Cover image for Prius or pickup? : how the answers to four simple questions explain America's great divide
Prius or pickup? : how the answers to four simple questions explain America's great divide
Title:
Prius or pickup? : how the answers to four simple questions explain America's great divide
ISBN:
9781328866783
Physical Description:
xxii, 259 pages : illustrations, charts ; 24 cm.
Contents:
Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus -- "A hell of a lot more abstract" -- Worlds apart -- A day in the life -- Rattlers and eagles -- "You're not going to be scared anymore" -- Our common fate.
Summary:
Two award-winning political scientists provide the psychological key to America's deadlocked politics, showing that we are divided not by ideologies but something deeper: personality differences that appear in everything from politics to parenting to the workplace to TV preferences, and which would be innocuous if only we could decouple them from our noxious political debate. What's in your garage: a Prius or a pickup? What's in your coffee cup: Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts? What about your pet: cat or dog? As award-winning political scholars Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler explain, even our smallest choices speak volumes about us--especially when it comes to our personalities and our politics. Liberals and conservatives seem to occupy different worlds because we have fundamentally different worldviews: systems of values that can be quickly diagnosed with a handful of simple parenting questions, but which shape our lives and decisions in the most elemental ways. If we're to overcome our seemingly intractable differences, Hetherington and Weiler show, we must first learn to master the psychological impulses that give rise to them, and to understand how politicians manipulate our mindsets for their own benefit. Drawing on groundbreaking original research, Prius or Pickup? is an incisive, illuminating study of the fracturing of the American mind. --
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