Events

I recently came across an article which seems important if we want to engage in political debate and influence other people.  To quote,

"For decades, people have thought that conservative views are caused, in part, by the belief that the world is generally a dangerous place. That’s why we’ve got to keep people out, spend money on guns and the people who wield them, and keep bad guys locked up, right? For example, many journalists, and the public at large, explained the rise of Donald Trump as driven by the belief that the world is dangerous... The conservatism-dangerous world belief connection was even backed by four decades of empirical studies using a well-validated measure... We were wrong."

I won't attempt to summarise the article here: you can read it for yourself on the Psychology Today website, We Thought Conservatives Saw the World as More Dangerous, We Were Wrong.  I'm not entirely convinced by their methodology, and most of the research seems to have been conducted on Americans, but the underlying analysis seems both convincing and useful.

And it resonates with something I wrote several years ago, Politics: Some Underlying Issues, which identifies twelve issues which affect our political beliefs and preferences. (The new article identifies 26!)