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Speaker: David Pinsof, Ph.D., UCLA Social Minds Lab

What explains the contents of political belief systems? A widespread view is that they derive from abstract values like equality, tolerance and authority. Here, David Pinsof challenges this view, arguing instead that belief systems derive from political alliance structures that vary across nations and time periods. When partisans mobilize support for their political allies, they generate patchwork narratives that appeal to ad-hoc and often incompatible moral principles.

In the first part of the talk, Pinsof will explain how people choose their allies and how they support their allies using propagandistic tactics. In the second part, he will show how these choices and tactics give rise to political alliance structures with their strange bedfellows and the idiosyncratic contents of belief systems. He proposes that if Alliance Theory is correct, then political psychology needs a radically different approach—one in which belief systems arise not from deep-seated moral values but from ever-shifting alliances and rivalries.

This talk is offered both in person and online. Light refreshments will be served.

David Pinsof is a postdoctoral scholar who received his Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA in 2018. David’s research focuses on evolutionary psychology, political psychology, public opinion, and the nature of social status. His empirical work explores individual differences in mating psychology and their relation to political attitudes, mathematical models of alliance formation, and the origins of political belief systems.