How Screwed Up Does Health Care Need to Get Before We'll Fix It?
“We need to be screwed!” Not altogether surprising words to spill out of a college student’s mouth. But this particular student was not talking about sex. She was discussing the U.S. health-care...
View ArticlePartisan Drift Over the Environment: Are Republicans Wandering Away from...
There’s a fascinating new analysis available, looking at parallels between the politics of health care and the environment. It is led by Theda Skocpol, a social scientist at Harvard (whose writing...
View ArticleAbraham Lincoln on Perspective Taking
I write frequently about the importance of perspective taking in clinician/patient interaction. Seeing the world through other people’s eyes is also a crucial moral and political skill. No surprise...
View ArticleCass Sunstein Takes on the Death Panel Myth
I wrote a while back about some research I conducted with Jason Reifler and Brendan Nyhan on how fact checking influences people’s belief in whether Obamacare created death panels, to decide which old...
View ArticleBroken Democracy
Until recently, the state of North Carolina, where I live, was a bastion of political moderation, especially compared to our neighbors in the southeast. Our politics were moderate in part because the...
View ArticleDo People on the Right Feel Superior to Those on the Left?
Most of us have at least one cranky old relative who not only has stronger opinions than the rest of us, but is also convinced that those opinions are superior to ours. Not just content to believe...
View ArticleHow Do Scientists’ Beliefs Differ from Those of Laypeople?
Do you think it is safe to eat genetically modified foods? I do, because I believe that most foods we eat have been genetically modified. Cows wouldn’t be cows if humans hadn’t changed them...
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