Moral Foundations: The New York Times vs. Andrew Sullivan
Over the past year, I've gotten involved in research on moral psychology and it's political implications, specifically working with a theory put forth by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham at the University of Virginia called the moral foundations theory. You can read more about it here.
The main idea is that there are a finite number of moral areas that people can care about (the exact number is still to be determined, but 5 is the current number). Liberals care about harm and fairness. Conservatives care about those 2 and in addition, care about group loyalty, authority, and purity. Understanding these differences will hopefully lead to more civil dialogue.
Anyways, their wonderful work is getting noticed and together with collaborators at the University of California-Irvine (Pete Ditto and Sena Koleva), we put together a website at YourMorals.org to collect data on this theory.
Recently, this article was published in the New York Times and this reference to this article was published by Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic. As someone who enjoys playing with data, I thought it would be interesting to compare people who took the moral foundations quiz via the New York Times vs. those who came from Andrew Sullivan's blog (who should be largely Libertarian). The results of this are below (green = me).
Not the most exciting graph as I thought there might be more differences. Andrew Sullivan's audience should skew largely libertarian while the New York Times audience should be largely liberal. Haidt's theory is largely focused on social issues, so it's actually somewhat unsurprising in retrospect that Sullivan's audience and the Times audience score similarly.
Always looking for another reason to distract myself from "real" work, I decided to compare Libertarians vs. Liberals vs. Conservatives on the same quiz.
As one might have guessed, Libertarians do indeed score similar to Liberals with perhaps a slightly lower emphasis on the harm and fairness foundations (they actually score very similarly to conservatives there...and if you believe in this small difference, Sullivan's audience looks more liberal than libertarian). I'm actually somewhat skeptical that "fairness" means the same thing to liberals and libertarians and so I'm developing a scale to test that which will run at yourmorals.org soon. Specifically, it seems likely that liberals will endorse equality, the idea that everyone should receive an equal share of the pie, while libertarians will endorse equity, the idea that people who bake the pie should eat the pie, as the "fairest" way to divide a pie. Stay tuned.