Political Psychology

What if there were a pill that made you more compassionate and more likely to give spare change to someone less fortunate? UC Berkeley scientists have taken a big step in that direction. A new study by UC Berkeley and...

Senator Inhofe (R-Okla.) pitched a snowball on the floor of the United States Senate last month. This was his way of disputing that 2014 was the warmest year on earth and that human-caused climate change is happening. Inhofe’s beliefs are...

A new study finds that while Democrats are generally more "pro-science" than other political groups, Republicans are also inclined to defer to science across a range of policy issues. In fact, there are only four issues where Republicans exhibit less...

New research suggests that liberals, as well as conservatives, can be biased against science that doesn’t align with their political views. The study found that people from both the left and right expressed less trust in science when they were...

A new study suggests college-educated cops are dissatisfied with the job, have negative views of their supervisors and don't necessarily favor community policing, a strategy aimed partly at reducing the number of deadly police-citizen incidents dominating the headlines. But William...

The “thirst for oil” is often put forward as a near self-evident explanation behind military interventions in Libya, for instance, or Sudan. Oil, or the lack of oil, is also said to be behind the absence of intervention in Syria...

A groundbreaking new study in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies compares the views of native Christians and Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in six Western European countries to shed light on the relationship between fundamentalism, religiosity, socio-economic status and...

Prompting people to think about the legacy they want to leave for future generations can boost their desire and intention to take action on climate change, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for...

Imagine that Brian promises to drive you to the airport but never shows up, and you miss your flight. When you confront Brian, he tells you that he remembered his promise but decided to watch a movie instead. Would you...

Twenty eyewitnesses testified before the grand jury investigating the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. None of these accounts is fully consistent with any other. Moreover, eyewitnesses even gave accounts that do not agree with their own earlier...

People’s views on income inequality and wealth distribution may have little to do with how much money they have in the bank and a lot to do with how wealthy they feel in comparison to their friends and neighbors, according...

Emotions are powerful motivators of human behavior and attitudes. Emotions also play an important role in guiding policy support in conflict and other political contexts. Researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya have studied the interaction...

Politics can have unintentional evolutionary consequences that may cause hastily issued policies to cascade into global, multigenerational problems, according to political scientists. "Most western democracies look at policies as if they are bandages, we fix what we can and then...