World vs. Country focus for Obama vs. McCain supporters

18Sep/08

World vs. Country focus for Obama vs. McCain supporters

These results aren't really surprising, but Obama and McCain supporters have different ideas about who they identify with, based on Sam McFarland's Identification with All Humanity Scale.

Specifically, those who plan to vote for McCain identify most with their country while those who plan to vote for Obama identify most with the world as a whole.

More interesting is the fact that Obama supporters have a relatively flat identification pattern where they are a bit more identified with all people in the world vs. people in their country while McCain supporters have over a full point difference (on a 5 pt. scale) between their identification with their country vs. their identification with people all over the world (3.7 vs. 2.6).

Below are the results...

I wanted to explore the results a bit further, so I looked at differences within self identified conservatives based on whether they are slightly, moderately, or very conservative. As you can see below, the more conservative one gets, the greater one identifies with one's country and the less one identifies with the world.

The question that comes to my mind is:

Why is it necessary to have this tradeoff between loving one's country and identifiying with people of all kinds?

And lastly, as a comparison, here are the results for liberals. It seems like the main difference for extreme liberals is greater concern for the world as a whole.

Comments

comments

Filed under: moral psychology, political psychology, yourmorals.org Leave a comment

Old Comments (4) Trackbacks (0)

Jon Haidt
September 22nd, 2008 - 08:23

Ravi,
i’d suggest that the reason for the tradeoff is that conservatives believe in lower level groupings and mid-level institutions, whereas liberals tend to be universalists — they positively dislike subgroupings. They think more abstractly, and want a clean overarching system to address problems. I don’t think one can be a universalist and also root passionately for the home team.
Jon Haidt
Sam McFarland
October 27th, 2008 - 11:38

Ravi, what does the green line in the first graph represent? Jon, I agree strongly with your comment. I have admired your work on moral intuitions, but think I found a different kind. I asked students to complete my “Identification with all humanity scale,” then asked them to do it a second time as they thought “the most mature and most moral person” they could imagine would complete it. Their IWAHS scores shot way up. Somehow, they intuited that “moral and mature” individuals would identify more with all humanity than they did, themselves. I would like to tease out why.
Sam McFarland (sam.mcfarland@wku.edu)
Robert Sommers
October 28th, 2008 - 11:08

Ravi – what are we calling the green bar group in the uppermost graph? Is this an undecided group or a different entity?

Robert
Ravi
April 23rd, 2009 - 14:30

The green represents my results on the scale as the site allows users to compare their results (in green) to the average results for liberals and conservatives.