Chris C. Mooney's Blog, page 8

Misconceptions About the Republican Brain, # 2: Are Left and Right an Evolutionary "Adaptation"?

Earlier this week, I debunked a deep misunderstanding of my book, and frankly, of genetics—the idea that political differences might be somehow "hardwired" or "genetically wired."

This is really just an error emerging from a cliched understanding of genes and how they contribute to making us who we are, and you find it popping up everywhere. So I needed to set the record straight, but it is not as if I'm the first one have to respond to this kind of faulty thinking.

Today, I want to take up a m...

My Conservatism-Alcohol Piece on The Young Turks

My recent Rolling Stone piece on the new conservatism-alcohol study was discussed in detail last night on Current TV's The Young Turks. Here's the video–enjoy. Pretty funny stuff, especially at the end:

 

Dispelling Misconceptions About the Republican Brain: # 1, "Hardwiring"

The Republican Brain is now available through Amazon and Kindle, and some reviews have gone up already. So it is, in a sense, "out," although the publication date is technically April 10. I think.

Anyway, long before they could read the book in any way, a number of people unfortunately misrepresented its contents. So I've decided to set the record straight–although, given what the book explains about the human brain, that is a probably a pretty foolish hope.

I'm going to do a series of posts...

So, About that Conservatism and Alcohol Study…

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Last week, I blogged on this study–showing that drinking alcohol shifts liberals and conservatives alike to the political right–and promised to provide "a longer piece…explaining what it *actually* means."

I've now done so–at Rolling Stone online. It starts out like this:

So, a group of political psychologists walks into a bar …

… and no, I'm not going to finish the joke. Enough of them have been told already (even in German) about a provocative study in the latest issue of Personality and...

New Video: 7 Studies Showing That Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed

Someone captured this video of me explaining the "Fox News effect" at the Tucson Festival of Books, on a session that aired on CSPAN. I didn't realize until watching that I'd managed to give a one minute sound-bite containing all the data on how bad Fox is:

The Republican Brain: News and a Video

We're approaching the release date for The Republican Brain; Amazon even says it is shipping books starting Monday, which is earlier than first expected. So this post is to bring you up to speed on what's happening.

First, my friends at Thirst, D.C. have released a video of my book preview talk there. We had a lot of fun with it, as you'll see; there is even a successful experiment in which I "read" the political views of an audience member based on the person's personality traits.

Chris...

Emotional, Motivated Reasoning About Jonathan Haidt

[image error]Jonathan Haidt has been one of the leaders when it comes to explaining the flaws in human reasoning–how our emotions guide us to a conclusion, and then we come up with all the reasons we can think of for why it is true.

So if you wanted to find an irony…well, you could hardly do better than people reasoning in a motivated, emotional way about Haidt's arguments!

Alas, humans being what they are, you do find such things. Look at some of the responses to my interview with Haidt at the Point of...

The Science of Truthiness

[image error]I just put up a transcript of a talk I gave at the Tucson Festival of Books, which aired on C-SPAN. It's about why conservatives deny global warming, and attempts to give a "scientific" explanation–basically, to provide a scientific account of why Colbert's "truthiness" exists.

It starts out like this:

So the question before us on this panel is, "Will the Planet Survive the Age of Humans?" And I want to focus on one particularly aspect of humans that makes them very problematic in a planetary...

My Next Point of Inquiry Guest: Neil Tyson

[image error]Later this afternoon I interview our most celebrated science communicator, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

It'll be the second time I've had him on Point of Inquiry, and we'll be focusing on space policy and his new book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.

(Last time we covered all the "why scientists must communicate" stuff.)

If there are questions you think Dr. Tyson ought to be asked, post them here–in the next two hours!!

Is Tennessee on the Verge of Another Monkey Trial?

[image error]Both houses of the Tennessee legislature have now passed an anti-evolution and anti-global warming (and anti-cloning) education bill. The National Center for Science Education has the details. Already, the Tennessee Science Teachers Association is calling the bill  "very likely unconstitutional."

Legislatively, it appears that there still has to be a reconciliation between the two houses, and the Republican governor, Bill Haslam, has to sign, before this is a bonafide law. But both houses...