Chris C. Mooney's Blog, page 7

My Appearance on The Young Turks

Last night I was on Current TV's The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur to discuss The Republican Brain. Here's the video:

The Republican Brain Book Giveaway

Over at GoodReads, we're giving away five free copies of The Republican Brain.

Details are here.

Contest goes through April 30.

If you want to enter to win, click here.

The Consistency in Romney’s Harvard Hypocrisy

[image error]This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets(www.dylanottokrider.com).

A lot has been written about Harvard man Mitt Romney’s attacks on Obama’s Harvard elitism, and Romney’s apparent complete lack of concern for accuracy altogether. What this is, in fact, has nothing to do with Romney’s veracity, but everything to do with the right’s decades lo...

The Consistency in Romney's Harvard Hypocrisy

[image error]This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,  a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets (www.dylanottokrider.com).

A lot has been written about Harvard man Mitt Romney's attacks on Obama's Harvard elitism, and Romney's apparent complete lack of concern for accuracy altogether. What this is, in fact, has nothing to do with Romney's veracity, but everything to do with the right's...

Anti-Science is a State of Mind

[image error]This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,  a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets (www.dylanottokrider.com).

As a long-time reader, I anxiously awaited Kevin Drum's skeptical take on Mooney's book. Having read it, I am equally anxious to read Mooney's response. However, this passage immediately jumped out at me:

When you read arguments that conservatives are anti-science, the bill of...

My Appearance on MSNBC's Now With Alex Wagner (Or, S.E. Cupp Proves My Point)

I was just on MSNBC, video pasted below. Note how S.E. Cupp, the conservative on the panel, reacts defensively to the argument and then goes on to misrepresent science, citing "phony studies" done at "East Anglia University." Actually, it was the University of East Anglia, they were emails, those emails don't undermine global warming, the scientists involved were repeatedly exonerated…but, those are mere facts. And here we're talking about conservatism, ideology, and psychology:

Stephen Colbert, Scientific Pioneer

[image error]I've got a new item at Huffington Post today, explaining how in his 2005 "truthiness" segment–now immortal–Stephen Colbert actually anticipated much research that would come later on the psychological underpinnings of ideology. It starts like this:

In my last post here, I explored what I called thescience of "truthiness": How we can come to understand the denial of science, on issues like global warming, by examining the underlying psychology of political conservatism itself.

But I must...

New Video: The Science of Why We Deny Science–And Reality

The Berkman Center at Harvard has just posted a video of a talk I gave at the law school last month. Basically, the talk corresponds to the content of the first two chapters of The Republican Brain, where I'm focused more on biased reasoning in general than on how liberals and conservatives may do it differently.

People seem to be enjoying the video, and commenting on it, so I thought I'd repost it here:

Birther Donald Trump Is Also Anti-Vax: A Contradiction, or Continuation of Science Denial?

[image error]This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,  a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets (www.dylanottokrider.com).

The anti-vax movement is typically the first counter example the springs to mind when one wants to challenge Mooney's contention, in The Republican Brain, that science-denial is most comfortable in the right wing. In an interview for the fifth annual World Autism Day, one of the...

A Political Psychologist's Reaffirmation of the Science Behind The Republican Brain

Everett Young, the political psychologist who designed the experiment reported in the final chapter of The Republican Brain, has now shared his views of the book as a whole. This means a great deal to me, because unlike most of the people criticizing this stuff, Everett actually knows the topic–he got his Ph.D. in studying the differences between liberals and conservatives, and has run many experiments on the matter.

Here's part of what he says:

Conservatives will be angry, of course. But...