Another interesting item from The Righteous Mind. People don’t vote on self-interest all that much – that is, “self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.” [p 85]

Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. [p 86]

Or all those in sequence, which confuses things; or all those in sequence plus others plus all those not so much in sequence as in competition all the time, waxing and waning depending on which is most salient at any particular moment. That’s my gloss, not his, but I think it has to be right, since we’re all part of all the groups he named plus a bunch of others, and they’re not all equally … Read the rest

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Speaking of righteous and unrighteous, I’m still reading the Jonathan Haidt book. (I read several books at once, so that I’ll be sure to confuse them all.) I’m quite liking Part One, which argues for the primacy of intuition over reasoning. I’ve seen a lot of it before but not all of it, and anyway it’s presented well. It’s convincing.

Like the bit on p 55 about William Wundt and “affective primacy.”

Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something.

I’ve been noticing something like that recently, with amusement, about driving – about a ridiculous little sorting thing going on in my head while driving that has to do with … Read the rest

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