Psychological Inquiry. She is the author of Shattered Assumptions: Toward a New Psychology of Trauma.
Janoff-Bulman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Two Moralities: Conservatives, Liberals, and the Roots of Our Political Divide, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test gets a grade of B—, a decent grade, but not a very strong performance. On the page readers are exposed to an important difference between liberals and conservatives and are therefore attuned to the book’s focus on political differences. The page essentially provides one example but misses the larger purpose of the book, which is to reveal the fundamental causes of our political divide today. To this end the book relies on important distinctions drawn from moral psychology.Learn more about The Two Moralities at the Yale University Press website.
Page 99 begins with the well-known finding that we are more likely to be liberal if we live in cities and more likely to be conservative if we live in rural areas. It goes on to note that in part this is because people self-sort and choose to live in communities where others share their politics and beliefs. Yet we also read that place influences people—that is, people don’t make cities liberal, but instead cities make people liberal. The norms of our environment, often imperceptible, are nevertheless powerful.
Half of page 99 is then devoted to a quote, one of two lengthy quotes that appear in the book. It refers specifically to how urban versus rural dwellers view immigrants, because attitudes towards immigrants represent one of the widest gulfs between the two populations. The quote is by a satisfied urban dweller who explains:In the country chances are pretty good that all your friends and neighbors look and sound just like you... But in the city suddenly multiculturalism isn’t some failed, politically correct agenda, it’s just your neighborhood... By the time you show up in town, this huge kumbaya-world stew has been boiling for ages... You get to see firsthand that most immigrants are normal, hard-working people, just with cool accents and better food.The rural-urban differences discussed on the page are likely not new to readers, but they are embedded in a book that does present something new. Specifically, the book as a whole uses the lens of moral psychology to present a new framework for understanding liberal-conservative differences. Two natural but distinct forms of morality underlie the two sides of the political divide. By the end of the book these two moralities have been related to psychological differences between liberals and conservatives, their near-perfect alignment with political parties today, specific policy preferences, and associated problems of extreme inequality and authoritarianism in the U.S. today.
Importantly, in these toxic political times readers are asked to consider the challenging possibility that both liberalism and conservatism are based in morality and reflect concern for the larger collective. If we are to preserve or reclaim our democracy, the left and anti-Trump right will have to work together. This is likely to be a long-term project, but one that would benefit from a better understanding of the other side.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
