Does trait anxiety make your more or less likely to support war & aggression?
Recently, one of the grad students in my department gave a brownbag talk about the relationship between fear and aggression. On the one hand, one might expect fear to lead to aggression as one perceives threat to a greater extent and responds accordingly. On the other hand, fear is associated with withdrawal and so we may expect those who are naturally fearful to avoid aggressive actions, such as war.
I analyzed data on our support for war and peace measure (e.g. "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict" - Van der Linden et. al 2008) as well as a measure of trait anxiety (e.g. how accurately "get stressed out easily" describes you - from the IPPI BIS/BAS scale). Unfortunately, the analysis I ran isn't particularly conclusive, but part of science is hopefully sharing both conclusive and inconclusive results so that others can build on it. There is a small significant negative correlation (r=-.166, p<.001) between trait anxiety and support for war. From the below graph, this relationship appears strongest in moderates (perhaps because they have made up their minds less about war/peace), but is consistent across groups except libertarians.
The straight lines above are linear relationships and the curvy lines are if we allow SPSS to fit a curvy line to the data. There is a semi-consistent result, but the slopes certainly aren't dramatic. I also ran the analysis for Big 5 Neuroticism and the correlation between that and support for war was even smaller (r=-.052) though still negative and significant (p=.004 since there were 3,041 participants vs. 604 in the above graph).
The take home message? I would say that it seems likely that there is an overall slightly negative relationship between general anxiety and general support for war. However, it seems likely (and consistent with previous research) that in a specifically threatening situation, the results might be quite different as the chronically stressed individual might perceive much greater threat and therefore support war in specific threatening cases to a greater degree than a less anxious individual. I hope to have more to report on this in the future as to what these cases look like and I'd welcome any comments pointing to other relevant research as it's something I'm learning about.
- Ravi Iyer
Religion does not cause racism, but group morality may underlie both.
One of the professors at my university co-authored a recent meta-analysis which found that there is a relatively robust correlation between religiosity and racism. It's hard to dispute the methodology of the study, which included 55 studies with over 20,000 people. Still, I can't help but cringe at what take home message people might get from reading about this study. I can see non-religious schadenfreude and religious defensiveness resulting from a simplistic assumption that correlation equals causality.
Religion does not cause racism, or at least that's my contention. My hypothesis is that the reason they are correlated is that some people who are naturally group oriented gravitate towards religion. Other people who are group oriented gravitate towards racism. There are a large number of things that being group oriented will lead one to gravitate towards....sports teams, the military, marching bands, boy scouts, etc.. Sometimes people who are group oriented will gravitate towards more than one of these groups and so it is not so surprising that we will see a correlation between racism and membership in any of these groups.
I cannot test this hypothesis directly, but I do have some evidence for this. In their paper, they state that "In our meta-analytic review, the paradox of religious racism was traced to the group-oriented motives that underlie religiosity." From a moral foundation theory perspective, we would expect endorsement of the moral principles of Ingroup Loyalty and Authority to correspond to these group-oriented motives. In our yourmorals.org dataset, we don't have measures of racism, but we do have measures of a related construct, social dominance orientation, which concerns agreement to items like "Inferior groups should stay in their place."
In our data, there is indeed a relationship between higher social dominance orientation scores and being Christian (most of the paper's studies used Christians as their religious group). However, when I control for moral foundation questionnaire scores on the Ingroup Loyalty and Authority dimensions, there is no difference between Christians and Atheists on social dominance orientation. It is hard to visualize regression results which 'control' for other variables, but perhaps the below 2 graphs illustrate this point. Basically, one can see that Christians and Atheists have very similar patterns of social dominance orientation at corresponding levels of group level moral concern. The lines more or less overlap.
If there were a main effect of religious group, we would see the blue line consistently above the green line, indicating that at similar levels of group based moral concern, religious people are still higher on social dominance orientation.
Another way to look at the effect of religion is by self reported religious attendance. Again, if we look at the simple relationship, there is a significant positive (Beta=.098) relationship between religious attendance and social dominance orientation. However, if we control for moral foundation questionnaire scores, the relationship actually becomes negative (Beta=-.040, p=.005), indicating that at similar levels of group level moral concern, religious attendance is actually negatively related to social dominance orientation.
How real are these effects? Will they replicate? Our sample is not necessarily representative of the whole world and social dominance is perhaps a poor proxy for actual racism...but at least in this data set, there does seem to be support for the idea that group level morality explains all of the effects of religion on group level dominance, such that we might find similar effects between any cohesive group and racist attitudes, purely as a function of a desire for group cohesion. All moral concerns are double edged swords and can be virtues (patriotic donations of blood after 9/11) or vices when hypermoralized (e.g. racism toward Middle Easterners after 9/11). From this perspective, the fact that group cohesion and the hypermoralization of group cohesion co-occur is perhaps to be expected.
- Ravi Iyer
A Difference Between Democrats and Republicans – The Effects of Empathy on Political Interest
Below is a simple little graph of yourmorals.org data that I thought would be worth posting. Interest in politics is positively correlated with empathic concern in liberals/democrats and not in conservatives/republicans. It's somewhat self-evident in posts like this, or debates about the role of empathy from either the Democratic or Republican side.
Can this difference be used to the advantage of the Democratic party? Perhaps inspiring empathy in the electorate will motivate liberals to be politically active more than conservatives? and how exactly might one appeal to empathy? Perhaps by pushing poverty reduction programs, increases in foreign non-military aid, or putting a human face on health care reform?
btw, empathic concern is measured using Davis' Interpersonal Reactivity Index which contains questions like "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me." The next obvious step is to manipulate empathy and see if it has any impact on political behavior, or at least on the intention to engage in political behavior, as there is only so much that can be inferred from this correlation. Still, it's a promising research lead with interesting potential applications toward inspiring political interest.
- Ravi Iyer
Separating Pro-Peace from Anti-War Attitudes using Moral Psychology Measures
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.
Methland by Nick Reding: Moral Maximizing and the Drug War
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.
United States Gross Domestic Product vs. Gross National Happiness
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.
What the positive psychology approach can learn from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided
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.
Does gratitude promote a sense of fairness and equality?
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.
Gratitude Video from Conan O’Brien and Louis CK
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
Louis CK “Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy” - Watch more Sports Videos at Vodpod.
Democrats and Republicans agree that Justice & Fairness are about Equity, not Equality or Impartiality
I was browsing CNN today and I decided to expand my moral imagination by watching Glenn Beck Speak at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting. I was surprised how reasonable his message sounded to me, as I my previous impression of him was not good.
I believe that people should be able to get what they deserve too. I don't begrudge small businesses who succeed through hard work. I appreciate hard work as much as anyone. Does that mean that I should switch parties?
None of my posts would be complete without a graph, so I decided to look at some of our data on justice and fairness from yourmorals.org. Below is a graph of how various ideologies would view changing a hypothetical allocation of a reward from ambiguous toward the use of some specific type of justice or fairness.
Equity concerns giving more to those who contribute more. Equality concerns making the distribution more equal. Need concerns giving more to those who need it more. Open information concerns making sure everyone understands the process. Equal voice concerns allowing everyone an equal say in how to make the allocation. Retribution concerns giving less reward to those who violate some relevant group norm. Higher bars indicate that making a change toward that principle is more desirable.
What did I learn from this graph? Liberals do care more about equality and need than conservatives and conservatives do care more about equity and retribution. However, both liberals and conservatives (and libertarians) find an equity based distribution (e.g. "Suppose the company instituted a way of quantifying each employee's contributions, and it then adjusted the bonuses up or down accordingly") to be more desirable to an equal distribution (e.g. "Suppose the company divided the money such that each employee received an equal share.") This somewhat captures how I feel about things. I care about people getting what they deserve, but perhaps I am willing to consider equality and need in some situations as well.
Below is another graph using different participants, which concerns endorsement of abstract principles rather than hypothetical allocations and again, we see that the proportionality principle (e.g. "Whether or not those who contribute more are rewarded more") is deemed most important.
The take home message for Democrats? Stop letting Republicans define policy as choices between equity and equality/need. Nobody is trying to stop small businesses from succeeding...few people want a completely equal society.
Rather, let's see if people are really getting what they deserve in life. Do investment bankers really deserve million dollar bonuses? I don't think they necessarily produce much more than many, and obviously in the past few years, their collective output has been negative. So I see taxing banks to recoup losses as a matter of equity/proportionality, not equality.
How about the working poor who work hard and then are bankrupted by a single medical expense? What percentage of Americans actually make enough money to pay for a chronic illness? We all need health care that doesn't go away when we get really sick and need to use it. So maybe health care isn't a right, but how can one argue with making sure the working poor and children all have health care? Does Glenn Beck's father, who owned a bakery and therefore would have immense trouble buying health care without a large risk pool, deserve health care less than those investment bankers who drove the economy into the ground with high risk derivatives? If not, maybe we should do something about that.
Democrats should welcome a debate about how to really give people what they deserve in life.
- Ravi Iyer