2010 February | Data Science & Psychology

20Feb/10

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

Tagged as: equality, equity, fairness, functional justice, glenn beck, proportionality 4 Comments

17Feb/10

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

Tagged as: racism, religion, social dominance orientation 3 Comments

12Feb/10

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

Tagged as: conservatives, difference between democrats and republicans, empathy, interest in politics, liberals, political behavior, political interest 5 Comments