I had to do a presentation relating some of my current work on yourmorals.org to some of the history of moral psychology and in doing so, I created this graph. It doesn’t include all the respondents on yourmorals.org as we changed our politics measure at one point and this graph only represents our newest subjects. Still, it’s interesting as it confirms elements of the 5 foundation theory using a well validated measure (the Schwartz Values Scale) which has been previously used on representative samples of thousands across various cultures.
Notable results, IMHO, are that conservatives appear to value power, tradition, conformity, and security more than liberals. Liberals appear to value universality and stimulation more and to a lesser degree self direction and hedonism. All of these results seem to confirm conventional wisdom. From a liberal perspective, the fact that conservatives score as highly (or even a bit higher, though I’m not sure if the difference is statistically significant yet) on benevolence is perhaps surprising….but only to liberals…:)
btw, the green bar represents my scores and obviously I’ve interpreted the scale instructions differently than most…or else I just don’t value anything…
January 17th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
This does not surprise me. In fact, Schwartz’s Values Typology allows for differentiation between the social and fiscal conservatives (with former scoring higher on CONFORMITY-TRADITION-SECURITY dimension, and latter ranking higher POWER-ACHIEVEMENT values), and can bring out interesting division between 2 types of liberals: “hippies” (HEDONISM, STIMULATION, SELF-DIRECTION) and more regular liberals (ranking higher Self-Direction and Universalism). Benevolence always clang better with traditional values, both in multi-dimensional space and common sense, but in general it always has bee a very vague construct (although idea to differentiate between caring for all people, universalism, and caring for only those you know, benevolence, is absolutely great).