...there are two big incentives that drive behavior at the intersection where politics meets media. One is public attention. The other is money. Experience shows there’s lots more of both to be had by engaging in extreme partisan behavior.

Fox News has soared on the strength of commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, both of whom fanned the Sherrod story on the strength of the misleading Breitbart video. (A Fox senior executive, by contrast, urged the news side of the operation to get Sherrod’s response before going with the story, The Washington Post reported.) On the left, MSNBC is trying to emulate the success of primetime partisanship. Meanwhile, CNN, which has largely strived toward a neutral ideological posture, is battling steady relative declines in its audience.

If media executives hunger for ratings, politicians hunger for campaign cash and fame.

Obama put it best earlier this year, after Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “you lie” during the president's State of the Union speech. "The easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude,” the president told ABC News.

Indeed, at first Wilson seemed embarrassed and apologized for his outburst. But within days, Wilson and his opponent were both flooded with campaign contributions; Wilson took in more than $700,000 in the immediate aftermath of his outburst and was a guest of honor on Hannity’s show and Fox News Sunday.

We reward politicians and news organizations, with our attention and our money, that engage in the very incivility that makes politics so ugly. This is true on both sides of the aisle.

At the recent meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Linda Skitka gave a talk which puts a lot of this in perspective for me. Her lab studies the dark side of moral conviction, which I call hypermoralism in the hope that the term catches on. Roy Baumeister studies a similar concept, idealistic evil. In Skitka's talk, she demonstrates in a Chinese sample that political intolerance (e.g. "people with different positions than your own about this issue should be allowed to have their phones tapped by the Chinese government") and social intolerance (e.g. "How willing would you be to have someone who did not share your views on this issue as a close personal friend?") were best predicted by moral conviction (e.g. "To what extent are your feelings about this issue or policy based on your fundamental beliefs about right and wrong?").  When controlling for moral conviction, all other variables (e.g. demographics, political position, attitude importance, and attitude strength) were all insignificant predictors of social and political intolerance. I look forward to seeing how this replicates on a US sample and how political intolerance is operationalized. Perhaps something along the lines of liberal consideration of censoring Fox news or conservative publication of what many would consider private discussion would make good operationalizations of political intolerance as they mirror what we see in reality, where considerations of privacy, context, and free speech are considered secondary to partisanship. Moral conviction may underlie the hyperpartisanship that Politico talks about.

Hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism may be another instance of the effects of what evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett calls "Supernormal Stimuli". As the Wall Street Journal writes about her book:

As Ms. Barrett notes, modern life surrounds us with supernormal stimuli. An example: Humans evolved strong tastes for fats and sweets, tastes that conferred a reproductive advantage in the days when starvation was common. But these tastes can be a burden when we're confronted with such supernormal stimuli as the 400-calorie Frappuccino at Starbucks. An evolutionary adaptation that once promised survival is more likely nowadays to produce Type 2 diabetes.

Ms. Barrett pushes her thesis too far at times, but her plain-spoken disquisition makes a strong case that supernormal stimuli "can help us understand the problems of modern civilization."

One might even argue that supernormal stimuli—or perhaps our reactions to them—are the biggest problems faced by affluent societies.

In the case of hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism, our evolved moral senses, which allow human beings to cooperate, are now subject to the stimulus which is the 24 hour news cycle and the non-stop political campaign. Moral emotions are powerful forces, which are now activated routinely, rather than rarely.

If anybody has ideas on how to escape this cycle, I would love to hear them. Humanizing and getting to know the opposition, along the lines of intergroup contact theory, is an idea. Perhaps moral emotions can be activated against hyperpartisanship itself, rather than against individual ideologies. Or maybe with greater understanding, we can all learn to recognize supernormal moral stimuli and give them less power in our lives. Ideas welcome and I'm open to operationalizing particularly promising ideas as studies to be run on yourmorals.org.

- Ravi Iyer

Harris correctly observes that "the only people who seem to generally agree with me (Harris) and who think that there are right or wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues, of one form or another, and of course they think there are right and wrong answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind, not because they made an intelligent analysis of the conditions of human and animal well-being...the demagogues are right about one thing, we need a universal conception of moral values."

His conception of morality is remarkably close to the construct of moral absolutism vs. moral relativism, measured on the YourMorals.org site using agreement to statements like "Different types of moralities cannot be compared as to 'rightness'" with agreement indicating more absolutism and disagreement indicating relativism. Harris also states that "It is possible for whole cultures to care about the wrong things....that reliably lead to human suffering." The graphs I show below show that he is correct that moral absolutism among these groups does lead to human suffering...but it also leads to suffering when moral absolutism is supported by liberals and atheists.

Harris then spends much of the rest of the talk detailing how terrible things occur as a result of cultures that do not share his values. I am generally liberal and likely agree with Harris' values, specifically the idea that morality is mostly about promoting the well-being of people. However, I do not believe that my values should be the values of other people as well. I have two main counters to this idea:

- Even the most liberal person can be made to consider ideas of morality outside of the idea of the greatest well-being possible.  For example, liberals believe in equity too, such that some people deserve more well-being than others. Jon Haidt's brother-sister incest dilemma confounds both liberals and conservatives meaning that there is a universal ability to moralize disgust, even if it is less developed in some than others. Harm and well-being are not the only considerations.

- Moral absolutism generally leads to more human suffering, not less, as people fight great wars to enforce their vision of morality on others.  Consider the below 2 graphs of yourmorals data relating moral relativism, the opposite of absolutism, and attitudes toward war.

Moral Absolutism relates to Support for War across Religions

Moral Absolutism is related to Support for War - Across Political Groups

Moral absolutism is not just dangerous for the groups that Harris dislikes, but also for the liberal and atheist groups that he likely subscribes to as the slope of the regression line is negative in all cases, indicating that moral absolutism is positively related to support for war for liberals and conservatives, atheists and christians.

It may be easier to think of groups that cause wars out of excessive group orientation (e.g. Hutus vs. Tutsis) or excessive authoritarianism (e.g. Nazis)...but there are also groups that caused harm out of excessive concern for others' well-being (e.g. The Weather Underground) or out of an excessive desire for social equality (e.g. the communist Khmer Rouge). Moral absolutism, believing that you are more right about morality than others, can be thought of as the first step toward hypermoralism, harming others in support of your moral principles. Human beings are already good at believing that our moral system is superior, with war sometimes as the consequence....instead or narrowing our conceptions of morality, we should be working to expand our moral imaginations.

- Ravi Iyer

There is lots of psychological research on how to reduce these inhibitions (e.g. dehumanization, Milgram's obedience studies), but there is little research (feel free to let me know if I'm wrong about this and I'll edit this) on the positive pressures towards aggression. Among the ideas I am familiar with are Sherif's classic studies on competition for limited resources, which are echoed in Robert Wrights's ideas about zero-sum competitions leading to conflict. However, competition itself is just a circumstance and it doesn't necessarily get at the psychological mechanism for group level aggression. For example, people may compete because they covet a particular resource or they may compete because they need that resource to survive.

A couple years ago, I hypothesized that individuals are moved to aggression because of an excess of moral principle, rather than the absence of moral principle. In the context of the health care reform debate, this may mean harming others "for the greater good", which could be defined as saving unborn fetuses, providing health care to the sick, defending the constitution, fighting for liberty, or an assortment of other moral principles which have been asserted by both sides as justifying actions that might normally be considered out of bounds. In the past few days, we have seen gun threats, windows broken, the elderly disrespected, and slurs and spit hurled at politicians. These incidences of crossing boundaries in the name of a cause are not limited to one party as those in favor of health care have harassed Bart Stupak and tried to have Joe Lieberman's wife fired. No side has a monopoly on the ugliness.

I don't have data that speaks directly to this question, but I do have this graph to consider. At the time that I started thinking about what I call 'hypermoralism', I created a small educational website that I thought I'd use to gather some exploratory data as I thought about these issues. The website is still in beta but the results of the initial survey are interesting. I asked people to think of a group that committed violence against civilians (e.g. 30% picked the Nazis) and think of the motivations behind that violence. I then asked people to think of reasons why, in an extreme case, they themselves might endorse violence against civilians.

Reasons to support violence against civilians

As you can see in the above graph, people believe that notorious groups that kill civilians are amoral ("They were amoral, having no moral standards." or "They were seeking personal gain at the expense of others.") most of all and were willing to entertain the idea that they were hypermoral ("They were killing people who belong to a specific group to avenge a past injustice committed by other members of that group.") as that value was still close to the midpoint of the scale. Survival ("They were killing people because they themselves would be killed if they did not.") was a distant third motivation.

In contrast, when people considered when they would potentially resort to violence against civilians, survival (of both the individual and the family, which loaded on the same factor in a factor analysis) was the prime potential motivator. Unfortunately, for my hypothesis, moral reasons were deemed no more likely than non-moral reasons for individuals, but I still think there is something to be learned.

Clearly, these scenarios are not directly comparable as the average respondent is likely actually different than the average Nazi or member of the Khmer Rouge. It's not just a matter of perception. But if we believe in the vast amount of research on the fundamental attribution error, which shows that we underestimate situational pressure when others do bad things, there likely is some amount of attribution error occurring in this instance. It seems likely that many individuals within these notorious groups actually did feel some survival motivation that spurred their actions. For example, Hitler was quite poor, though clearly his actions went way beyond mere survival.

In the health care reform debate, it seems that a precursor to the ugliness is indeed couching the debate in terms of a life or death struggle for survival, justifying questionable behavior.  Is America hanging by a thread? Then I suppose it's worth taking extreme measures to save it. Are people dying every day that reform isn't enacted? Then I suppose a few harassing calls to a congressman's home are a small price to pay.

Politics in America can often be a zero-sum game and it is inevitable that passions will be inflamed on both sides. Liberals may have 'won' this vote, but we all lose when the debate gets too ugly and liberals are just as guilty of exaggeration when things don't go their way. Indeed, I just received an email asking for help to "stop big corporations from taking over our democracy", a reference to a recent Supreme Court decision which conservatives "won". Such rhetorical devices may be useful, but we should all guard against where such exaggeration inevitably leads....ugliness.

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

I hope to explore the idea of hypermoralism in a series of blog posts.

Posts in this category:

• On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics
• On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics
• Sam Harris’ TED video and the danger of liberal atheist moral absolutism
• The Psychology of Aggression and the Ugliness of the Health Care Reform Debate
• Religion does not cause racism, but group morality may underlie both.
• Hypermoralism – Morality causes ordinary people to do immoral things.
• Hypermoralism – Morality causes ordinary people to do immoral things.
• Methland by Nick Reding: Moral Maximizing and the Drug War

While there are brave souls who try to save Oelwein in the book, one can't help but feel that there are larger forces that cannot be fought, that are transforming rural America.  Profit motives entice both poor rural Americans and poor Mexicans to take enormous risks to produce and sell meth.  Several times in the book, enforcement agents succeed at having drug laws enforced only to see drug use take a different turn to new forms of production, distribution, and use.  The best that people appear to be able to do is to minimize the associated harm.

The book ties the drug trade to a similarly intractable problem, immigration.  Mexican drug cartels "employ a miniscule percentage of the illegal immigrants in this country," but the integration of immigrant workers into American life makes it impossible to find that needle in the haystack (p.159). Big agriculture firms place ads for workers in Mexican border cities and lobby congress for access to this labor.  Consumers demand cheap food and enforcing immigration laws would cripple the agricultural system.  The city prosecutor doesn't enforce immigration laws as it seems like forcing someone "through the gate which is left perpetually and invitingly open" (p.171).

The psychological variable that this makes me want to study, but for which I cannot find much previous research, is the willingness to accept moral imperfection.  Perhaps it could be termed moral maximizing?  If anybody knows of previous research on this, I would love to hear about it.  It seems to me that there are some cases where we are morally opposed to something, but trying to force that thing not to exist does more harm than good.  I think drugs are bad, but I think the drug war causes more harm than good and there is little we can do to stop people in a free society.  We just don't have that level of control.  I think there is some injustice in illegal immigration towards those who wait to apply legally, and I lament the drain of workers from the countries of origin.  But we just don't have that level of control over the border either.  Sometimes we just have to accept moral imperfection.

There is lots of research on consequentialism vs. deontological thinking, which is often framed as the willingness to do a bad thing in order to prevent a worse thing.  I think moral maximizing is different in that it is simple willingness to accept a bad thing.  If you can't accept injustice, you may find yourself causing more harm than good in trying to change what cannot be changed in some cases.

What kind of people are moral maximizers?  I took Barry Schwartz's maximizer-satisficer scale and changed the questions so that they referred to maximizing in the moral realm.  I then gave the survey to visitors at yourmorals.org.  Questions are listed at the end of this post.  The differences aren't large, but it looks like both extreme liberals and extreme conservatives have this tendency.  As a liberal, I might tend to think of instances where extreme conservatives make things worse by failing to accept injustice (e.g. invading Iraq to avenge 9/11)...but it would seem likely that extreme liberals are likely to do similar things in some cases.  For example, communists like the Khmer Rouge killed a lot of people ostensibly in the name of social justice.  Perhaps we should be wary of extremely morally motivated people (what I call hypermoralism) from both sides of the political aisle.

Moral Maximizing Questions (alpha=.752):

When deciding on an action in a moral decision, I compare my action to the best possible action.

In choosing a moral action, one should never settle for a morally imperfect action.

One should never settle on a moral outcome that is less than the best.

I often fantasize about living in a better, more just world.

I have the highest moral standards for myself in making any decision.

No matter how satisfied I am with a decision, it's only right for me to consider if it was the most moral decision.