The role of generalizability in moral and political psychology

Abstract

The aim of the social and behavioral sciences is to understand human behavior across a wide array of contexts. Our theories often make sweeping claims about human nature, assuming that our ancestors or offspring will be prone to the same biases and preferences. Yet we gloss over the fact that our research is often based in a single temporal context with a limited set of stimuli. Political and moral psychology are domains in which the context and stimuli are likely to matter a great deal (Van Bavel, Mende-Siedlecki, Brady, & Reinero, 2016). In response to Yarkoni (see BBS issue), we delve into topics related to political and moral psychology that likely depend on features of the research. These topics include understanding differences between liberals and conservatives, when people are willing to sacrifice someone to save others, the behavior of political leaders, and the dynamics of intergroup conflict.

Partisans are more likely to entrench their beliefs in misinformation when political outgroup members correct claims

“…Our results also appear robust to the diversity of subtle message features present in some of our tweets (e.g., exclamation points, hashtags, referencing specific political parties by name). As such, our findings seem to generalize fairly well across political actors, issues, and messages, an important feature of moral and political psychology(Harris et al, 2022). Our overall results are also robust to different operationalizations of belief change (e.g., treating any belief change of less than 5-points or even 10-points as simply no change) and we rule out measurement error concerns in Section 9 of the supplement.…”

A New Way to Think About Internal and External Validity

“…However, Yarkoni’s focus was on Sense 1 external validity (the focus was the generalizability of results) as opposed to Sense 2 external validity. Although many commentators retained a Sense 1 external-validity focus, several of them criticized Yarkoni for a lack of consideration of the role of theory, although these researchers did not distinguish between Sense 1 and Sense 2 validity (e.g., Davidson et al, 2022; Harris et al, 2022; Hensel et al, 2022; Lakens et al, 2022; Maniadis, 2022; Turner & Smaldino, 2022). However, making the distinction suggests that the seemingly irreconcilable positions can, perhaps, be reconciled with worth accruing to both.…”