly offensive nature, but it’s reminiscent of any number of other parallel cases in which conservative Christians have cited dubious “facts” to help rationalize their moral convictions. Take the twin assertions that having an abortion causes breast cancer or mental disorders, for instance. Or the denial of human evolution. Or false claims that same-sex parenting hurts kids. Or that you can choose whether to be gay, and undergo therapy to reverse that choice. The ludicrous assertion that women who are raped have a physiological defense mechanism against pregnancy is just part of a long litany of other falsehoods in the Christian right’s moral and emotional war against science.

Conservatism makes you happy

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 15:03:00 +0000

In general, political conservatives haven’t been very pleased with a slew of scientific attempts — sometimes dating back well over a decade -- to psychoanalyze their beliefs and behavior. Indeed, some on the right wrongly interpret these analyses as implying that conservatives have “bad brains” or a “mental defect.” Yet if psychology-of-politics research is really a veiled attack on the right, then why does it contain so many findings that cast conservatives in a positive light?

Chief among these, perhaps, is the discovery that conservatives, across countries, tend to be just plain happier people than liberals are. That’s not bad news for the right — it’s seriously bad news for the left.

Republicans: Wired for homophobia

Sat, 05 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000

On May 8, North Carolinians will vote on a constitutional amendment that defines a marriage between a man and a woman as the “only domestic legal union” the state will recognize -- thereby barring LGBT marriage equality. The amendment would also ban civil unions and end domestic partner benefits like prescription drug and health care coverage for the partners and children of public employees. At its deepest level, this issue is about fairness for everyone under the law. But less mentioned is that it is also about science, and about what’s factually true.

Many voters who go to the polls to support Amendment One will do so believing outright falsehoods about same-sex marriages and civil unions. In particular, they hold the belief that such partnerships are damaging to the health and well-being of the children raised in them. That is, after all, one of the chief justifications for the amendment.

Fox’s misinformation effect

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000

In June of last year, Jon Stewart went on air with Fox News’ Chris Wallace and started a major media controversy over the channel’s misinforming of its viewers. “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart asked Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

Stewart’s statement was factually accurate, as we’ll see. The next day, however, the fact-checking site PolitiFact weighed in and rated it “false.”In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,” PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error—and later, doubly ironically, failed to correct it. How’s that for the power of fact checking?

Why the GOP distrusts science

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:22:00 +0000

For a long time, those of us who monitor the troubled relationship between science and the American public had at least one thing we could feel good about. And that was knowing that while we might argue endlessly over global warming or the teaching of evolution, at the end of the day Americans in general still expressed strong confidence — strong trust — in the institution of science and its leaders. Spats over a handful of divisive issues didn’t seem to have soured them on science across the board.

The evidence for this came in the form of polling data from the General Social Survey, which for decades has asked people to rate their level of confidence in the leaders of a variety of institutions. Even at a time of declining trust in institutions in general, science always seemed to fare pretty well by this metric. “In 2008, more Americans expressed a ‘great deal’ of confidence in scientific leaders than in the leaders of any other institution except the military,” noted the National Science Foundation’s 2010 “Science and Engineering Indicators” report, which serves as a clearinghouse for these sorts of public opinion findings.

The ugly delusions of the educated conservative

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000

I can still remember when I first realized how naïve I was in thinking—hoping—that laying out the “facts” would suffice to change politicized minds, and especially Republican ones. It was a typically wonkish, liberal revelation: One based on statistics and data. Only this time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that people ignore data and evidence—and often, knowledge and education only make the problem worse.

Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming.^.It’s a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

Why America is flunking science

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:20:00 +0000

In the recent Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film "Angels & Demons," science sets the stage for destruction and chaos. A canister of antimatter has been stolen from CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — and hidden in the Vatican, set to explode right as a new pope is about to be selected.

Striving to make these details as realistic as possible on screen, Howard and his film crew visited CERN, used one of its physicists as a science consultant, and devoted meticulous care to designing the antimatter canister that Hanks' character, Robert Langdon, and his sexy scientist colleague, Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), wind up searching for.

But there was nothing they could do about the gigantic impossibility at the center of the plot. While the high-energy proton collisions generated at CERN do occasionally produce minute quantities of antimatter — particles with the opposite electrical charge as protons and electrons, but the same mass, which can in turn be combined into atoms like antihydrogen — it's not remotely enough to power a bomb. As CERN quips on a Web site devoted to "Angels & Demons," antimatter "would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it, but this would take us billions of years."

Bill Clinton’s questionable clemencies

Mon, 04 Feb 2002 17:22:00 +0000

On Dec. 13, the New York Times metro section printed the bleak story of Patricia Flounders, whose husband Joseph died at the World Trade Center, and who herself committed suicide three months later in the couple's "just-finished dream house." It's hard to think of a single personal narrative that better captures the devastation wrought by al-Qaida on Sept. 11. Near its end, however, the article contained a curious anecdote:

"At her husband's memorial service, Mrs. Flounders stood in black at the head of the receiving line ... and asked people to attend a reception at Fraunces Tavern, in the financial district.

"Mrs. Flounders explained that she had selected the landmark tavern as the site for the reception 'because they, too, were once bombed,' she said, referring to the 1975 bombing by a Puerto Rican nationalist group in which four died and more than 60 were injured."

This, as it happens, was one of the few post-Sept. 11 media references to the United States' long history of grappling with Puerto Rican terrorism. That's baffling, considering that as recently as August 1999, President Clinton offered to commute the sentences of 16 members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN (a Spanish acronym for the Armed Forces of National Liberation). It was FALN that was responsible for the Fraunces Tavern attack, as well as over 100 bombings during the 1970s and 1980s, largely in New York and Chicago.

A pox on pro-lifers

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 21:16:00 +0000

Imagine the following future scenario: Terrorists simultaneously release an aerosolized form of the variola virus, which causes smallpox, in five major U.S. cities. The attack deliberately targets low-income neighborhoods, so surveillance efforts prove lacking, and the infection has ample time to spread before the government catches on.

With the death toll mounting, President Bush announces an emergency inoculation of the entire U.S. population, using nearly 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine prudently stockpiled by the administration in the year and a half following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But almost immediately, scores of pro-life Protestants and Catholics protest that they would rather die than be injected with a "tainted" vaccine and threaten to launch a particularly gruesome form of civil disobedience.