Brandon McMurtrie

08/04/2025 1h 10min
Brandon McMurtrie

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Episode Synopsis

Brandon McMurtrie is a PhD student in psychology at Massey University, where he studies political polarization. He is also a keen Substacker, X-user, and hunter. We talked to him about polarization; whether the way we're currently talking about mental health might have some downsides; psychological research on left- (and right-) wing authoritarianism; and why he goes hunting. Pew Research on polarization in the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/...Costello et al. on the traditional political spectrum: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retri...Brandon's piece on 'identity satiation': https://backcountrypsych.substack.com...Steven Pinker on the American Psychological Associations' guidelines: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/op...Quadrant piece on authoritarianism research: https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/unca...Jesse Smith, 'Old wine in new wineskins': https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...For more links, see the YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MTXAgF1MTs&t=7s