Jordan Peterson

Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of those distinct political orientations is probably a prerequisite for managing political disputes, which are a source of social conflict that can lead to frustration and even bloodshed. A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence documents a multitude of ways in which liberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics, from tastes in art to desire for closure and from disgust sensitivity to the tendency to pursue new information, but the central theme of the differences is a matter of debate. In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.

Differences in political orientation are partly rooted in personality, with liberalism predicted by Openness to Experience and conservatism by Conscientiousness. Since Openness is positively associated with intellectual and creative activities, these may help shape political orientation. We examined whether exposure to cultural activities and historical knowledge mediates the relationship between personality and political orientation. Specifically, we examined the mediational role of print exposure (Study 1), film exposure (Study 2), and knowledge of American history (Study 3). Studies 1 and 2 found that print and film exposure mediated the relationships Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness have with political orientation. In Study 3, knowledge of American history mediated the relationship between Openness and political orientation, but not the association between Conscientiousness and political orientation. Exposure to culture, and a corollary of this exposure in the form of acquiring knowledge, can therefore partially explain the associations between personality and political orientation.

A exceptionally large number of excellent commentary proposals inspired a special research topic for further discussion of this target article's subject matter, edited by Axel Cleeremans and Shimon Edelman in Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. This discussion has a preface by Cleeremans and Edelman and 25 commentaries and includes a separate rejoinder from Andy Clark. See: Abstract: Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may neatly capture the special contribution of cortical processing to adaptive success. This target article critically examines this " hierarchical prediction machine " approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action. Sections 1 and 2 lay out the key elements and implications of the approach. Section 3 explores a variety of pitfalls and challenges, spanning the evidential, the methodological, and the more properly conceptual. The paper ends (sections 4 and 5) by asking how such approaches might impact our more general vision of mind, experience, and agency.

While church and state are officially separated in many Western nations, there is nonetheless a great deal of overlap between the religious beliefs and political orientations of individual citizens. Religious individuals tend to be more conservative, placing a greater emphasis on order, obedience, and tradition. While many religious movements emphasize conservative values, there also exists a tradition of religious thought associated with equality, universalism, and transcendence—values more in line with political liberalism. The current study examined whether these divergent political orientations relate to the distinction between reli-giousness and spirituality. Political orientation, spirituality, and religiousness were assessed in two large community samples (Study 1: N ¼ 590; Study 2: N ¼ 703). Although spirituality and religiousness were positively correlated, they displayed divergent associations with political orientation: conservatives tended to be more religious, while liberals tend to be more spiritual. Experimentally inducing spiritual experiences similarly resulted in more liberal political attitudes.

Entropy, a concept derived from thermodynamics and information theory, describes the amount of uncertainty and disorder within a system. Self-organizing systems engage in a continual dialogue with the environment and must adapt themselves to changing circumstances to keep internal entropy at a manageable level. We propose the entropy model of uncertainty (EMU), an integrative theoretical framework that applies the idea of entropy to the human information system to understand uncertaintyrelated anxiety. Four major tenets of EMU are proposed: (a) Uncertainty poses a critical adaptive challenge for any organism, so individuals are motivated to keep it at a manageable level; (b) uncertainty emerges as a function of the conflict between competing perceptual and behavioral affordances; (c) adopting clear goals and belief structures helps to constrain the experience of uncertainty by reducing the spread of competing affordances; and (d) uncertainty is experienced subjectively as anxiety and is associated with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and with heightened noradrenaline release. By placing the discussion of uncertainty management, a fundamental biological necessity, within the framework of information theory and self-organizing systems, our model helps to situate key psychological processes within a broader physical, conceptual, and evolutionary context.

Social and personality psychologists have recently begun examining patterns of natural language use in relation to psychological phenomena. One domain of interest has been the relationships between individual differences in personality and the types of words that people use. The current study extends this research by examining the association between personality traits and language use in the production of self-narratives. Ninety-four undergraduate students were led through an automated writing program that facilitated the telling of the past and the planning of the future. Word usage was categorized using James Pennebaker's Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text-analysis software. Individual differences in the frequency of word use within these categories were correlated with measures of the Big Five personality traits. Every one of the Big Five was strongly and significantly associated with word use patterns theoretically appropriate to the trait, indicating strong connections between language use and personality.

The prisoner's dilemma has been used to study self-interest and cooperation in a variety of contexts. Applying an individual differences approach to this paradigm allows for the examination of dispositional factors that predict the likelihood of betraying one's game partner. An iterative prisoner's dilemma was administered to undergraduate students, along with measures of demographics, personality, and cogni-tive ability. Results demonstrate that higher scores on the withdrawal aspect of neuroticism and the enthusiasm aspect of extraversion independently predicted a greater likelihood of cooperation.

It is not clear either that the categories “given” to us by our senses, or those abstracted out for us by the processes of scientific investigation, constitute the most “real” or even the most “useful” modes of apprehending the fundamental nature of being or experience. It appears, instead, that the categories offered by traditional myths and religious systems might play that role, despite the initial unpalatability of such a suggestion. Such systems of apprehension present the world as a place of constant moral striving, conducted against a background of interplay between the “divine forces” of order and chaos (Peterson, 1999a). “Order” constitutes the natural category of all those phenomena whose manifestations and transformations are currently predictable. “Chaos” constitutes the natural category of “potential” – the potential that emerges whenever an error in prediction occurs. The capacity for creative exploration – embodied in mythology in the form of the “ever-resurrecting hero” – serves as the eternal mediator between these fundamental constituent elements of experience. Voluntary failure to engage in such exploration – that is, forfeit of identification with “the world-redeeming savior” – produces a chain of causally-interrelated events whose inevitable endpoint is adoption of a rigid, ideology-predicated, totalitarian identity, and violent suppression of the eternally-threatening other.

Susceptibility to alcoholism varies with age, gender, and familial background. Youthful alcoholic males with multigenerational family histories of male alcoholism seem at particular risk. Previous investigations suggest that such males are characterized by abnormal psychophysiological response, while sober and alcohol-intoxicated; additional recent studies indicate that the endogenous opiate systems are involved in mediating cardiac response to alcohol administration among young (mean =22.8 years), non-alcoholic men and women with multigenerational, unigenerational, and negative family histories of alcohol dependence and abuse. Then, we compared the ethanol-induced cardiac response of the males in these three groups to that of currently alcohol-dependent older males and age-matched non-alcoholic male controls. Finally, we examined ethanol-induced change in plasma beta-endorphin and cortisol levels among a subset of the non-alcoholic males, divided into those with high and low levels of postethanol administration heart-rate increase. Nonalcoholic males with multigenerational family histories of male alcoholism were characterized by significantly higher [t(201)=5.70,p<0.0001, Cohen's d=0.73] levels of ethanol-induced heart-rate increase than nonalcoholics from all other comparison groups. The magnitude of their increase matched that of current male alcohol-dependents. Nonalcoholic males with high levels of ethanol-induced heart-rate increase also produced significantly more plasma beta-endorphin after consuming alcohol. Peak production of beta-endorphin was highly correlated (r=0.861,p<0.001) with magnitude of heart-rate increase. A subset of those at risk for alcoholism may be characterized by sensitivity to ethanol-induced reward, marked by heightened ethanol-induced, heart-rate increase, mediated by ethanol stimulation of endogenous opiate production. This subset might certain those who, once alcoholic, would differentially benefit from treatment with opiate antagonists.

Violence and drugs seem to mix readily. In this paper, relevant correlational studies are briefly reviewed and methodological issues are discussed. With a focus on alcohol, facts pointing to some type of causal relationship are presented both from crime and laboratory manipulative studies. Dose and rate-dependent anxiolytic, psychomotor stimulant and alteration in inhibitory and problem-solving cognitive functions are each in turn seen as precipatory to aggression. Drugs other than alcohol which interact with these systems are also discussed.

This study investigated the relationship between provocation, acute alcohol intoxication, impaired frontal-lobe function, and aggressive behavior. The authors ranked 114 men according to their performance on two neuropsychological tests associated with frontal-lobe function. Forty-eight men (24 with scores in the upper and 24 with scores in the lower performance quartiles) participated in the full study. Half completed an aggression task while intoxicated, the remainder while sober. Aggression was defined as shock intensity delivered to a sham opponent. Shock intensity significantly increased as a main effect of provocation, alcohol intoxication, and lower cognitive performance. Furthermore, provocation interacted significantly with test performance such that individuals in the lower cognitive performance quartile responded to increased provocation with heightened aggression.

A growing literature suggests a significant relationship between "anxiety sensitivity" (AS: fear of anxiety symptoms) and alcohol use/abuse. The present study examined the relationship between levels of AS and self-reported rates of weekly alcohol consumption and frequency of "excessive drinking" (i.e., number of times legally intoxicated per year). Subjects were 30 non-alcoholic university women, divided into three AS groups (high, moderate, and low) based upon scores on the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI). High AS women reported consuming significantly more alcoholic beverages on a weekly basis and drinking to excess more times per year than low AS controls. ASI scores were found to be significantly positively correlated with both measures of self-reported alcohol consumption. The results support the hypothesis of a positive relationship between AS levels in young adult women and extent of excessive alcohol use.

The existence of a relationship between cardiovascular reactivity to signalled shock and alcohol consumption can be inferred from studies of males at increased familial risk for alcoholism. The present study examined two groups of non-alcoholic men - those with multigenerational histories (MGH) of alcoholism and family-history negative (FH-) controls - to determine whether reactivity was related to voluntary ethanol consumption in the context of a beverage taste test. High reactors, a significant majority of whom were MGH males, drank significantly more vodka and orange juice, rum and coke, and orange juice when asked to rate the flavor of three alcoholic and two non-alcoholic drinks. High reactors also consumed more alcohol on a weekly basis according to their self-report.

Four of alcohol's dose- and rate-dependent pharmacological properties may increase the likelihood of human aggression. As an anxiolytic, alcohol is capable of reducing the inhibitory effect of fear on manifestation of aggressive behavior. As a psychomotor stimulant, alcohol can potentiate aggressive behavior, once evoked, or lower the threshold for such evocation. Alcohol-related disruption of certain higher order cognitive functions may reduce the inhibitory control generally exercised by previously established knowledge and decreased ability to plan in the face of threat or punishment. Finally, alcohol's ability to increase pain sensitivity may increase the likelihood of defensive aggression. Discussion of the nature and relevance of these pharmacological properties I structured according to a heuristic and synthetic schema, predicated upon consideration of an inhibitory neuropsychological structure - the individually and culturally determined general expectancy set.

Recent studies have demonstrated that sons of male alcoholics with multigenerational family histories of male alcoholism are characterized by sober heart-rate hyperreactivity to aversive stimuli, susceptibility to alcohol-induced dampening of that hyperreactivity and by increased resting heart rate while intoxicated. Regression analyses indicate that the magnitude of alcohol-induced change in resting and reactive cardiac response is significantly and powerfully associated with the degree of self-reported voluntary alcohol consumption among 85 non-alcoholic males who are either lacking or who have moderate or extensive family histories of male alcoholism. It appears that heightened sensitivity to alcohol-induced increase in resting and decrease in reactive heart rate might mark or underlie familial risk for developing alcoholism.

The Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) (Cloninger, 1987c) was administered to four groups of young men. The first group was composed of non-alcoholic sons of male alcoholics with extensive multigenerational family histories of male alcohol abuse. The second was made up of non-alcoholic men with alcoholic fathers. The third group was composed of non-alcoholic men with no family history of alcoholism. There were no significant differences between the mean scores obtained by members of all four groups on the three major subscales of the TPQ.

What are the connections between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, childhood conduct disorder, and the development later in life of alcoholism or other drug abuse? Can we differentiate children who may develop problems with alcohol or other drugs later in life from those who may not?

Sons of male alcoholics (SOMAs) are at markedly heightened genetic risk for the development of alcohol abuse. Study of SOMAs could therefore conceivably increase the efficiency of research aimed at uncovering those heritable factors that predispose to alcoholism. SOMAs manifest observable behavioral, cognitive, and psychophysiological abnormalities while sober and react idiosyncratically to alcohol intoxication. They are most commonly described as conduct disordered and hyperactive, appear heir to a variety of deficits in verbal and abstract cognition, and perform more poorly in the academic environment. SOMAs are characterized by abnormal patterns of cued psychophysiological response, and appear more sensitive to the putatively reinforcing aspects of alcohol intoxication. Various methodological weaknesses permeate the relevant literature. Some straightforward improvements are suggested.

In a university sample (n=245) and a community sample (n=222), we replicate the higher-order factor solution for the Five Factor Model (Big Five) reported by Digman (Digman, J. M. (1997). Higher-order factors of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 1246–1256). We present a biologically predicated model of these two personality factors, relating them to serotonergic and dopaminergic function, and we label them Stability (Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) and Plasticity (Extraversion and Openness). Based on this model, we hypothesize that Stability will positively predict conformity (as indicated by socially desirable responding) and that Plasticity will negatively predict conformity. A structural equation model indicates that conformity is indeed positively related to Stability (university sample: =0.98; community sample: =0.69; P < 0.01 for both) and negatively related to Plasticity (university sample: =À0.48, P < 0.07; community sample: =À0.42, P < 0.05). These findings suggest that there are pros and cons of conformity, such that the most thorough conformists will tend to be stable but also rigid, less able to adjust to novelty or change. #

Genetic programming (GP) is a paradigm for automating the process of computer programming. It works in a fashion analogous to selective breeding in biology. The user provides two elements: an operational definition of the goal, and a set of operators and operands that can be used to achieve that goal. In selective breeding, the goal may be to come up with a smaller dog or a cow that produces more milk. In GP, the goal can be the optimization of any well-defined function, from maximizing food collected by virtual creatures to minimizing error in a regression equation. The important point in all these cases is that the fitness of a candidate solution is quantifiable. As long as the dog or error is getting smaller, a solution is getting better. In selective breeding, the operators are genetically specified and are often (until recently, always) only implicit from the breeder's point of view. A dog breeder can create a smaller dog by selective breeding without ever knowing which genes his directed mating is affecting. Relatives of GP such as genetic algorithms (Holland, 1992) are analogous, because they use arcane problem-specific binary representations for a solution. In GP, however, the operators are explicitly specified, consisting of well-defined, general computational operations such as addition , subtraction, square root, and log. When the goal and operators are defined, GP proceeds by creating a large set of computer programs (agents) that combine the operators in random ways. Each agent in the population attempts to solve the problem. The agents that perform best at this task are selected out and mated (duplicated , broken apart, and recombined with each other in random ways) to form new agents. These new agents and the best agents from the previous generation are used to create a new population pool. This process—test, select, and mate—is repeated until a completion criterion specified by the user is met (e.g., until a certain amount of time or number of generations has elapsed, or until one agent gets close enough to the goal). Recently, we have developed the Naturalistic University of Alberta Nonlinear Correlation Explorer (NUANCE 2.0) (Hollis & Westbury, 2006), a platform-independent program written in Java that uses GP to model nonlinear variable relationships. When NUANCE was introduced, it was demonstrated to work on two toy problems. The focus of the present studies is to demonstrate that NUANCE can be applied to real problems in psychology. In this article , we introduce and use a new version of the program, NUANCE 3.0. This tool and a manual that includes a description of parameters and new features added since the previous version are available as a free download from the Psychonomic Society archive at psychonomic.org/ archive. Our aim here is to demonstrate that NUANCE can be applied to real psychological problems, revealing new findings with both utilitarian and theoretical value. To this end, we apply NUANCE to very different data sets. The first study is a short example having to do with phar-macists' prescription errors. This serves as an example of how GP can be used to simplify predictive models. The Previously, we introduced a new computational tool for nonlinear curve fitting and data set exploration: the Naturalistic University of Alberta Nonlinear Correlation Explorer (NUANCE) (Hollis & Westbury, 2006). We demonstrated that NUANCE was capable of providing useful descriptions of data for two toy problems. Since then, we have extended the functionality of NUANCE in a new release (NUANCE 3.0) and fruitfully applied the tool to real psychological problems. Here, we discuss the results of two studies carried out with the aid of NUANCE 3.0. We demonstrate that NUANCE can be a useful tool to aid research in psychology in at least two ways: It can be harnessed to simplify complex models of human behavior, and it is capable of highlighting useful knowledge that might be overlooked by more traditional analytical and factorial approaches. NUANCE 3.0 can be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Genetic programming (GP) is a paradigm for automating the process of computer programming. It works in a fashion analogous to selective breeding in biology. The user provides two elements: an operational definition of the goal, and a set of operators and operands that can be used to achieve that goal. In selective breeding, the goal may be to come up with a smaller dog or a cow that produces more milk. In GP, the goal can be the optimization of any well-defined function, from maximizing food collected by virtual creatures to minimizing error in a regression equation. The important point in all these cases is that the fitness of a candidate solution is quantifiable. As long as the dog or error is getting smaller, a solution is getting better. In selective breeding, the operators are genetically specified and are often (until recently, always) only implicit from the breeder's point of view. A dog breeder can create a smaller dog by selective breeding without ever knowing which genes his directed mating is affecting. Relatives of GP such as genetic algorithms (Holland, 1992) are analogous, because they use arcane problem-specific binary representations for a solution. In GP, however, the operators are explicitly specified, consisting of well-defined, general computational operations such as addition , subtraction, square root, and log. When the goal and operators are defined, GP proceeds by creating a large set of computer programs (agents) that combine the operators in random ways. Each agent in the population attempts to solve the problem. The agents that perform best at this task are selected out and mated (duplicated , broken apart, and recombined with each other in random ways) to form new agents. These new agents and the best agents from the previous generation are used to create a new population pool. This process—test, select, and mate—is repeated until a completion criterion specified by the user is met (e.g., until a certain amount of time or number of generations has elapsed, or until one agent gets close enough to the goal). Recently, we have developed the Naturalistic University of Alberta Nonlinear Correlation Explorer (NUANCE 2.0) (Hollis & Westbury, 2006), a platform-independent program written in Java that uses GP to model nonlinear variable relationships. When NUANCE was introduced, it was demonstrated to work on two toy problems. The focus of the present studies is to demonstrate that NUANCE can be applied to real problems in psychology. In this article , we introduce and use a new version of the program, NUANCE 3.0. This tool and a manual that includes a description of parameters and new features added since the previous version are available as a free download from the Psychonomic Society archive at psychonomic.org/ archive. Our aim here is to demonstrate that NUANCE can be applied to real psychological problems, revealing new findings with both utilitarian and theoretical value. To this end, we apply NUANCE to very different data sets. The first study is a short example having to do with phar-macists' prescription errors. This serves as an example of how GP can be used to simplify predictive models. The Previously, we introduced a new computational tool for nonlinear curve fitting and data set exploration: the Naturalistic University of Alberta Nonlinear Correlation Explorer (NUANCE) (Hollis & Westbury, 2006). We demonstrated that NUANCE was capable of providing useful descriptions of data for two toy problems. Since then, we have extended the functionality of NUANCE in a new release (NUANCE 3.0) and fruitfully applied the tool to real psychological problems. Here, we discuss the results of two studies carried out with the aid of NUANCE 3.0. We demonstrate that NUANCE can be a useful tool to aid research in psychology in at least two ways: It can be harnessed to simplify complex models of human behavior, and it is capable of highlighting useful knowledge that might be overlooked by more traditional analytical and factorial approaches. NUANCE 3.0 can be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The prisoner's dilemma has been used to study self-interest and cooperation in a variety of contexts. Applying an individual differences approach to this paradigm allows for the examination of dispositional factors that predict the likelihood of betraying one's game partner. An iterative prisoner's dilemma was administered to undergraduate students, along with measures of demographics, personality, and cogni-tive ability. Results demonstrate that higher scores on the withdrawal aspect of neuroticism and the enthusiasm aspect of extraversion independently predicted a greater likelihood of cooperation.

An experiment tested the hypothesis that literature can subvert habitual emotional disengagement of avoidantly attached individuals. After completing the Attachment Style Questionnaire and an Emotion Checklist, 166 participants were randomly assigned to either an Art or a Control condition. Those in the Art condition read the short story The Lady with the Toy Dog by [Chekhov, A. (1899/1990). The lady with a toy dog. In S. Applebaum (Ed.), Five great short stories. Dover Thrift Editions: Springer]. Those in the Control condition read a comparison text that was documentary in format, and had the same content, length, reading difficulty, and interest. Following this, all participants completed the Emotion Checklist again. As hypothesized, an interaction between Attachment Style and Condition was found: Individuals who scored above the median on avoidant attachment experienced significantly greater Emotion Change in the Art condition than in the Control condition.

Self-report measures of personality appear susceptible to biased responding, especially when administered in competitive environments. Respondents can selectively enhance their positive traits while downplaying negative ones. Consequently, it can be difficult to achieve an accurate representation of personality when there is motivation for favourable self-presentation. In the current study, we developed a relative-scored Big Five measure in which respondents had to make repeated choices between equally desirable personality descriptors. This measure was contrasted with a traditional Big Five measure for its ability to predict GPA and creative achievement under both normal and ''fake good " response conditions. While the relative-scored measure significantly predicted these outcomes in both conditions, the Likert questionnaire lost its predictive ability when faking was present. The relative-scored measure thus proved more robust against biased responding than the Lik-ert measure of the Big Five.

Delay discounting describes the extent to which the value of a reward decreases as the delay to obtaining that reward increases. Lower discounting rates predict better outcomes in social, academic, and health domains. The current study investigates how personality and cognitive ability interact to predict individual differences in delay discounting. Extra-version was found to predict higher discounting rates at the low end of the cognitive distribution , while emotional stability was found to predict lower discounting rates at the high end of the cognitive distribution. These findings support recent models of discounting behavior and suggest that personality and cognitive ability interact in shaping decision making.