I’m off to SPSP 2010 and will be presenting the below poster at the morality and justice pre-conference.  It’s based on a scale I found measuring separate war and peace attitudes (Vander Linden et. al, 2008) at the main political psychology conference 2 years ago.  The concept is pretty simple…I found scales that predicted pro-war and pro-peace attitudes, controlling for political ideology and the opposite construct.  For example, there are many reasons to be pro-peace….one could think war is a bad thing or one could be echoing one’s political party’s point of view.  Theoretically, by controlling for war attitudes and ideology, we get a picture of the kind of person who uniquely likes peace.

Like this Mother Theresa quote:

I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations.  I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be there.

There is something powerful about being “for” things rather than “against” things that other people believe in.  The opposition that the later strategy creates might just lead to the very same kinds of conflict that anti-war protestors seek to avoid.

Click Here for the poster

I just finished Methland, by Nick Reding, an in-depth portrait of the fall and hopeful rise of a small American town, Oelwein, Iowa, and a few individuals touched by the meth epidemic there.  What makes the book most powerful are the portraits that Reding is able to draw of the town having spent 4 years getting to know both the drug dealers, drug users, enforcement officers, medical staff, and politicians.  As a social psychologist, I swim in data, which has the benefit of objectivity, but which lacks a great deal of the nuance that defines the book.  Hearing the stories of people who used meth to be able to work longer at jobs which paid less and less seems far more convincing than studies looking at  ”the role of drug expectancies as important operations involved in the development of substance use patterns.”

While there are brave souls who try to save Oelwein in the book, one can’t help but feel that there are larger forces that cannot be fought, that are transforming rural America.  Profit motives entice both poor rural Americans and poor Mexicans to take enormous risks to produce and sell meth.  Several times in the book, enforcement agents succeed at having drug laws enforced only to see drug use take a different turn to new forms of production, distribution, and use.  The best that people appear to be able to do is to minimize the associated harm.

The book ties the drug trade to a similarly intractable problem, immigration.  Mexican drug cartels “employ a miniscule percentage of the illegal immigrants in this country,” but the integration of immigrant workers into American life makes it impossible to find that needle in the haystack (p.159). Big agriculture firms place ads for workers in Mexican border cities and lobby congress for access to this labor.  Consumers demand cheap food and enforcing immigration laws would cripple the agricultural system.  The city prosecutor doesn’t enforce immigration laws as it seems like forcing someone “through the gate which is left perpetually and invitingly open” (p.171).

The psychological variable that this makes me want to study, but for which I cannot find much previous research, is the willingness to accept moral imperfection.  Perhaps it could be termed moral maximizing?  If anybody knows of previous research on this, I would love to hear about it.  It seems to me that there are some cases where we are morally opposed to something, but trying to force that thing not to exist does more harm than good.  I think drugs are bad, but I think the drug war causes more harm than good and there is little we can do to stop people in a free society.  We just don’t have that level of control.  I think there is some injustice in illegal immigration towards those who wait to apply legally, and I lament the drain of workers from the countries of origin.  But we just don’t have that level of control over the border either.  Sometimes we just have to accept moral imperfection.

There is lots of research on consequentialism vs. deontological thinking, which is often framed as the willingness to do a bad thing in order to prevent a worse thing.  I think moral maximizing is different in that it is simple willingness to accept a bad thing.  If you can’t accept injustice, you may find yourself causing more harm than good in trying to change what cannot be changed in some cases.

What kind of people are moral maximizers?  I took Barry Schwartz’s maximizer-satisficer scale and changed the questions so that they referred to maximizing in the moral realm.  I then gave the survey to visitors at yourmorals.org.  Questions are listed at the end of this post.  The differences aren’t large, but it looks like both extreme liberals and extreme conservatives have this tendency.  As a liberal, I might tend to think of instances where extreme conservatives make things worse by failing to accept injustice (e.g. invading Iraq to avenge 9/11)…but it would seem likely that extreme liberals are likely to do similar things in some cases.  For example, communists like the Khmer Rouge killed a lot of people ostensibly in the name of social justice.  Perhaps we should be wary of extremely morally motivated people (what I call hypermoralism) from both sides of the political aisle.

Moral Maximizing Questions (alpha=.752):

When deciding on an action in a moral decision, I compare my action to the best possible action.

In choosing a moral action, one should never settle for a morally imperfect action.

One should never settle on a moral outcome that is less than the best.

I often fantasize about living in a better, more just world.

I have the highest moral standards for myself in making any decision.

No matter how satisfied I am with a decision, it’s only right for me to consider if it was the most moral decision.

I recently read this blog post by Justin Wolfers defending the use of United States gross domestic product rather than measures of subjective well being (e.g. gross national happiness) to measure how well our country is doing.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with this debate, you can see this below video or this link to the Sarkozy Commission Report which prompted the French president to similarly question whether the French are using the right indicators to measure societal progress in their country.

Personally, I think this ends up being a subjective rather than an objective question and I think it’s likely that people who are productivity oriented will never be convinced to use happiness measures primarily and that those who are care oriented will never be convinced to use GDP.  I’m currently working on a paper detailing why I think that this question of the ‘right indicators’ is a subjective rather than an objective question that depends on one’s goals, warmth or competence.

Using more objective criteria, Wolfer’s argument is that perhaps gross domestic product and measures of subjective well being are so highly correlated that there is no need to use new measures of psychological well being.  If they are so highly correlated, maybe there is no need to measure both.  I disagree for 2 reasons:

1.  The correlations he uses are with log transformed values of income and most people care about actual dollar values rather than log transformed values.  Consider this excerpt from the paper referenced:

Most early studies considered the relationship between the level of absolute income and the level of happiness, and thus often found a curvilinear relationship.In some cases the lack of evidence of a clear linear relationship between GDP per capita and happiness led to theories of a satiation point, beyond which more income would not increase happiness. A more natural starting point might be to represent well-being as a function of the logarithm of income rather than absolute income. And indeed, recent research has shown that within countries “the supposed attenuation at higher income levels of the happiness-income relation does not occur when happiness is regressed on log income, rather than absolute income.” However, if happiness is linearly related to log income in the within-country cross section,then cross-country studies should also examine the relationship between average levels of subjective well-being and average levels of log income.

This is a very good academic point about satiation points, and it may be true that doubling the income of someone who makes a million dollars a year produces the same increase in happiness that doubling the income of someone who makes $20,000 a year.  But for the same million dollars that it takes to double a rich person’s salary, we can create the same amount of subjective well being in 50 people who make $20,000 per year (50*20,000=1 million).  That fact is lost in a log transformed graph.  Real world allocation decisions are made with actual dollars, not log transformed dollars, which removes the skew that represents the United States’ actual distribution of wealth.  (ps. feel free to correct me if anyone reading this knows more about log transformation than I and I’ll edit this)

2.  Life Satisfaction, Happiness, and Smiling/Laughing are different things and the fault may be in the measurement of subjective well being failing to tap what Kennedy was talking about in his speech.  If I ask you how satisfied you are with your life, a large part of your answer may have to do with your current economic circumstances.  Wolfers and Stevenson do a good job in their paper of examining questions about life satisfaction and happiness separately and conclude reasonably that the measures are similar if we throw out outliers.  However, when we look at a question like “Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?”, the correlation goes down to .27 from .82 (which was the correlation between log GDP/capita and life satisfaction).  

Try answering this question-> “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days-would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”  What did you base your answer on?  Was it somewhat about your economic circumstances or work goals?  

Now ask yourself if you smiled or laughed a lot lately.  What was your answer based on? 

If you are like me, these questions tap very different parts of my life.  My thoughts naturally go to my progress with goals in question 1, whereas when asked about smiling/laughing, I tend to think of my day-to-day experiences.  There is a big difference between remembered happiness and experienced happiness.  General global assessments may indeed be related to economic well being, but perhaps the fault lies in the blunt ways we measure happiness where we don’t really know whether the person is talking about being satisfied, joyous, lacking anxiety, feeling engaged, etc…  When asked about things which tap these more discrete constructs, GDP doesn’t seem to capture them very well at all.   According to the Gallup World Poll data reported by Wolfers, having learned something interesting was uncorrelated with log GDP.  Feeling love is correlated .14.  Smiling/laughing, with a correlation of .27 with log GDP/capita, leaves a lot of unexplained variance that ought to be considered in policy making. 

To be fair, Wolfers himself acknowledges that “we can do a lot better” in measuring well being in previous posts and his defense of GDP is more to play devil’s advocate as he states that he agrees with criticisms of the over-use of United States Gross Domestic Product to measure our country’s progress.  I learned a lot in writing this post and will be following his well written blog and research closely in the hopes that it spurs more thought elaboration.

As a liberal social psychologist who has helped create a science of positive psychology course at the University of Southern California, I could not help but be interested in Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bright-Sided, which states how the positive psychology approach (in academia, business, health, and economics) has undermined America.  First, I would think we would have a lot in common given her unabashedly liberal bent and my generally liberal orientation.  The fact that an intelligent liberal person would be so upset by one of my primary chosen areas of research, and that enough others agree with her that a book got published, bears noting.  As well, one area that I’ve always been interested in researching is the idea of expanding our moral imagination.  Along the lines of Robert Wright’s idea that confrontational zero-sum situations lead to more misery in the world, it seems important that I practice what I hope to eventually preach and attempt to actually learn something from her book, rather than dismiss it.  For those of you who haven’t read the book, here is an entertaining interview that summarizes many points.

There are some definite points to agree upon in her interview and the book.  She was clearly negatively impacted by those who somewhat forcefully put forth the opinion that she should adopt the positive psychology approach given her cancer diagnosis.  ”The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease,” she writes (p.43).  Some people believe that there is a connection between having a positive attitude and cancer outcomes and Ehrenreich goes on to dispute this.  A review of the literature on health and happiness is beyond the scope of this post and really should be beyond the scope of her book, let alone the few pages she devotes to serious study of it.  She is a journalist not a scholar and she touches on only a brief part of this immense literature, with a lack of depth that would never work in a scholarly setting.  Her book does not have the kind of literature review that really can get at complexities and she seems to have relied on “a list of articles…compiled for me by Seligman” rather than doing her own in-depth research.  She ignores a large literature on stress as having no relationship to happiness research and intermixes research on the effects of feeling happy on cancer vs. other health outcomes.  People who study cancer and positive illusions agree that “there is no evidence that positive illusions can cure cancer,” but that is not the only health-happiness relationship worth studying.  Ehrenreich herself writes on p. 162 “The evidence that positive emotions can protect against coronary heart disease seems sturdier, although I am not in a position to evaluate it.”  It certainly is more complex than “being positive”=”being healthy”.  But the health-happiness relationship is also not as simplistically non-existent as she represents in her media interviews, and she is possibly doing harm to others by representing the research as simplistically (the very charge she levels at others).

That being said, positive psychologists and those they inspire likely were doing harm to her and others like her.  On page 42 of her book (my hardcover edition), she writes that “without question there is a problem when positive thinking fails and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment.  Then the patient can only blame herself.”  This is an important point that advocates of positivity should note.  It may work for some people, but it doesn’t work for everyone and if someone wants to be grumpy because they have cancer, they should feel supported in those feelings, not attacked.  As Ehrenreich puts it, “She took it personally.”  A more complex reading of the psychology literature would lead Ehrenreich and positive psychologists to the conclusion that acceptance of feelings (e.g. meditation) is important.  Perhaps some of the error lies in the idea that “positive psychology” is a separate discipline from psychology when in reality, there are no clear distinctions.

The fact that Ehrenreich is able to caricature positive psychology as “be positive” is unfortunate. It would be easy to place the blame on Ehrenreich for failing to dig much deeper than the works cited by Martin Seligman, who has his own detractors in academia.  But it is certainly true that positive psychology would do well to examine the ways that it can get it’s findings out without being so easy to caricature.  How was Ehrenreich so easily able to dismiss the robust research on stress and health?  Perhaps because positive psychology overly focuses on activated emotions such as joy rather than deactivated emotions such as contentment?  Or perhaps positive psychology needs to incorporate previous research on stress and not pretend that it is a completely new discipline?

Ehrenreich seems to have a particular concern about synthetic happiness vs. real happiness, feeling as she states in her interview with Stewart, “I never believe delusion is ok.”  In the personal realm, I have to side with positive psychologists as the evidence is overwhelming that circumstances matter less than we think in terms of our own happiness.  Human beings get used to things and those that don’t are who we call clinically depressed.  Dan Gilbert puts in best in this video:

 However, even if synthetic happiness is the same as real happiness, there are kernels of wisdom in Ehrenreich’s criticism.  Believing that one can synthesize money is different from changing one’s perspective toward money (e.g. being grateful for the comforts we have) and some new age interpretations of positivity are a bit ahead of the curve of what can be called science.  It is true that people are attracted to happy people, wanting to be around them in business environments, which likely leads to a link between happiness and wealth.  Ehrenreich acknowledges this, but calls this a bias that needs to be corrected.  That seems more like an opinion, as I think it’s reasonable for many to prefer the company of happy people, both in dating and in the workplace.  However, I can see how those who are naturally less positive might feel discriminated against or even feel like something is wrong with them as a result.

Positive psychology and spirituality is not for everybody.  Ehrenreich admits to being an atheist in her book (p.17 - “atheists pray in their foxholes”).  I, on the other hand, often attend a new age church where the preacher was actually in The Secret.  Still, I have always been uncomfortable with the idea that people use spiritual principles to manifest wealth, as many at my church believe, and instead choose to interpret wealth as meaning the inner wealth that we all have.  Getting off the treadmill which says we constantly need more money is the key to wealth, not having more stuff.  That’s my opinion, but  I don’t feel particularly upset that others around me might feel something different.  If you watch Stewart’s interview, you’ll notice that he tries to frame positivity similarly saying that if it works for other people, why does Ehrenreich have a problem with it?  Ehrenreich doesn’t give an inch.  The anger she feels for her cancer experience is palpable (and legible in her book).  Isn’t it just as wrong to try to force everyone to be ‘realistic’ (put in quotes as one person’s realism is another person’s delusion) as it is to force everyone to be positive?  I often write about moral confabulation in this blog and I would hypothesize that Ehrenreich’s moral outrage about positivity is somewhat more about her personal feelings than her research.  I say that not to dismiss her book, which gives voice to a very real sentiment shared by many, but rather to point out a very real hazard of the phenomenon of studying happiness.  Specifically, it can wound people when forced upon them and cause a great deal of psychological reactance.  Advocates of the science of studying happiness and the positive psychology approach to health maintenance would benefit from reading her book and learning about her perspective.  It’s not the only perspective, but it’s an important one to listen to.

Gratitude has been theorized to be a moral emotion, yet it has largely been studied for it’s hedonic benefits rather than it’s effect on moral reasoning.  I had done some previous analyses on our data at yourmorals.org where scores on the Gratitude quotient scale were positively related to most all measures of moral reasoning.  By itself, this isn’t particularly interesting as there are so many possible interpretations of this.  People who have nice things happen to them may feel grateful and also be nice people.  Nicer, more moral people may do good things in life and may receive benefits for them, for which they are grateful.  The numerous interpretations make any conclusion difficult.

As such, I decided to put a simple gratitude manipulation where participants were asked to write about something they were grateful for, before the moral foundations questionnaire.  I attempted to test the effects of gratitude on moral reasoning by running an experiment where participants were asked to write about 5 things they were grateful for, 5 hassles from their life, or 5 neutral events.  Below are the results of ~1500 participants.  Generally, it seems gratitude makes people more morally liberal and when I examined the standard liberal/conservative moral split (Harm & Fairness minus Authority, Ingroup, & Purity), there was a marginally significant relationship (p=.06) between being in the gratitude condition and having a greater liberal split.  The effect sizes are obviously small, but those in the gratitude condition appear to endorse the fairness foundation (p<.01) more and the authority foundation less (p<.05).

I’m not sure how to interpret this result.  It may just be random error.  To explore the result further, I looked at the individual fairness questions.

The fact that the gratitude manipulation has a fairly homogenous effect at the question level is promising.  Fairness can be thought of in many different ways.  It can be thought of as a concern for equality or for people not getting what they deserve.  The “RICH” and “TREATED” questions appear to show the biggest effect and they are most indicative of a concern for equality (see question text below).  I could imagine a theoretical argument for this link as being grateful and satisfied with a situation allows one the luxury of being generous and worrying about equal treatment.  There is research indicating that being grateful motivates prosocial behavior (also see this article).

Here is a list of fairness questions:

TREATED - Whether or not some people were treated differently than others

UNFAIRLY - Whether or not someone acted unfairly

RIGHTS - Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights

FAIRLY - When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone is treated fairly.

JUSTICE - Justice is the most important requirement for a society.

RICH - I think it’s morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing.

Still, I’m not 100% convinced of these results given the small effect sizes and will likely have to do more studies to confirm if this effect is replicable or is just an effect of noisy data.  Another way to look at the reliability of these effects is to examine whether these effects are consistent across groups.  It does appear that the effect is consistent across groups for increasing fairness.

The robustness of this effect less consistent for the Authority foundation, though it is perhaps worth considering why grateful libertarians may endorse authority less.  Perhaps the only reason for libertarians to value authority is out of a sense of insecurity.  For example, the libertarian party does espouse the idea that the only role of government is to provide security for property rights.  If that security is provided, perhaps libertarians see no need for any authority?

I’m not sure if I have enough evidence for a paper.  All research is somewhere between a zero and 1 in terms of it’s conclusiveness and these results may be too preliminary to reach the somewhat arbitrary standard of paper-hood.  I could clearly strengthen these results with a regression analyses of our large correlational dataset that confirms these patterns.  I’ll have to get feedback from more objective parties.

People who study happiness can be annoying in their pollyannish prescriptions to just look on the bright side of life.  Just ask Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.  So it’s always refreshing to see someone put basic research findings (being grateful is important) into more common sense language as in the below video.

Louis CK “Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy” - Watch more Sports Videos at Vodpod.

I bought Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue.  As someone interested in moral confabulation, Sarah Palin is an a great case study.  She has a very visceral intuitive sense of her own moral opinions (e.g. her opinion on Israeli settlements)…yet she often seems to have no preconceived notion of the source of those opinions.  So when the press asks her for the reason for her opinions, she is bound to confabulate a reason more than most.  A supporter of her might say that we all use intuitions to reason morally and so her gut level analysis is refreshingly honest.  A detractor might say that this is evidence that she doesn’t have well reasoned opinions and that our gut is not always correct.

Robert Wright wrote a recent book about zero sum situations, of which politics definitely is one.  One side wins and the other loses in every election.  In these situations, our gut is going to lead us to demonize the other side, which often is a strategically bad thing to do.  To combat this, he (and others like John Lederach) advocates actively exercising our moral imaginations.  The idea is that we need to consider other viewpoints to combat our gut reactions to demonize the other side.  That takes effort and willpower as our minds are wired to discount the opposing view on any issue.  But sometimes understanding the other side is the only way to compromise and peace.

So I am going to try to read Palin’s book with an open mind and expand my liberal moral imagination.  Maybe there are things we can agree upon or at least maybe I’ll learn something about conservative views that I can use.  For example, 10 pages into it, I can certainly agree about the need to keep special interests (big oil) out of politics and it seems that will be a recurrent theme in the book.  My partisan bias is to point out the special interests she caters to, but perhaps the more adaptive strategy is to take her words at face value.  If I really expect conservatives to expand their moral imaginations to consider the perspective of the Muslim world, it would seem hypocritical to be equally unwilling to expand my own moral imagination.

For more on expanding the moral imagination, you can watch the below video, specifically around the 14 minute mark where Robert Wright talks about moral imagination.

Sarah Palin, in contrast to the Obama administration, believes that Jewish settlements in disputed territory should be allowed to expand.  She is very clear about this belief in her recent interview with Barbara Walters.  But does she understand the reason for these beliefs?  Consider the below statement…

“I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.”

In contrast, here is the view of the Prime Minister of Israel from this article:

“We do not intend to build any new settlements, but it wouldn’t be fair to ban construction to meet the needs of natural growth or for there to be an outright construction ban,” Netanyahu said.

“Natural growth” is the term Israel uses for expansion to accommodate population growth inside the boundaries of existing settlements.

Perhaps a minor point, as Palin has part of the story about population growth right, but her opinion about a mass immigration into Israel causing a need for settlement is at odds with the official government position, which stresses that the population which needs to be accommodated is growth from within.  It’s possible that there is some immigration pressure, but it isn’t an opinion that is generally put forth by supporters of settlers and if population growth were the real “because” in her stated opinion, then one might think she would be equally concerned about the population growth of the Arab population, which is growing at a far faster rate, and where those people will live.

The moral intuitionist perspective would hypothesize that she has a really strong intuitive support for Israeli settlers and that when pressed, she may have to confabulate logical reasons for this support.  If you want to see moral confabulation in action, fast forward to 4:20 in the below video.

 For the sake of balance, Palin’s detractors are certainly capable of motivated reasoning (see this article by Andrew Sullivan) and moral judgment and I have to admit that I doubt my own immunity to such processes.  So maybe there really is lots of flocking going on and I’m just unaware of the validity of that argument.  Or maybe not…;)

A few years ago, I was fortunate to catch a talk by Jon Haidt at the Gallup Positive Psychology Summit where he gave a wonderful talk about moral foundation theory, which seeks to determine the fundamental systems of morality.  I sought to use his scale in my work and using that scale eventually grew into our current collaboration (along with Jesse Graham, Pete Ditto, and Sena Koleva) of yourmorals.org, where the main instrument used in moral foundation theory, the moral foundations questionnaire, is available.

The moral foundations questionnaire measures 5 foundations.  The below descriptions are taken from the moral foundations theory webpage.

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundaiton underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

According to Jon Haidt, ”Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.”

Perhaps one of the most compelling parts of the theory is that it invites people to try and posit a 6th foundation.  There was even a prize offered by Jon to those who succeeded and a number of possible candidates are listed here.

How can we determine what is or is not a foundation?  Some of the criteria are listed on the above webpage.  Borrowing from a recent lecture I attended on approaches to develop foundations of ‘personality’, I would list the below criteria as important.

• Factor analysis/Conceptual Distinction - Factor analysis is the most common way that people empirically determine distinct constructs.  The idea is that if two constructs are distinct, questions about these constructs should inter-correlate to form a separate factor from questions about a separate construct.  So if questions about Harm load on a separate factor versus questions about Fairness, we can conclude they are separate constructs.  I would argue that this is a necessary, but not sufficient test of any new foundation.  It is possible to ask questions with enough specificity that anything can be a separate factor.  Five questions about harm using a knife will likely load on a separate factor versus five questions about harm by drowning, yet does that mean they are separate foundations.  Furthermore, work on moral confabulation and moral intuition leads many researchers to believe that individuals are fundamentally naive about what drives their moral reasoning.  As such, direct questions may not be able to illuminate all possible moral systems.
• Cluster analysis - One of the most important applications of moral foundations theory is that it successfully describes the differences between liberals and conservatives in a fairly robust manner.  Some personality scale developers take the notion that if a question successfully differentiates classes of people, it’s a good question.  This is true for the moral foundation questionnaire to a point, but more work could certainly be done.  5 foundations should conceivably posit 5 classes of people (individuals who value each foundation over the other four) and the co-occurrence of many of these foundations is evidence that some current foundations may share a moral system or that these clusters have yet to be identified.
• Evolutionary explanation - One of the most important aspects of moral foundation theory is that it contains a plausible evolutionary explanation of all systems.  Evolutionary evidence should include both cross-cultural universality and a coherent evolutionary explanation.  The current foundations are well described in terms of their evolutionary roots, having grown out of anthropological field work, and future foundation candidates should be equally well described in terms of evolutionary theory and equally universal cross-culturally.
• Beyond Self Interest - I often think that people who are in front of me in traffic are jerks.  Why don’t they just get out of the way?  If you catch me on a particularly bad day, I may even consider them to be immoral people.  But is ‘getting out of my way’ a moral system?  Human beings are notoriously clever at moralizing their self-interest and any candidate foundation needs to go beyond self interest.  The relevant question would be whether I would judge the other people to be at fault from the perspective of a neutral third party.  Given that I don’t routinely chastise drivers for being in the way of other drivers, I would say that my beliefs in this example are not the result of a moral system, but rather my personal self-interest.
• Beyond Harm -  There are lots of different ways to harm another person.  Some would argue that Harm is too broad a moral category, but as long as Harm is included as a moral foundation, any subsequent candidate foundation will necessarily be forced to answer the question “Is this reducible to harm?”.  The question which would need to empirically be asked is whether individuals would judge an act to be wrong even if nobody were harmed.  This may seem like an easy test, but consider the case of liberty, which is an often brought up criticism of moral foundation theory as something that has been left out.  Most people would think that it is wrong for someone to deprive somebody else of their freedom.  It’s conceptually distinct from physical harm, potentially describes a class of people (libertarians), has an evolutionary explanation (the need for groups to encourage explorers?), and is not just self-interest as I care about other people’s liberty, not just my own.  However, would I care about somebody else’s liberty if they didn’t want to be free?  It’s a difficult question as I think the intuitive reaction is to assume that the person doesn’t know any better and really would be better off being free.  But what if I was absolutely convinced that they enjoyed captivity…or what if I thought that they actually benefited from captivity.  Should they be free?  It’s a more complex question than one initially might think and shows some of the complexity of developing foundations.  Ideally, we should be able to find cases where any foundation is generally used, even in cases where the use of that foundation causes harm.

With that in mind, I would offer these potential modifications of our initial foundations.

• Fairness is a notoriously ambiguous word and can mean many things to many people.  Current questions focus too much on fairness as equality, which is possibly motivated concern for the harm experienced by those who experience less equal outcomes.  In order to separate it further from harm, I would focus this foundation more on the principle of equity, where people get what they deserve.  Equity is motivationally tied to the desire for productivity and so this foundation would then possibly encompass ideas of property rights, sloth and waste, which have been missing from the current taxonomy.
• Concerns about liberty, equality and rights would be moved to the Harm foundation.  All of these constructs are things which could relate to the harm caused to another individual, whether it is the psychological harm due to being controlled, the emotional harm due to receiving an unequal share, or the harm to self-esteem when one does not feel like one has any rights.
• Ingroup and authority foundations have tended to predict similar things and co-occur in individuals such that one might doubt the independence of these two factors.  As they are currently measured, respecting authority and being loyal could both be considered subsets of a system that might be labelled “being a good group member”.  Some items which measure authority concern the desire for things to stay the same and a resistance to change, which has been shown to be indicative of conservative thought.  Changing authority to this conception and labeling it ‘conservation’ while allowing ingroup loyalty to encompass other aspects of being a good group member might improve the discriminant validity of the authority and ingroup foundations.
• Many of the other candidate foundations that have been proposed deal with truth, wisdom, honesty, and authenticity.  Telling the truth is a moral principle which might survive all of the above tests as it is conceptually distinct, describes a class of people (see The Dignity of Working Men), has an evolutionary explanation (trustworthiness), and is observed when it is contradictory to self-interest and causes harm to others.  In conceptualizing this foundation, I might consider including things like simplicity, directness, and being a stand-up guy.  This might explain why conservatives have a disdain for liberal academics who are too complex to be trusted and lack practical intelligence that is indicative of being a ’stand-up’ guy.

These are merely hypotheses and opinions, so take them for what it’s worth.  It is also important to note that the fact that it is possible to refine a theory doesn’t reduce the importance or contribution of the theory.  In fact, the fact that I (and many others) posted about refining it means that this theory has had a significant impact on public discourse and is worthy of refining.

Recently, a professor expressed the opinion that the purpose of social psychology is to publish first-rate research in journals.  Personally, I do not feel that social psychology is an end, in and of itself, but rather a means.  It is true that one of the primary means that psychology gets disseminated is through journals, but that is certainly not the only way to disseminate ideas.  Social psychology is especially interesting to me, in that it is applicable to the average undergraduate student’s daily life and so the teaching of social psychology becomes one of the most important ways that ideas are disseminated.  Social psychology hopefully contributes toward more worthy ends by teaching students about their world.

One exercise we use to teach undergraduates is one where we ask students to list reasons why they might want to be the opposite sex.  Below is the number of reasons that students listed in a recent exercise, divided by gender.

What exactly does this mean?  We use this to teach the students about sexism.  Somehow, it is just easier for women to think of reasons why they want to be men rather than for men to think of reasons why they want to be women.  There are several explanations for this.  It could be that women simply write more.  It could be that this accurately reflects society and there are more reasons in society to be a man than a woman.  Or it could be that women are more comfortable thinking about being masculine compared to men thinking about being more feminine.  This last hypothesis is supported by the below graph where we see that men were much more likely to fold their paper in half when turning it in, indicating that they perhaps wanted to hide their answers.

Some sample responses?

Reasons women thought it might be easier to be a man: less attention to appearance, capable, menstruation, less drama, physical abilities, aging not a big deal, less prejudice, & giving birth.

Reasons men thought it might be easier to be a woman: free drinks,nicer, don’t neccesarily have to get a job, socially acceptable to go to bathroom in groups, don’t have to fight wars, & easier to get dates.