Rose McDermott

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Rose McDermott is an American political scientist who is the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University. [1] [2] She has also taught at Cornell, UCSB, and Harvard. [3] She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. [3] [4] Her work is situated at the intersection of several disciplines including political science, psychology, biology, methods, development, and gender studies. [5]

Contents

Early life and education

McDermott was raised in Hawaii, United States. [2] Her father was in the Navy. She has a B.A. in Political Science from Stanford University (1984), M.A. in Political Science from Columbia University (1986), M.A. in Experimental Social Psychology from Stanford University (1988), M.A. in Political Science from Stanford University (1990) and a PhD in Political Science from Stanford University (1991).

At Columbia University, she was strongly influenced by Robert Jervis. [2]

Research

McDermott has applied prospect theory to U.S. foreign policy behavior. [6]

In her publication, "Man is by nature a political animal: Evolution, Biology and Politics", she has focused on differentiating between conservatism and liberalism, rather than between democrats and republicans, and investigates how respectively conservatives and liberals experience the world differently. Before beginning the research it is recognized that your ideology is the result of processes of socialization and due to your environment, however this doesn't tell the whole story. The relative genetic importance is common in between cultures, however the relative influence from family and environment varies a lot depending on the society and the time.

A part of this research was carried out by having test persons look at different photos, and by eye tracking techniques, tracking what their eyes focused on. This could be related to their political ideology. An example would be that liberals tend to look at emotions - eyes, faces - compassion for a specific person or situation. Whereas conservatives would focus on authorities, a threat etc. The conclusion of this would be, that even though looking at the same photo, the persons would have different experiences of the same situation. This is interesting and relevant in regards to politics, because it's then possible to track the reaccion and therefore the difference in ideology, but also how different people experience different actions by governments, political actions etc. Furthermore, it shows that ideology has a greater personal impact, than just politics, but also actually defines certain characteristics and personal values.

Other researches carried out was by using human smell - having different test persons smell other people, and whether the ideology actually also had an impact here. They could conclude that liberals prefer the smell of liberals and conservatives prefer the smell of other conservatives, even though not knowing the ideology of the person they smelled.

An overall conclusion was that biology has a greater impact on politics than maybe expected. That politics not only has to do with the mindset or ideas about societal structures, but rather carved values, that define how you experience the world. [7]

Publications

Furthermore, more than 100 academic articles. To find CV please look at Brown University website: https://watson.brown.edu/people/faculty/mcdermott

Related Research Articles

Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in which it appears. In Western culture, depending on the particular nation, conservatives seek to promote a range of social institutions such as the nuclear family, organized religion, the military, property rights, and monarchy. Conservatives tend to favor institutions and practices that guarantee stability and evolved gradually. Adherents of conservatism often oppose certain aspects of modernity and seek a return to traditional values, though different groups of conservatives may choose different traditional values to preserve.

A political spectrum is a system to characterize and classify different political positions in relation to one another. These positions sit upon one or more geometric axes that represent independent political dimensions. The expressions political compass and political map are used to refer to the political spectrum as well, especially to popular two-dimensional models of it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Discourse</span> Field of theory which examines elements of conversation

Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our experience of the world. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics, in which expressions' denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context.

An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones." Formerly applied primarily to economic, political, or religious theories and policies, in a tradition going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, more recent use the term as mainly condemnatory.

International relations theory is the study of international relations (IR) from a theoretical perspective. It seeks to explain causal and constitutive effects in international politics. Ole Holsti describes international relations theories as acting like pairs of coloured sunglasses that allow the wearer to see only salient events relevant to the theory; e.g., an adherent of realism may completely disregard an event that a constructivist might pounce upon as crucial, and vice versa. The three most prominent schools of thought are realism, liberalism, and constructivism.

The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by a disposition to treat authority figures with unquestioning obedience and respect. Conceptually, the term authoritarian personality originated from the writings of Erich Fromm, and usually is applied to people who exhibit a strict and oppressive personality towards their subordinates.

Evolutionary psychology seeks to identify and understand human psychological traits that have evolved in much the same way as biological traits, through adaptation to environmental cues. Furthermore, it tends toward viewing the vast majority of psychological traits, certainly the most important ones, as the result of past adaptions, which has generated significant controversy and criticism from competing fields. These criticisms include disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, cognitive assumptions such as massive modularity, vagueness stemming from assumptions about the environment that leads to evolutionary adaptation, the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues in the field itself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Gries</span>

Peter Hays Gries is the Lee Kai Hung Chair and founding Director of the Manchester China Institute at the University of Manchester, where he is also Professor of Chinese politics. He studies the political psychology of international affairs, with a focus on China and the United States.

Hazel June Linda Rose Markus is a social psychologist and a pioneer in the field of cultural psychology. She is the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in Stanford, California. She is also a founder and faculty director of Stanford SPARQ, a "do tank" that partners with industry leaders to tackle disparities and inspire culture change using insights from behavioral science. She is a founder and former director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). Her research focuses on how culture shapes mind and behavior. She examines how many forms of culture influence the self, and in turn, how we think, feel, and act.

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Glenn Daniel Wilson is a psychologist best known for his work on attitude and personality measurement, sexual attraction, deviation and dysfunction, partner compatibility, and psychology applied to performing arts. He is a fellow of the British Psychological Society and makes frequent media appearances as a psychology expert, especially in TV news and documentaries.

Equity feminism is a form of liberal feminism that advocates the state's equal treatment of women and men. Equity ensures equality between everyone without challenging inequalities perpetuated by employers, educational and religious institutions, and other elements of society. The concept has been discussed since the 1980s. Equity feminism has been defined and classified as a kind of classically liberal or libertarian feminism, in contrast with social feminism, difference feminism, gender feminism, and equality feminism.

Genopolitics is the study of the genetic basis of political behavior and attitudes. It combines behavior genetics, psychology, and political science and it is closely related to the emerging fields of neuropolitics and political physiology.

Dominic D. P. Johnson is an Alistair Buchan Professor of International Relations at St Antony's College, Oxford.

A number of studies have found that human biology can be linked with political orientation. This means that an individual's biology may predispose them to a particular political orientation and ideology. Many of the studies linking biology to politics remain controversial and unrepeated.Davies, James. "The Proper Biological Study of Politics". Political Psychology. 4 (4): 731–743. doi:10.2307/3791065. JSTOR 3791065.

Neuropolitics is a science which investigates the interplay between the brain and politics. It combines work from a variety of scientific fields which includes neuroscience, political science, psychology, behavioral genetics, primatology, and ethology. Often, neuropolitics research borrow methods from cognitive neuroscience to investigate classic questions from political science such as how people make political decisions, form political / ideological attitudes, evaluate political candidates, and interact in political coalitions. However, another line of research considers the role that evolving political competition has had on the development of the brain in humans and other species. The research in neuropolitics often intersects with work in genopolitics, political psychology, political physiology, sociobiology, neuroeconomics, and neurolaw.

The interdisciplinary study of biology and political science is the application of theories and methods from the field of biology toward the scientific understanding of political behavior. The field is sometimes called biopolitics, a term that will be used in this article as a synonym although it has other, less related meanings. More generally, the field has also been called "politics and the life sciences".

Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. It was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, and Jesse Graham, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder. It has been subsequently developed by a diverse group of collaborators and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. The theory proposes six foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. Its authors remain open to the addition, subtraction, or modification of the set of foundations.

David O’Keefe Sears is an American psychologist who specializes in political psychology. He is a distinguished professor of psychology and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles where he has been teaching since 1961. He served as dean of social sciences at UCLA between 1983 and 1992. Best known for his theory of symbolic racism, Sears has published many articles and books about the political and psychological origins of race relations in America, as well as on political socialization and life cycle effects on attitudes, the role of self-interest in attitudes, and multiculturalism. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.

Academic bias is the bias or perceived bias of scholars allowing their beliefs to shape their research and the scientific community. It can refer to several types of scholastic prejudice, e.g., logocentrism, phonocentrism, ethnocentrism or the belief that some sciences and disciplines rank higher than others.

The political views of American academics began to receive attention in the 1930s, and investigation into faculty political views expanded rapidly after the rise of McCarthyism. Demographic surveys of faculty that began in the 1950s and continue to the present have found higher percentages of liberals than of conservatives, particularly among those who work in the humanities and social sciences. Researchers and pundits disagree about survey methodology and about the interpretations of the findings.

References

  1. ↑ "Rose McDermott | Watson Institute". Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Retrieved 2021-07-15.
  2. 1 2 3 McDermott, Rose (2022). "An Accidental Academic" (PDF).
  3. 1 2 "Rose McDermott | Watson Institute".
  4. ↑ "Rose McDermott". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Retrieved 2021-07-15.
  5. ↑ "Rose McDermott". www.cep.ucsb.edu. Retrieved 2021-07-15.
  6. ↑ Kydd, Andrew H. (2008-08-14). Reus-Smit, Christian; Snidal, Duncan (eds.). "Methodological Individualism and Rational Choice". The Oxford Handbook of International Relations. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199219322.001.0001. ISBN   978-0199219322 . Retrieved 2022-03-05.
  7. ↑ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine : The Genetics of Politics | Rose McDermott | Talks at Google. YouTube .
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