Jonathan Weiler | Prius or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide

Jonathan Weiler | Prius or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide

Thursday, Nov 08, 2018 7:15 PM

Location:
Decatur Library Auditorium
215 Sycamore St, Decatur, GA 30030

Is there a psychological key to America’s deadlocked politics? Jonathan Weiler will drive home the answer at this Georgia Center for the Book event. Weiler is an award-winning political scientist and co-author of "Prius or Pickup?" 

Based on groundbreaking original research, this new book is an incisive, illuminating study of the fracturing of the American mind. Weiler and co-author Marc Hetherington write 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  Hetherington and 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.

About the Authors

Jonathan Weiler is Director of Undergraduate Studies and a professor in Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received his Ph.D. in political science. In addition to "Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics" (co-authored with Marc Hetherington), he is the author of "Human Rights in Russia: A Darker Side of Reform." He has been a regular contributor to the Huffington Post since 2009 and has appeared many times on radio and television to provide analysis of American Politics and other subjects.

(Not Presenting at the Event) Marc Hetherington is the Raymond Dawson Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of three previous books, including Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (co-authored with Jonathan Weiler) and Why Washington Won't Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis (with Thomas J. Rudolph), which won the Alexander George Award from the International Society of Political Psychology. Also winner of the Emerging Scholar Award from the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section of the American Political Science Association, he and his work have been widely cited in mainstream media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

 

If you are unable to attend this event, you may still pre-order a signed copy below.