A review by ederwin
The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It by Robert Kurzban, Jason Weeden

3.0

Apparently, the prevailing academic view is that people do NOT tend to vote based on their self-interest. This book says that is BS. When you consider that people's self-interest involves many more things than just money, and when you break them down into finer categories than simply "rich" and "poor", then you will see that most people do take opinions on all sorts of issues mostly based on what benefits them or their friends and family, even if they are not admitting to themselves that is why they do so. Since we so often have to vote for simply "Team A" or "Team B", we will usually be voting against some of the things we want and for some of the things we don't want.

There are only a few ideological labels that everyone uses: "conservative", "liberal", and sometimes "libertarian" and "socialist". But real people fall into many more categories. This book gives names to some of those categories and explains their trends. Those labels would be useful if they were widely used, but since they are not, I'm not going to try to remember them.

There is some interesting stuff here, but it isn't easy reading. Lots of deep analysis of surveys sliced-and-diced in hundreds of ways. Gets boring real fast to me.