This article discusses some ideological issues related with the simulation of social systems in The Sims, proposing an interpretation of The Sims as an ideological game. This paper will focus on describing The Sims as a social simulator of a postcapitalist society: what The Sims proposes as an ideological game is a simulation of a specific set of values linked with a capitalist culture. Therefo...

Despite Miller's (1969) now-famous clarion call to "give psychology away" to the general public, scientific psychology has done relatively little to combat festering problems of ideological extremism and both inter- and intragroup conflict. After proposing that ideological extremism is a significant contributor to world conflict and that confirmation bias and several related biases are signific...

Two key features robustly describe ideological differences in society: (i) individuals persistently disagree about objective facts; (ii) individuals also disagree about which sources can be trusted to provide reliable information about these facts. We develop a model in which these patterns arise endogenously as the result of small deviations from Bayesian information processing. Individuals re...

It is a common fear in many countries that ideological parties will come to power through elections but will implement extreme policies. Many countries cope with this problem by overriding the election results when such parties are elected. We demonstrate that the alternative approach of containing these parties within the democratic system is more effective. We show that, as the probability of...

It is widely thought that news organizations exhibit ideological bias, but rigorously quantifying such slant has proven methodologically challenging. Through a combination of machine learning and crowdsourcing techniques, we investigate the selection and framing of political issues in 15 major U.S. news outlets. Starting with 803,146 news stories published over 12 months, we first used supervis...

The paper focuses on ideological determinants of therapeutic treatment of guilt. The ideological factors have strong, often unrecognised, effect on both therapists and patients. Especially religious vs. non-religious or anti religious attitudes play an important role. Therapeutic approaches to guilt can be often understood and classified respectively (especially in case of abortion). Some relev...

Marcia’s (1966) identity status approach was employed in the examination of an existential domain of identity—conceptualized as a component of ideological identity, and operationalized as a multidimensional set of death orientations. Paralleling the identity status constructs of exploration and commitment, the underlying constructs of this domain were proposed to be death contemplation and acce...

Individual differences in moral views are often explained as the downstream effect of ideological commitments, such as political orientation and religiosity. Recent studies in the U.S. suggest that moral views about recreational drug use are also influenced by attitudes toward sex and that this relationship cannot be explained by ideological commitments. In this study, we investigate student sa...

The quickly growing presence of ideological groups on the Internet has garnered interest into how these groups use technology to persuade others. This study extends current research on the influential effects of website credibility and interactivity to the context of ideological group websites. Results of this study indicated that credibility and interactivity had direct and interactive effects...