What are the basic foundations of morality?
A few years ago, I was fortunate to catch a talk by Jon Haidt at the Gallup Positive Psychology Summit where he gave a wonderful talk about moral foundation theory, which seeks to determine the fundamental systems of morality. I sought to use his scale in my work and using that scale eventually grew into our current collaboration (along with Jesse Graham, Pete Ditto, and Sena Koleva) of yourmorals.org, where the main instrument used in moral foundation theory, the moral foundations questionnaire, is available.
The moral foundations questionnaire measures 5 foundations. The below descriptions are taken from the moral foundations theory webpage.
1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.
3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."
4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundaiton underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).
According to Jon Haidt, "Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible."
Perhaps one of the most compelling parts of the theory is that it invites people to try and posit a 6th foundation. There was even a prize offered by Jon to those who succeeded and a number of possible candidates are listed here.
How can we determine what is or is not a foundation? Some of the criteria are listed on the above webpage. Borrowing from a recent lecture I attended on approaches to develop foundations of 'personality', I would list the below criteria as important.
- Factor analysis/Conceptual Distinction - Factor analysis is the most common way that people empirically determine distinct constructs. The idea is that if two constructs are distinct, questions about these constructs should inter-correlate to form a separate factor from questions about a separate construct. So if questions about Harm load on a separate factor versus questions about Fairness, we can conclude they are separate constructs. I would argue that this is a necessary, but not sufficient test of any new foundation. It is possible to ask questions with enough specificity that anything can be a separate factor. Five questions about harm using a knife will likely load on a separate factor versus five questions about harm by drowning, yet does that mean they are separate foundations. Furthermore, work on moral confabulation and moral intuition leads many researchers to believe that individuals are fundamentally naive about what drives their moral reasoning. As such, direct questions may not be able to illuminate all possible moral systems.
- Cluster analysis - One of the most important applications of moral foundations theory is that it successfully describes the differences between liberals and conservatives in a fairly robust manner. Some personality scale developers take the notion that if a question successfully differentiates classes of people, it's a good question. This is true for the moral foundation questionnaire to a point, but more work could certainly be done. 5 foundations should conceivably posit 5 classes of people (individuals who value each foundation over the other four) and the co-occurrence of many of these foundations is evidence that some current foundations may share a moral system or that these clusters have yet to be identified.
- Evolutionary explanation - One of the most important aspects of moral foundation theory is that it contains a plausible evolutionary explanation of all systems. Evolutionary evidence should include both cross-cultural universality and a coherent evolutionary explanation. The current foundations are well described in terms of their evolutionary roots, having grown out of anthropological field work, and future foundation candidates should be equally well described in terms of evolutionary theory and equally universal cross-culturally.
- Beyond Self Interest - I often think that people who are in front of me in traffic are jerks. Why don't they just get out of the way? If you catch me on a particularly bad day, I may even consider them to be immoral people. But is 'getting out of my way' a moral system? Human beings are notoriously clever at moralizing their self-interest and any candidate foundation needs to go beyond self interest. The relevant question would be whether I would judge the other people to be at fault from the perspective of a neutral third party. Given that I don't routinely chastise drivers for being in the way of other drivers, I would say that my beliefs in this example are not the result of a moral system, but rather my personal self-interest.
- Beyond Harm - There are lots of different ways to harm another person. Some would argue that Harm is too broad a moral category, but as long as Harm is included as a moral foundation, any subsequent candidate foundation will necessarily be forced to answer the question "Is this reducible to harm?". The question which would need to empirically be asked is whether individuals would judge an act to be wrong even if nobody were harmed. This may seem like an easy test, but consider the case of liberty, which is an often brought up criticism of moral foundation theory as something that has been left out. Most people would think that it is wrong for someone to deprive somebody else of their freedom. It's conceptually distinct from physical harm, potentially describes a class of people (libertarians), has an evolutionary explanation (the need for groups to encourage explorers?), and is not just self-interest as I care about other people's liberty, not just my own. However, would I care about somebody else's liberty if they didn't want to be free? It's a difficult question as I think the intuitive reaction is to assume that the person doesn't know any better and really would be better off being free. But what if I was absolutely convinced that they enjoyed captivity...or what if I thought that they actually benefited from captivity. Should they be free? It's a more complex question than one initially might think and shows some of the complexity of developing foundations. Ideally, we should be able to find cases where any foundation is generally used, even in cases where the use of that foundation causes harm.
With that in mind, I would offer these potential modifications of our initial foundations.
- Fairness is a notoriously ambiguous word and can mean many things to many people. Current questions focus too much on fairness as equality, which is possibly motivated concern for the harm experienced by those who experience less equal outcomes. In order to separate it further from harm, I would focus this foundation more on the principle of equity, where people get what they deserve. Equity is motivationally tied to the desire for productivity and so this foundation would then possibly encompass ideas of property rights, sloth and waste, which have been missing from the current taxonomy.
- Concerns about liberty, equality and rights would be moved to the Harm foundation. All of these constructs are things which could relate to the harm caused to another individual, whether it is the psychological harm due to being controlled, the emotional harm due to receiving an unequal share, or the harm to self-esteem when one does not feel like one has any rights.
- Ingroup and authority foundations have tended to predict similar things and co-occur in individuals such that one might doubt the independence of these two factors. As they are currently measured, respecting authority and being loyal could both be considered subsets of a system that might be labelled "being a good group member". Some items which measure authority concern the desire for things to stay the same and a resistance to change, which has been shown to be indicative of conservative thought. Changing authority to this conception and labeling it 'conservation' while allowing ingroup loyalty to encompass other aspects of being a good group member might improve the discriminant validity of the authority and ingroup foundations.
- Many of the other candidate foundations that have been proposed deal with truth, wisdom, honesty, and authenticity. Telling the truth is a moral principle which might survive all of the above tests as it is conceptually distinct, describes a class of people (see The Dignity of Working Men), has an evolutionary explanation (trustworthiness), and is observed when it is contradictory to self-interest and causes harm to others. In conceptualizing this foundation, I might consider including things like simplicity, directness, and being a stand-up guy. This might explain why conservatives have a disdain for liberal academics who are too complex to be trusted and lack practical intelligence that is indicative of being a 'stand-up' guy.
These are merely hypotheses and opinions, so take them for what it's worth. It is also important to note that the fact that it is possible to refine a theory doesn't reduce the importance or contribution of the theory. In fact, the fact that I (and many others) posted about refining it means that this theory has had a significant impact on public discourse and is worthy of refining.
The Business of Psychology: Will the peer review journal article system be changed by technology?
In a sense, academics have been 'crowd sourcing' for years. The first documented case of peer review was in 1665 (according to wikipedia), though this only became a standard in the later part of the 20th century. Peer review refers to the process whereby other academics review the work of potential authors of new knowledge to insure that this work is of sufficient quality. Peer review spreads the work of editing a journal among a wide array of researchers and also allows for editors to forward papers anonymously, allowing the works of nobel prize winners and humble graduate students to stand on their own merits. It's a system with many virtues that has served academia well.
Still, technology has changed the way we communicate in almost every arena and the pace of that change seems to be accelerating. Will the peer review system survive? If not, what will take it's place? I don't know the answer to that question, but perhaps examining some of the areas where the current business of psychology and the current world don't match will lead us to some answers.
- It's slow for authors - Peer review is already derided as a slow process and given the pace of the modern world, it seems inevitable that change needs to occur in this area. There are too many researchers producing too much work for unpaid experts to keep up willingly. This will only get worse as online sites like Facebook produce mountains of data that should be analyzed.
- It's binary - What makes matters worse about the speed of the process is the fact that decisions are binary. You either are accepted (rarely in social psychology) or you are rejected. Yet papers exist on a continuum and some research gets cited hundreds of times while most research never gets cited at all...which is a chilling fact given how much effort and time went into it. All that work that reviewers do in their expert review of the research gets lost in the binary nature of their result and the fact that their comments are never revealed to the public.
- It's slow for readers - Invariably, the research that is most interesting is the research that is going on right now. How are discoveries expected to be made if cycles of research are delayed for years by inefficiencies in sharing information?
- It's static - Most papers in psychology contain a review of current literature and a discussion which talks about why the paper helps advance current knowledge. Unfortunately, that information becomes outdated soon after it is written and is even more outdated by the time it is published.
- It confounds praise with publicity - Having your article published serves two purposes. It helps you get a job in that it proves the worth of your work. It also allows other people to read your work and build upon it. However, these two things don't necessarily need to go together. 'Unsuccessful' research needs to be shared as 'failure' can be very instructive. Meta-analyses and other research aggregation techniques require that information.
- It is inefficient for authors - In most businesses, people specialize in certain tasks. In order to be a standout psychologist, you need to be able to be able to combine knowledge of psychology with writing skills and knowledge of statistics and increasingly, technical knowledge to collect data online. Few people can do all of these things well.
What kind of systems should stand in place of the current peer review journal article system? I don't have the answer to that, but I hope to talk about ideas for how technology may change the peer review system in successive posts. The problems of information overload facing academics is the same problem which everyone has these days. And people are continually improving systems which address this problem through innovations like crowd-sourcing (digg), leveraging social networks to filter information (facebook), collaborative writing (wikipedia), and sharing data across data sources (semantic web and freebase).
I'll write more in successive posts about specific solutions, but I think an ideal system would be one where all data is published, but the prestige that comes from a publication is awarded by crowd-sourced ratings and reviews, not by the act of being published. The publishing of a paper is the beginning of a conversation with the world, not the end. I say data, because I think people should be able to publish data or literature reviews or a combination...but that it should be possible to publish data for others to analyze, just like people publish theories for others to test. Analyses and literature reviews should be separate as analyses should remain relatively static while literature reviews and conclusions will inevitably change and should be updateable by the original authors (eg. see Psychwiki). Any review of a paper should include semantically tagged ratings of the research so that others can combine these ratings into meta-analyses. Indeed, eventually all data should be semantically tagged such that the aggregation of data points, not just studies, is possible.
I know that is a dense paragraph and I know I'll want to change it as soon as I hit publish....and the beauty of the internet is that I can. But rather than pretend I have the answer (I don't), I'll try and blog about innovations to the publishing process and the business of psychology in later posts, all in the business of psychology category of this blog.
Moral Confabulation: What is it and why does it matter?
Given the fact that the term is not widely used and that this site now is the first google entry for "moral confabulation" (not that there is any real competition), the responsible thing to do is to properly define moral confabulation and summarize previous research.
What is moral confabulation?
Confabulation is a well studied phenomenon in psychology. It refers to the formation of false beliefs or perceptions due to some "imperfection" of the brain. I put "imperfection" in quotes because psychology is consistently proving that confabulation is the norm, not the exception. Rational beliefs that we have reasons for may be considered more legitimate, but irrational beliefs may actually be more psychologically functional. Given how negative emotion is stronger than positive emotion, it is not necessarily functional for us to see the world as it truly is. Consider this video on synthetic happiness by Dan Gilbert:
Synthesizing happiness, even if it's a trick of our minds, works. Confabulation often serves the purpose of helping us synthesize happiness. We synthesize beliefs that may not accurately reflect reality, but which feel good. Our moral intuitions are part of this "emotional immune system" which keeps us happy and functional.
Psychologist Geoffrey Cohen illustrated this in the moral/political realm in a 2003 paper where he surveyed liberals and conservatives as to their preference for generous or stringent welfare policies. In the absence of knowledge about whether the policies were supported by Democrats or Republicans, liberals supported generous welfare policies and conservatives supported stringent welfare policies. However, a liberal who learned that Democrats supported stringent policies was likely to support the stringent policy and a conservative who learned that Republicans supported generous policies was likely to support generous policies. Further, they confabulated (synthesized or made up) the reason for this support as being based on the details of the proposal or their philosophy of government rather than on the fact that this was their parties' belief.
What if we didn't confabulate? A person would be left with the correct but disturbing belief that they blindly follow their party. While it might be true, that belief isn't very complimentary and we have a word for people who don't avoid having these emotionally negative beliefs....the word is depressed.
Moral confabulation is simply the study of confabulation in the moral realm. We are constantly making judgments about things as morally good or bad, right or wrong. However, we sometimes don't actually know the real reason why we make these judgments.
Why does it matter?
One could study food confabulation and the fact that people believe things taste good or bad when 80% of taste is actually a result of smell. However, somehow I don't think many people would care why food really tastes good or bad as there are no consequences of taste, unless you are a food manufacturer.
On the other hand, moral confabulation has important negative consequences.
- Increased Group Conflict - It feels good to bolster your group and feel morally superior to the other group. Fighting the cold war feels better when you can think of the USSR as the evil empire. Liberals enjoy demonizing conservatives and vice versa. It's fun...but the conflicts continue and lead to bad policy (due to liberal vs. conservative acrimony) and bad lives (oppressed Palestinians and insecure Israelis).
- Poor Choices - It is easy to confuse the policy choice which feels good with the policy choice that leads to the best outcome. Consider a hypothetical case where 10 terrorists kill 1000 Americans. These 10 terrorists then decide to hide in a village which we can bomb, killing the 10 terrorists, but also 3 innocent villagers. These 3 villagers have 30 relatives who will then become terrorists if we do this. Depending on your emotional makeup, it may feel especially wrong to let these 10 terrorists go unpunished or it may feel especially wrong to kill 3 innocent villagers. But the important thing to notice about this scenario is that your feelings have nothing to do with making America safer. However, I'm betting that if you are honest with yourself, you are much more susceptible about arguments to justify why reducing terrorism depends upon whichever choice seems less 'wrong' to you. It is moral confabulation to believe that your decision is based on reducing terrorism and not on following whichever moral intuition feels most just. In cases where the prudent decision is the decision which is also unjust, moral confabulation is bound to lead to poor choices.
Our hope is that popularizing the term will allow it to go from being an academic term to one which enters regular culture. Perhaps conscious awareness of the phenomenon will lead to less division in the world and more prudent choices, as people consciously attempt to avoid the phenomenon. It is neither a liberal or conservative phenomenon and anyone who makes judgments routinely confabulates. You can help in this effort by mentioning the term to your friends or writing about it on your facebook page or blog.
What previous research exists?
I did not invent the term moral confabulation. I don't think even the people who first used the term moral confabulation invented it as moral confabulation is implicit in the study of processing biases, intuition, ingroup bias, balance theory, cognitive dissonance, and numerous other areas of social psychology that are as old as the discipline itself. However, I would point the reader to this article by Jon Haidt (with Selin Kesebir), whose moral intuitionist perspective is well cited in current moral psychology research. It's a fairly current overview of much of the research on this topic in psychology.