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Saturday, August 05, 2017

Psychologist intergroup contacts himself

This is a very interesting article on psychology and support for Donald Trump. It isn't wildly original, but it is brief clear and convincing.

Also it is very lefty (as one would guess at alternet). Bobby Azarian has essentially no time for the hypothesis that Trump supporters are populist in any meaningful sense. As a psychologist, he looks at the causes of their votes, not the reasons they gave -- basically he treats Trumpism as a mental disorder (to be sure he doesn't write that explicitly).

But I was struck by ironic evidence of non-hypocrisy

4. Intergroup Contact

Intergroup contact refers to contact with members of groups that are outside one’s own, which has been experimentally shown to reduce prejudice.

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Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist, a researcher in the Visual Attention and Cognition Lab at George Mason University

Now that's some serious intergroup contact. I fear Azarian is there, because it is just obviously the most desireable job he could get, but I want to believe that he went there in search of interaction with conservatives (and libertarians don't forget the libertarians or suggest they are just conservative hipsters).

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