It’s unscientific but the volume of “I absolutely voted for this!” I see on regional anonymous message boards is off the charts.

I’ve been annoying people in our profession by complaining that we haven’t wrestled with cruelty as a motivation in behavior research…hell we haven’t even started a conversation about operationalizing it. Had started this with a co-author, and then he died.

Knowing that they very much will get votes because of, not despite, the grossness and depravity.

Manifesto is the one off the top of my head but I know there are others. I’ll ask the much smarter than me folks I know who do this.

I’ll get yelled at for this but for classes I’ve used Wiki; their elections links generally list the ideology of parties (mostly) and more importantly the data sources.

And why I got a refundable ticket for Christmas 😕

The political science nerd me is looking at all the down ballot and local races to see what’s going on.

I’m thinking it might not, which is more unsettling.

I have a lot of thoughts on how our profession hasn’t wrestled with cruelty as a concept let alone a vote determinant and I think that’s its own tragedy. I get the obvious operationalization issues but still.

I wish that’s what it was. I think it might be something darker.

And obviously anonymity enables cowardice but still.

I was about to post something earlier about how I wince when I hear “People didn’t vote for this.” I scan a lot of message boards and I know that’s not scientific but boy howdy are people not shy about stating “I very much voted for this!”