do you know if there is any evidence that conservatives would be more upset (defined loosely) by a guilty person getting away with a crime than by an innocent person being convicted of a crime? and would it be the opposite for liberals?

None of us could come up with a ready answer of a published study to this effect (feel free to let me know of one and I'll add it here), so I thought it would be useful to share a quick analysis of a few YourMorals.org questions that help answer this question.

The below question was asked on a 7 point scale, meaning that liberals (and libertarians) generally agree that it is better to let 10 people go free than to convict one innocent person, while conservatives are somewhat torn given a 10-1 scenario.

Another way to ask this question is to ask how wrong it would feel for a criminal to go unpunished.  Again, we see a similar result where liberals and libertarians are less punishment oriented, while conservatives feel it would be more wrong.  This is perhaps a gut-level intuitive rationale for the above graph.

Everyone agrees that we should punish the guilty (indeed, everyone is above the midpoint on the above scale) and free the innocent.  The issue is that we operate in an uncertain world and some kinds of errors bother some people more than other errors.

I believe a similar asymmetry drives the differences between Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.  Most people will admit that there are lazy people who take advantage of government generosity (e.g. the prototypical welfare queen) and that there are poor people who work hard and encounter a disaster that is out of their control and deserve help (e.g. the guy who works 2 jobs that don't provide health care, and gets a chronic disease).  The question is which case bothers you most.

Similarly, there are cases of wealthy people who clearly deserve their wealth and who create wealth for others (e.g. Steve Jobs) and there are cases of wealthy people who game the system and create negative wealth for others (e.g. the aggressive mortgage bankers of the sub-prime crisis).  Is it worse to unfairly tax Steve Jobs or unfairly let the bankers keep their windfall of ill-gotten rewards?  There is no right answer to this.  I would submit that in such uncertain circumstances, we all let our intuitions lead our moral thinking, and hence we see the strong divisions we see in society.  Personally, I think it's a good thing (that the conversation is had, though not that it gets so personal and uncivil), as society needs a healthy balance between punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent.

- Ravi Iyer

I ran the same survey at yourmorals.org, and the results are similar to the original study, with some important differences (see graph below).  Importantly, the % of people who chose a world of relative income was smaller than in the original study, where 50% of participants chose relative position.  Perhaps people at Harvard are simply more competitive?  Mean scores are quite variable in different non-representative samples, so I wouldn't put much stock in them, but perhaps more interesting is that the relationship between variables replicates.  Our results converge with the idea that some goods are more positional than others.  Specifically, the same things that people thought were more appropriate to think of in relative terms in the original study (praise and attractiveness) were thought to be relative in our sample, with vacation time being the least relative good.  The graph below shows questions in rough decreasing order of concern about relative position.

Our data suggests that some people think of things as more relative than others.  Cronbach's alpha for the items in the graph was .80, meaning that answers positively correlate and it is reasonable to think of answers to these diverse questions as all representing some general underlying preference for relative or absolute position.

Interestingly, it appears that conservatives care more about relative position compared to both liberals and libertarians.  Perhaps this converges with the idea that conservatives have a more competitive orientation, leading to positive beliefs about competitive markets and competitive sports, both of which are found in our data as well.

The current data is based on 5,795 participants (3,559 liberals, 632 conservatives, 569 libertarians, and 1,035 others) who took this survey.  This means that aside from political orientation, we could look at other factors that are associated with preference for relative or absolute goods.  For example, concern for positional goods is negatively correlated with Big 5-Agreeableness (r=-.13, p<.001), Openness to Experience (r=-.09, p<.001), and positively correlated with Neuroticism (r=.07, p<.001).  These are very modest correlations made significant by the sample size that took both measures (3,844).  If other people have ideas for personality variables that may explain why some people prefer relative vs. absolute goods, please leave a comment with your ideas.

- Ravi Iyer

To test this idea, I thought I'd look at the data from the Good Self Scale from yourmorals.org.  In it, participants are asked how important it is to have various traits, and one of them happens to be "funny".  If you look at the below graph, you'll see that liberals do indeed place a tiny bit more value on being funny, compared to others (p<.01 comparing liberals to non-liberals).

It is important to note that this does not mean that liberals are indeed funnier, but rather that they place a value on being funny.  The results seem plausible given that the rest of the results conform to previous research (e.g. conservatives care about loyalty more and care about being more responsible).  Some observations:

• All groups are above the midpoint (2.5) of the scale for all traits, except for libertarians and their valuation of being generous, outgoing, and sympathetic.  Instead, libertarians score high on being intellectual and logical.
• Moderates actually score highest in terms of valuing fairness and honesty.  A very interesting finding.
• Liberals, in addition to wanting to be funny, also want to be creative, kind, sympathetic, and almost as intellectual as libertarians.
• Conservatives value being responsible, loyal, and honest (comparable to moderates for honesty).

In all, these are fair descriptions of these ideological groups, and given that the other relationships are reasonable, I would conclude that it's also reasonable to say that liberals likely do place more value on being funny than other ideological groups.  Whether they succeed or not is another question.

- Ravi Iyer

In contrast, Sarah Palin was perturbed that "We get in the back of the bus and wait for NATO, we wait for the French."  Newt Gingrich said that when Obama stated that Gaddafi has to go, "he pitted the prestige and power of the United States against a dictator who's been anti-American for over 40 years."   Conservative Charles Krauthammer believes that Obama is "overly modest about his country" at a time when "the world is hungry for America to lead".

Does it really matter if we are perceived to be leading or following and does every desire the President expresses have to come true, lest we are diminished?  A belief certainly isn't wrong just because I don't share it.  There are many things that people value more than me (e.g. etiquette or aesthetics) that are nevertheless important in the world.  However, what puzzles me about calls for the US to lead in Libya is that I don't necessarily understand the underlying value differences that drive this.  What do we get for being the "leader" in Libya?  Would it be so bad to let the French bear the cost and risk involved?

I don't have a good empirical answer for this, but I did examine some value differences in our yourmorals dataset that I wanted to share, in part because certain hypotheses I had are demonstrably wrong.  Below is a graph of how much conservatives, liberals, and libertarians value humility, influence, social power, and authority from the Schwartz Values scale in our dataset.  The overall average bars are the average across all values on the scale, indicating that none of these values overly important in any group.  Still, these differences may play a role in the underlying psychology of geo-political leadership.

Perhaps blinded by my liberal bias, I thought one possibility was that liberals believe in humility more than conservatives and/or perhaps conservatives have a greater desire to be influential.  Surprisingly, though probably not to conservative readers, some of whom likely share Krauthammer's belief that liberals are immodest, conservatives in our dataset value humility more than liberals and both groups value being influential fairly evenly.  The belief that the US should lead does not appear to be a function of conservatives lacking modesty about our country or wanting to wield influence in the world.

Conservatives do report valuing being in positions of authority and having social power more than liberals.  One hypothesis that is possible,  is that conservatives might believe that it would be a bad thing if the US had less power and authority in the world, as these are things which they value more than liberals.  Some people may get a sense of power and authority from being associated with a powerful and authoritative country.  From that perspective, it might make sense to want the US to take a leadership position, even if it does result in a higher tax bill and more risk.

Of course, bear in mind that I haven't actually connected these values to any attitudes toward Libya, and these results may only hold for the types of educated internet users that tend to visit our website.  Still, this was informative to me for the hypothesis that this rules out, as it seems unlikely that pride is driving calls for the US to lead intervention in Libya amongst conservatives, given that liberals may actually be more prone to pride.  The desire for our country to remain in a prestigious position of power and authority is a more likely candidate and perhaps underlies the desire to see us play a leading role in Libya.

I would welcome any other hypotheses or ideas, especially from conservatives who do feel that it is important that the US take a leadership role in whatever we do.  Why do you feel this is this important to you?  What am I possibly missing?  Perhaps those thoughts would help me design a more conclusive study.  In addition, I'm going to start monitoring my own levels of modesty.

- Ravi Iyer

This is basically common sense, but the interesting part is when we combine the model with research suggesting that conservatives are more likely than liberals to react to threats and avoid negative outcomes, suggesting that in the first decision box, even given the same facts, conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe that scarce resources(e.g. the budget deficit) are likely to lead to ruin and therefore cut public assistance.  For example, this  might explain why a recent Pew Research Poll found that Republicans feel that the deficit is a bigger economic priority than adding more jobs (37% vs 22%), while the numbers were reversed for Democrats (41% think jobs is the most important economic concern vs. 15% for the deficit).

Further, when you get to the second decision box (appraising deservingness), conservatives are more likely to attribute success and failure to internal-controllable causes vs. liberals.  For example, this is a graph of yourmorals.org data and you'll notice that conservatives are more likely to attribute their success at work and in relationships to effort (an internal-controllable trait) versus ability (internal, but not necessarily controllable) or context/luck (external).  This attributional divide has been documented in other published research.

When you combine these two factors, it is no surprise that liberals and conservatives have very different ideas about a social safety net.  Each group may be psychologically predisposed to believing in more or less scarcity and more or less personal responsibility for outcomes, even given the same information about the world.

These dispositions may actually also cause people to be more liberal or conservative, or to support such policies, as research on mortality salience has succeeded in increasing support for conservative candidates.  There is a lack of research on causes of liberalism, but anecdotally, Michael Moore recently told a liberal audience that "America is not broke." and in my anecdotal experience of religion, one of the main principles of many liberal churches is the idea that we need to think of the world as full of abundance, not scarcity.  The ironic thing is that just when people need help most (conditions of scarcity) and Keynesian economics would suggest we should spend more, the psychology of the situation predisposes us to be less generous.  Of course, that's from my liberal point of view, where I'm predisposed to such beliefs.

- Ravi Iyer

ps If anyone knows of studies where an abundance mentality leads to liberal beliefs, I'd love to hear from you.

First, you can see that within the yourmorals dataset, liberals appear more neurotic than conservatives regardless of the question that is asked.

This even extends to asking about symptoms in the recent past.  The questions here are how often the participant has experienced "Being suddenly scared for no reason", "Spells of terror or panic", or "Feeling fearful" in the past 7 days, though the effect is tiny.

It appears that the effect is robust across questions.  Our sample is not representative of the broader US, but in this instance, this may be instructive.  Liberals may be more neurotic than conservatives within certain groups.  Our data is a large enough sample that it likely represents a sizable group of people, and it is possible that there is something peculiar to the kind of people who visit yourmorals that makes our liberals more neurotic than our conservatives.   As a broader test of this idea, I thought I'd examine those participants who visit yourmorals from sites like the New York Times or Edge, versus those who find yourmorals.org via search engines (e.g. searching for 'morality quiz'), with the idea that the NY Times and Edge readers are more like our core audience (people especially interested in social science).

Here is the graph by question for those who find us via search engines:

And here is the graph for those who find us via the New York Times and Edge.org.

It may be self-evident from the graphs, but put another way, the correlation between neuroticism and liberal-conservative identification (1-7) is -.03 (n=1634, p=.22) for those who find us via search engines, -.08 (n=7129, p<.001) in New York Times readers, and -.13 (n=2382, p<.001) for those who find us via Edge.org.  Overall, the correlation is -.08 (n=35,793, p<.001).

To me, this supports the idea that there is something peculiar about the kind of liberal that reads the New York Times or visits Edge.org or a site like YourMorals.org.  Perhaps the common thread here is the idea that these are people who are searching for answers in life.  It somewhat converges with this paper by Napier & Jost, where they find that liberals are less happy than conservatives, a finding that replicates in our data and has been found by others, and they found that this relationship is explained by the liberal un-acceptance of inequality.  It seems somewhat implausible that liberals walk around consciously thinking about inequality a lot.  But perhaps the inability to accept inequality is part of a general questioning of the way things are and what the larger meaning of things is, which inevitably leads to anxiety about why things are not 'better'.  I cannot show that with data, but I can say that, as a liberal, this rings true for me.  My search for meaning and desire to create change inevitably lead me to anxiety producing situations when I try to swim against a tide.  And yet it's a tradeoff I continue to be willing to make.

- Ravi Iyer

However, Tony Hsieh's book is clearly about something more than business.  I recently saw him speak at the Miliken Institute in Los Angeles and the last 10 minutes of his talk could have been from a class we teach at USC, the Science of Happiness.  In fact, I think the introduction to that series of slides was entitled the Science of Happiness and Delivering Happiness has a healthy dose of psychological research on happiness in it.  His basic thesis is that if he makes his employees happy, they will in turn be able to authentically make customers happy, which will allow Zappos' brand, which is all about "WOW"-ing consumers (and suppliers actually).  For example, Zappos surprise upgrades shipping for customers and tries to pay for dinner when dining with suppliers, who normally have to woo their clients.  Zappos actively seeks to hire and fire employees based on their 10 core values, in order to maintain a happy harmonious workforce that can deliver happiness.

Hsieh gives a very succinct view of happiness/positive psychology research in his talks in a far more interesting manner than most psychologists, but there is one bit of new research that I bet he would be interested in.  Specifically, more and more research is showing that people who buy experiences are happier than people who buy objects.  In the book itself, Hsieh explicitly talks about his preference for experiences over objects.

From p.76 & p.106 respectively -

"ever since selling linkexchange, I'd committed to living by the philosophy that experiences were much more important to me than material things.  Most people assumed that I would have gone out and bought a fancy and expensive car, but I was content with my Acura Integra."

(re: visiting Africa when it might not be financially the best decision) - "For me, summiting the tallest mountain of a continent was one of those things that I wanted to check off my list of things to do at some point in my life.  It went with my life philosophy of valuing experiences over things."

In collaboration with Ryan Howell and Paulina Pchelin at San Francisco State, we've been developing a measure of experiential buying.  In validating that measure, we've found that happiness->less materialistic values->experiential buying->more happiness.  Conversely, neuroticism->more materialistic values->less experiential buying->less happiness.  The simple correlational pattern indicated that those who were more approach oriented were more experiential, while those who are more avoidance oriented are more materialistic in terms of the purchasing styles.

I've since extended this model in looking at the relationship between values and experiential buying.  Consider the below graph and notice that liberals (in blue) prefer experiences over possessions compared to conservatives (in red), who value experiences and possessions more equally.  Libertarians also prefer experiences to possessions.

In further analysis, these differences were mediated fully by differences in values between liberals and conservatives.  Specifically, liberals valued experiences due to their valuation of stimulation (using the Schwartz Values Scale), while conservatives' relative preference for material objects was mediated by endorsement of power.  I subsequently experimentally manipulated values by having participants recall a low or high power situation (based on the idea that people of low power will seek power and work by Dacher Keltner that high power->stimulation).  Sure enough, having people recall low power situations leads to more materialistic buying, while recalling high power situations leads to more experiential buying (preliminary graph below).

These results mirror what Tony Hsieh talks about concerning his values.  He is a more approach than avoidant oriented, per this quote from p.103:

My plan was to take almost everything that I had left in my name and liquidate it in a fire sale.  I would bet the farm and put all the proceeds into Zappos.

And he thought of his possessions as a means toward stimulation, rather than power or security.  From p.115...

selling the party loft symbolized the end of an era for me. It was hard not to feel wistful and nostalgic.  The loft had created so many experiences and memories for so many people.

Of course, it's easier to think about stimulation rather than power, when you've made millions in your 20s.  But perhaps it explains some of the Zappos culture which includes approach/stimulation oriented statements like "Embrace and Drive Change", "Create Fun and a Little Weirdness", "Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded", and "Pursue Growth and Learning".  One of Zappos' core values ("Be Humble") seems almost the opposite of power.  Perhaps the key to Zappos' success is that its culture is conducive to selling shoes as experiences, rather than possessions.

- Ravi Iyer

The most classic case of perverse motivation and moral hazard is the case of Wing Chau, who "was making $140,000 a year managing a portfolio for the New York Life Insurance Company.  In one year as a CDO manager, he'd taken home $26 million." (p.142)  For what was he paid?  CDO's are the instruments that allowed people to bet on the housing market.  Wing Chau's clients, pension funds that only looked at the AAA ratings these instruments got from rating agencies (more on this moral hazard later), lost a ton of money, but Chau himself was "paid a fee of .01 percent off the top, before any of his investors saw a dime, and another, similar fee, off the bottom...His goal, he explained, was to maximize the dollars in his care."  Simple put, he was paid on volume, not on performance.  This may seem odd, but other such situations exist.  Real estate agents also get paid largely on volume, as they don't get you a higher price, but do make more money the more homes they can sell quickly.  Loan originators, such as New Century (p.169) or Countrywide, had similar incentives as they made loans and sold them, making them indifferent as to whether the borrower could actually be paid back.

The ratings agencies themselves get paid on the volume of bonds they rate.  "Moody's...revenues had boomed, from $800 million in 2001 to $2.03 billion in 2006.  Some huge percentage of the increase...flowed from the arcane end of the home finance sector, known as structured finance.  The surest way to attract structured finance business was to accept the assumptions of the structured finance industry."   Pension funds often have rules that state that they can only invest in bonds that have high enough ratings, but how useful are these ratings likely to be given that the companies that create these bonds pay the agencies to rate them.  It's the same practice that incentivized Arthur Anderson to "audit" Enron, with the fees paid by Enron, with similarly disastrous consequences for those who believed in such audits.

Still, some CEOs are paid based on the performance of their companies.  Are those incentives enough to create a lack of moral hazard?  The book gives many instances where there is still much moral hazard, as individuals have lots of upside, but very little risk.  If the company makes money, they make millions.  If the company loses money, then maybe they find a new job, but they lose nothing.  Consider the tale of Howie Hubler, whose group was at one time responsible for 20 percent of Morgan Stanley's profits.  He was paid $25 million a year, but was "no longer happy working as an ordinary bond trader.  The best and the brightest Wall Street traders are quitting their big firms to work at hedge funds, where they can make not tens but hundreds of millions."   Morgan Stanley made a deal with Hubler to pay him a lot more money, whereupon he subsequently lost $9 billion.  Hubler appears to have been honest, but mistaken, and now runs a company where the slogan "100% of the shots you don't take don't go in". That makes perfect rational sense.  If you go to a casino and earn 10% of the winnings and lose 0% of the losses, you can make a lot of money just by making bigger and bigger bets.

Having limited risk, but huge potential gain means that even the dumbest individual can make money.  Based on performance, Hubler's previous gains weren't necessarily due to skill, but rather to circumstance.  Steve Eisman, a central character in the book who foresaw the collapse "got himself invited to a meeting with the CEO of Bank of America, Ken Lewis.  'I was sitting there listening to him.  I had an epiphany.  I said to myself, 'Oh my God, he's dumb!''  They shorted Bank of America along with UBS, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and a few others." (p. 174)   Dumb is perhaps too strong a word, but it seems self-evident that money managers are rewarded as if they are better at money management than they actually are.  There is a psychological dimension to this.  Both liberals and conservatives attribute their success in work life to ability and effort more than luck or circumstance.  Conservatives and libertarians (likely a majority of those who read the Wall St. Journal) are slightly more likely to attribute success to effort and less likely to attribute it to context.  Below is a graph of our YourMorals data, which mirrors previous research.

Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around for creating moral hazards.  Conservatives tend to focus on government organizations like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as well as the government officials that do not let firms fail, creating a moral hazard as firms no longer suffer the consequences of their actions.  In contrast, many liberals might focus on the moral hazard created by executive compensation packages given to upper management.  This blame bias mirrors this psychology study, where Scott Morgan et. al, show that attributions are influenced by one's feelings for the groups involved.  As shown below in our yourmorals data, conservatives feel warmer toward upper management, while liberals feel warmer toward government officials.

Both types of moral hazard are evident in The Big Short, and perhaps we as a society, can work to reduce moral hazards for both companies (e.g. let them fail) and individuals (e.g. proportional risk/reward in compensation).  Or Barry Schwartz articulates another, perhaps idealistic answer, in this video: that we need people who are less motivated by incentives and more motivated by wisdom.

- Ravi Iyer

Some question the motivations of NPR executives or Stewart based on their audience, but what if something more basic is going on.  Perhaps the concept of non-partisanship, conflict avoidance, and compromise is inherently appealing to liberal sensibilities.  This can be framed as both a positive or negative trait, as being extremely conflict avoidant could relate to appeasing one's enemies or being a moral relativist.  Some in the press have observed that "An endorsement of civility and reason is basically an endorsement of Barack Obama. 'Reason and civility' are practically the Democratic party's platform."  Perhaps anyone with the motivation to promote reason and civility in politics would necessarily attract a liberal audience, regardless of how truly non-partisan one intended to be.

What psychological traits might relate to being conflict avoidant?  The most obvious trait is Agreeableness, one of the Big Five dimensions of personality, depicted in the below graph of yourmorals.org data.  As you can see, liberals do score slightly higher on measures of Agreeableness, which includes questions like not finding "fault with others" and being "generally trusting".

The effect size is fairly small though, so it might help to find some convergent evidence.  I did find this paper, where a nationally representative sample was asked if people "try to avoid getting into political discussions because they can be unpleasant, whether they enjoy discussing politics even though it sometimes leads to arguments, or whether they are somewhere in between."  There was a small, but significant correlation (r=.07) between being conflict tolerant and being Republican and a smaller, but insignificant correlation (r=.03) between being conflict avoidant and being a Democrat.  This paper cites 6 instances where Agreeableness is negatively linked to conservativism, but also 2 instances where it is positively linked.  It seems like there may be a link between being agreeable overall and being liberal (again, with both positive and negative connotations), but the link is certainly weaker than other effects (e.g. openness to experience or conscientiousness).  Perhaps whatever effect exists due to differences in Agreeableness may be magnified by lower liberal perceptions of ingroup/outgroup distinctions, leading to reduced willingness to engage in conflict with out-groups, as conservatives have heightened concerns about constructs like group loyalty.

So far the data I have and research I've looked at doesn't yet paint a decisive picture as to why liberals disproportionately seem to rally around civility.  I need to do more research on this and would welcome ideas that might yield cleaner data.  Perhaps conservative critics are correct and the problem is the source of the message, but there does appear to be some intrinsic psychological mechanism at work that makes Fox News popular with conservatives, while liberals prefer an ostensibly neutral NPR to a more obviously partisan MSNBC.

- Ravi Iyer

From a political psychology perspective, one fact about Warren Buffett is particularly interesting.  He has a liberal position, obviously contrary to his self-interest, on the estate tax.  From p.596 of my edition of his book:

He liked to compare his tax rate to his secretary's, pointing out how
unjust it was that she paid a higher tax rate on her income than he
did, just because most of his income came from investing.  Having
already angered all the plutocrats and would-be plutocrats, but with
his credibility at a peak in other quarters, Buffett vowed to carry on
the fight against repeal of the estate tax, and would spin on this
subject for years.

Not only is this position contrary to his self-interest, but from the book, one might infer that he is low on openness to experience and high on conscientiousness, two traits which have been found to be central to ideological preferences, with Buffett's pattern being opposite to most liberals.  As an example, Buffet is described as unable to eat foreign foods, preferring plain hamburgers, consistent with low openness to experience scores (e.g. liberals are more adventurous eaters).  He is famously conscientious in terms of his business dealings.  Below is yourmorals data relating these personality traits to ideology, replicating the study linked above.

From reading the book, my answer to the above question would be that Buffett is also very high on empathic concern, which might logically be related to agreeableness in the above graph, where you might notice that liberals score a bit higher.  Answers to questions like "I would describe myself as a pretty soft hearted person" correlate highly (r=.5) with agreeableness scores and with liberal identification (r=-.2, 1-7 lib-con).  Buffett is not a social person in the book, but he does care about the people around him a great deal, a realization that appears to ever more salient as he gets older and mortality is a more salient concern.  Perhaps it is this empathic concern that leads him to be more liberal on tax policy, while other wealthy individuals actively fight the estate tax.  Some research indicates that the primacy of ensuring economic growth versus caring for others, both noble goals that sometimes conflict, is central to notions of distributive justice.  Buffett may have fewer productivity goals compared to other CEOs, as his investing has the feel of a game that he loves, rather than a job.

Finally, I'd like to share one last tangientially related quote from the final pages of the book, which I found especially wise, more wise than his investment advice actually.  I do recommend the whole book.

People ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to
go to work for whom they admire the most,  It's crazy to take little
in-between jobs just because they look good on your resume.  That's
like saving sex for your old age.  Do what you love and work for whom
you admire the most, and you've given yourself the best chance in life
you can.

- Ravi Iyer