Prius or Pickup?

How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide

By: Marc Hetherington, Jonathan Weiler

Narrated by: Scott Merriman

Two award-winning political scientists provide the psychological key to America’s deadlocked politics, showing 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 Marc Hetherington and Jonathan 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.

Drawing on groundbreaking original research, Prius or Pickup? is an incisive, illuminating study of the fracturing of the American mind.

©2018 Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Read this book to understand the world right now

The title pretty much says it all. Ignore the reviews saying this book is biased against conservatives. It's not. Those reviewers heard something they didn't like and stopped listening. The book is neutral about who is right, but if there is a bias it is that the book is written for liberals so they can understand "how did this happen!?"

Spoiler: Liberal opinions are not as common as liberals believe they are.

The Bigotry of the Holier than Thou

These guys almost convinced me they were honest researches on a quest to expose evolutionary bias in the human species. They were doing a pretty good job until for some inexplicable reason their train went proudly off the track into the abyss of their own self righteous bigotry. Too bad, they might have actually done some good.

Everyone Should Read This...

This book doesn't just explain why there's a right vs left divide opening up and the effect it has had on society. But it explains the consequences and what we might do about it. There are no judgements here. I'd guess that the authors go "left" but there's no evidence of any anger/aversion to the "right" in there. If you're tired of the constant bickering... this book may be the map to a better place for all of us. Fingers crossed.

Recommended but can come across as a bit lopsided.

An intriguing listen, but I can see why supporters of President Trump aren't fans. The authors frequently use him as an example of what's wrong with the fixed (conservative) worldview without any real example of what can go wrong with the fluid (liberal) worldview (Murray's The Madness of Crowds does an excellent job of showcasing the fluid/liberal run amok). They should feel some redemption (if they stick with it) as the authors make clear that the fixed worldview is more closely aligned with "the middle", or the rest if the U.S. population, than those on the left, or the fluid. If you're interested in understanding why someone holds beliefs you might find repellant instead of ridiculing them, this book is an excellent place to start.

Good research, but liberal bias is irritating

I gave it three stars because it is more worth reading than not, but it was annoying to keep reading about how all “fixed” voters are motivated by racism. I’m a fixed person, and I vote based on my religious convictions. One possible fix to how deeply fragmented our parties have become would be for the left to stop demonizing religious people all the time. Maybe it’s ok to work at a private Christian school, even if their beliefs differ from yours. You could argue the same for Muslim schools - freedom of religion being one of the reasons our country was founded in the first place. And maybe if the left stopped threatening to tax our nation’s places of worship, fixed voters wouldn’t feel that fear anymore that made them vote for Trump - who we all knew wasn’t a Christian, and frankly we didn’t care, because we knew he would protect our urban churches from closing down and protect our freedom of religion and speech more generally. Anyway, that’s my take. But the research is excellent, so worth the read.