Left and Right: The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction

by John T. Jost

This book brings together for the first time an updated, revised collection of influential essays and articles that capture some of the most exciting scientific and scholarly contributions to the topic of political ideology. John Jost tackles fundamental questions about how psychology, neuroscience, and societal factors impact political attitudes and group divisions. In what sense, if any, are ordinary citizens "ideological"? Is it useful to locate political attitudes on a single dimension of representation? Are there meaningful differences in the beliefs, opinions, and values of leftists and rights-or liberals and conservatives? How are personality traits related to ideological preferences? What situational or contextual factors contribute to liberal and conservative shifts in the general population? What are the implications of ideological polarization for the future of democracy? Drawing on Max Weber's concept of elective affinities, one of the world's leading political
psychologists discusses the myriad ways in people choose ideas and ideas choose people.

Genres: Politics, Psychology

416 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2021

Reviews

[Emil O. W. Kirkegaard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely biased book but not bad.

[Joseph Bronski · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author mostly fails to achieve any real insight into political psychology. Inheritance, evolution, fitness, and producing a measure of leftism-rightism with maximal predictive properties regarding political behavior (voting, alignment, etc) is the job of whatever calls itself political psychology. This answers questions like where rightism and leftism come from, who will be leftist or rightist, why we have leftism and rightism, and so on.

Correlating noisy phenotypic measures with noisy phenotypic measures is not the primary job of psychology and is therefore not the primary job of political psychology. It's secondary at best. This only answers the question as to whether there is an r = 0.29 (p = 0.04) correlation between the Fascist Butthead Scale (a=0.71) (sample item: have you tried LGBT relations?) and the Cognitive Dunce Scale (a=0.73) (sample item: do you believe in God?).

Ask a Phenotype on Phenotype psychologist where rightism comes from and they might say from dogmatism. Where does dogmatism come from? Now you have to research the inheritance, evolution, and fitness of dogmatism. And there’s only a weak to moderate correlation between “dogmatism” and the thing I actually want to know about. You could have figured out these answers for rightism directly!

Also as usual, the book should have been maybe 1/4 as long. It seems to be mainly structure around a journal article. So it goes.

[Veronika Tait · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is mostly aimed at academics, but still thought-provoking. Jost's evidence, scientific thinking, and boldness are refreshing.