How To Keep Voters With You Forever, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Duverger's Law

[maradydd]

So I'm a bit late to the game with this trifecta of links, and maybe what I have to say has already been said elsewhere, but what the hell:

How To Keep Someone With You Forever -- a concise guide to some extremely effective techniques for stringing someone along in a shitty job or relationship by placing them into a "sick system". There's some

Comments

[q_pheevr]

I tried a few of the surveys, and on the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale in particular, I scored rather higher on "ingroup/loyalty" than I might have expected. I think there may be a problem with the design of the survey here. For example, I said that I wouldn't (for any price) go on the radio and say bad things about my country1 that I didn't believe were true, and I assume this contributed to my "ingroup/loyalty" score. But I also wouldn't say bad things about another country that I didn't think were true, nor would I say good things about my own country that I didn't think were true. What seems to be most relevant in this particular scenario is that I value truthfulness (which might have something to do with fairness or maybe even purity, or which might be a distinct value in its own right).

In-group loyalty definitely has a place in my moral system-to take a couple of variations on one of the other scenarios in the survey, I'd help a friend move house for free,2 regardless of whether I thought they'd ever have occasion to return the favour, whereas I wouldn't (under ordinary circumstances) do that for a stranger. But I don't think any of the questions on the survey caused me to give answers that reflect the degree to which loyalty figures in my moral thinking.

1. It's a little unclear, at this point, what "my country" ought to refer to, but I'm assuming it's the country I feel the most allegiance to, rather than the one I was born in or the one I happen to be living in at the moment.

2. Well, preferably for pizza and beer, but yeah, for free, if it came down to it.

[maradydd]

I had the same problem. I'm thinking about writing to Haidt to see what he has to say about that aspect of the survey design.

[whswhs]

The survey I found most striking had me scoring above average on Openness to Experience, and below average on the other four traits. I'm not sure that's right. I make my living as a freelance copy editor; that seems to call for a fairly high level of Conscientiousness, both to do good work and to get it done on time. But perhaps I don't understand how the trait is defined.