Besides dovetailing with my research, I think there is a practical value to be taken from this video. I often find myself concentrating on what I am doing, sometimes forgetting why I do things. In a world where we all have too many paths to choose from, we sometimes choose the path that has the most urgency (extrinsic motivation) rather than the path that is the most meaningful (intrinsic motivation). In business, that might mean doing whatever generates a profit now, rather than what satisfies the business' core mission. In academia, that may mean writing a paper for publication sake (extrinsic reasons) rather than exploring ideas that may not just get published, but also may serve some larger purpose. If you are inclined to explore these theories/ideas further, I might read more about self-determination theory, which talks about how intrinsic, rather than extrinsic motivation, leads to better human functioning, in addition to the benefits described in the above talk.

- Ravi Iyer

Is support for torture restricted to the evil among us (e.g. liberals who think that Dick Cheney = Darth Vader)? When individuals say that they are torturing an evil few in order to save many innocents (an argument based in Utilitarianism), are they lying about their noble goals? A recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that individuals may not be honest about their utilitarian motives. From the abstract:

The use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects is typically justified on utilitarian grounds. The present research suggests, however, that those who support such techniques are fuelled by retributive motives.

This is a very well done experimental study, which illustrates an important point about other potential motives for torture, specifically a desire for retribution or vengeance. However, it may be nitpicking or splitting hairs, but I might instead have written "those who support such techniques may also be fuelled by retributive motives." Indeed, in the study itself, there is an increase in support for severe interrogation techniques when there is a greater likelihood that the suspect is withholding information that may save lives, especially among Republicans, the group most likely to be "those who support such techniques." The fact that retributive motives exist, does not necessarily mean that utilitarian motives do not. One could probably design a study that shows the opposite, where utilitarian motives dominate, given the total control one has in a lab environment.

Our yourmorals.org data suggests that utilitarian motives are indeed important in predicting attitudes toward torture. There are a number of measures that tap utilitarian thinking, but the most convincing to me are the classic moral dilemmas that ask people if they are willing to take some action (e.g. flipping a switch) to save 5 innocent people at the cost of 1 innocent life. They are convincing because they are generally free of any political content or judgment about the worth or guilt of individuals.  Below is a graph relating responses to these dilemmas to attitudes toward torture.  Higher scores on the Y axis indicate more willingness to sacrifice 1 life for 5.  Higher scores on the X axis indicate willingness to support torture in more situations.

Torture and Utilitarian Moral Judgments are positively correlated

There is a fairly robust positive correlation between utilitarian judgments on these dilemmas and support for torture (the dip on the far right for liberals is likely due to there being such a small number of liberals who think torture is often justified).

If I look at other utilitarian measures such as moral idealism (using the Ethics Position Questionnaire - e.g. "The existence of potential harm to others is always wrong, irrespective of the benefits to be gained.", r=-.35) or moral maximizing (using an adapted version of Schwartz's maximizing-satisficing scale - e.g. "In choosing a moral action, one should never settle for a morallyimperfect action.", r=-.15), you find the same relationship. Controlling for political affiliation and beliefs about punishment and disposition toward vengeance, one still finds significant relationships between utilitarianism and support for torture.

My take home. Part of promoting civil politics is to take people at their word for their motives, rather than questioning them. There may indeed be some vengeful motive behind torture...but there are utilitarian motives as well and those of us who dislike torture might actually get further confronting torture on utilitarian grounds rather than attempting to question the motives of those who believe in torture.

- Ravi Iyer

What interested me was not the data, but the critique of how psychologists attempt to illuminate the human condition.  A few quotes from the chapter summarize the points I'd like to emphasize.

Psychologists often study phenomena in isolated, artificial environments, which allows researchers to necessarily isolate variables of interest, but....

Aiming to isolate phenomena, scholars in this research enterprise are prone to devise somewhat peculiar and overly constrained assessments of moral functioning that are remote from everyday moral experience.

A gold nugget in Gilligan’s (1982) critique of moral psychology was her skepticism concerning such constrained dilemmas and her advocacy for assessing moral judgment more naturalistically, tapping moral problems from individuals’ own experience.

Another paradigmatic assumption to which we draw attention asserts that people are psychologically “cut from the same cloth,” uniformly operating by the same moral psychological

processes. This assumption is manifest in the frequent reliance on a single type of research participant (e.g., undergraduate students garnering course credit), a lack of consideration for

individual differences, and a homogenizing “people” label.

Our proposal contends that lab experimentation should be balanced with real-world observation of socially significant affairs and that morally relevant aspects of personality should

be tapped across all levels of personality description. Different methodologies should be mutually informative. Multiple lenses on the same phenomena contribute to a more comprehensive understanding, whereas divergent findings across methodologies hearken our attention.

So what can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities, or simply reading the newspaper thoughtfully, cannot?  I would say not much, but rather that psychology can help buttress what can be learned by other methods and vice versa. They both get at the same questions. A colleague of mine once shared that he thinks of psychology studies as statistical parables, in the same way that stories of the real or fictional world provide us with different kinds of parables. Anyone who has read a really good novel might believe Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote that "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

The authors I quote above want us to use multiple lenses to understand the human condition, referring to the lenses that psychologists might use (different samples, different methods). I would further extend that analogy to all fields that attempt to understand the human condition, such as literature and the humanities, but also just reading the news. This is not to say that there is not something powerful about quantitative analysis and methodologically rigorous psychological research. But as I step back from the research, I find that I'm only convinced by findings where there is a web of evidence, of the type that one researcher, paper, study, method, or discipline, could never produce...where the statistical parable has been replicated in other ways by other people and is echoed in situations I've faced and news stories I've read about. Fortunately, the internet and semantic web technologies promise to make it easier to discover such webs of evidence...but that's a subject for another post.

If you have the patience, it's worth reading the results of the conference in Herzilaya, but if not, perhaps I'll make a practice of summarizing some of the other chapters as I read them. Social psychology can be unfortunately unintelligible, in ways that literature is not.

- Ravi Iyer

As you can see, conservatives feel that ingesting all types of substances (cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine) are more moral issues, compared to liberals. Liberals appear to moralize driving while using a cellphone and eating unhealthy food a bit more than conservatives.

Interestingly, liberal visitors felt that distracted driving is about as immoral as using cocaine and much more immoral than smoking marijuana. Conservatives, on the other hand, felt that the use of illicit drugs (cocaine and marijuana) was more immoral than driving while using a cellphone. This is perhaps another way to show the robust moral foundations theory finding that liberals care more about issues of harm (e.g. distracted drivers might kill someone), while conservatives care more about issues of purity (e.g. taking drugs is unnatural) and authority (e.g. especially illegal drugs).

- Ravi Iyer

edit: I had a few request for the sample size.  1,538 liberals and 337  conservatives took this study for this analysis.

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

Like this Mother Theresa quote:

I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations.  I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.

There is something powerful about being "for" things rather than "against" things that other people believe in.  The opposition that the later strategy creates might just lead to the very same kinds of conflict that anti-war protestors seek to avoid.

Click Here for the poster

I bought Sarah Palin's new book, Going Rogue.  As someone interested in moral confabulation, Sarah Palin is an a great case study.  She has a very visceral intuitive sense of her own moral opinions (e.g. her opinion on Israeli settlements)...yet she often seems to have no preconceived notion of the source of those opinions.  So when the press asks her for the reason for her opinions, she is bound to confabulate a reason more than most.  A supporter of her might say that we all use intuitions to reason morally and so her gut level analysis is refreshingly honest.  A detractor might say that this is evidence that she doesn't have well reasoned opinions and that our gut is not always correct.

Robert Wright wrote a recent book about zero sum situations, of which politics definitely is one.  One side wins and the other loses in every election.  In these situations, our gut is going to lead us to demonize the other side, which often is a strategically bad thing to do.  To combat this, he (and others like John Lederach) advocates actively exercising our moral imaginations.  The idea is that we need to consider other viewpoints to combat our gut reactions to demonize the other side.  That takes effort and willpower as our minds are wired to discount the opposing view on any issue.  But sometimes understanding the other side is the only way to compromise and peace.

So I am going to try to read Palin's book with an open mind and expand my liberal moral imagination.  Maybe there are things we can agree upon or at least maybe I'll learn something about conservative views that I can use.  For example, 10 pages into it, I can certainly agree about the need to keep special interests (big oil) out of politics and it seems that will be a recurrent theme in the book.  My partisan bias is to point out the special interests she caters to, but perhaps the more adaptive strategy is to take her words at face value.  If I really expect conservatives to expand their moral imaginations to consider the perspective of the Muslim world, it would seem hypocritical to be equally unwilling to expand my own moral imagination.

For more on expanding the moral imagination, you can watch the below video, specifically around the 14 minute mark where Robert Wright talks about moral imagination.

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.

Is it possible to be both pro-peace and pro-Israel?  What part of this is simply the moral confabulation of believing that your side (liberal or conservative) is correct and that the other side MUST be unpatriotic?  Sometimes we might dislike the opposing viewpoint so much that we question not just their wisdom, but their motives.

To help answer this question, I analyzed some of our data from yourmorals.org to see how identification with one's country (measured using questions like "How much do you identify with (that is, feel a part of, feel love toward, have concern for)...people in my country?") is related to attitudes toward peace (measured using questions like "Peace brings out the best qualities in a society.") and attitudes toward war (measured using questions like "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict.").  It is worth noting that attitudes toward war and attitudes toward peace are not necessarily the same thing.  They are highly correlated (r=-.68) in our sample, but the correlation is not perfect (-1 or 1 would be a perfect correlation).

At first glance, it seems that being pro-peace might be incompatible with identifying with one's country.  Consider the below 2 graphs.  Attitudes toward peace aren't really related to patriotism.  Attitudes toward war are related to patriotism in that people who identify with their country more seem to be slightly more likely to be more sympathetic to the need for conflict.

Given that the distinction between pro-peace and anti-war is difficult, it is unsurprising that from the simple relationships, people are suspicious of people who are both pro-peace and patriotic.  However, these relationships are not large and there are many confounding variables, the most obvious of which are your political leanings.  Much research in political psychology concerns our motivated reasoning to support our political party's position on any given issue.  If we look within each political party, the relationship between being pro-peace and pro-country changes as shown in the below two graphs.

The confusing purple lines above are self-identified libertarians.  Let's deal with them later.

The main result if we look at everybody else is that we see that identification with one's country is actually associated with being pro-peace WITHIN each political group.  In contrast, in the first set of graphs, being pro-war was associated with identification with one's country when collapsing across all political groups. The results suggest that identification with country is independently associated with being pro-peace if we control for being liberal, conservative, or libertarian.  If we control for the variance associated with political ideology, it is not patriotic to be anti-war or pro-war.  It IS patriotic to be pro-peace....and the reason people who are pro-peace are characterized as not being patriotic is because the doves and the hawks reside on opposite sides of the partisan divide.  This partisan divide also predicts identification with country (conservativism correlates .29 with identification with country).  But if we take out the variance due to ideology, peace is indeed patriotic.

Put in the context of the political issue of the day, there is nothing so abnormal about being pro-peace and pro-Israel, but it is unsurprising that critics of J Street are unable to disentangle their partisan leanings from their opinions about the group given the simple pattern of what we see in society.  It is worth noting though that questioning the motives rather than the wisdom of the opposing position is not something that is limited to conservative groups like the Weekly Standard.  J Street characterizes the Weekly Standard's actions as "thuggish smear tactics", "swift boat" moves, and "unhinged" which is surely a caricature of their true motivations.  My advice to J Street would be to avoid such confrontational language as it only exacerbates the partisan divide and makes it more unlikely that others might actually see resonance in their pro-peace, pro-Israel stance.

There is one group for whom being pro-peace is more diagnostic, libertarians.  Libertarians make up 10-15% of the population according to recent surveys and 7% of our sample, but it is worth speculating about why group identification is so diagnostic of war and peace attitudes for this group.  Using Moral Foundations Theory, war and peace attitudes are predicted by both the ingroup/loyalty foundation and the harm/care foundation.  Similarly, patriotism and identification with one's country is a blend of concern about loyalty to one's group and care for those group members.  Libertarians score lower on the moral foundations questionnaire on both the ingroup and harm foundations.  My hypothesis would be that for libertarians, identification with country is more a function of group loyalty rather than care for other group members (see Ayn Rand's virtue of selfishness).  Indeed, the correlation between Moral Foundations Questionnaire-Ingroup scores and Identification with Country scores are higher for libertarians than for every other group (r=.56 for libertarians, .37 for conservatives and .38 for liberals).  I would speculate that the fact that libertarian patriotism is more loyalty than care based is the reason why libertarian patriotism is more highly related to pro-war/anti-peace attitudes.  More on libertarians to come as I'm working on a paper on libertarian psychology.

According to this book, "Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America" by Robert Fuller, perhaps 20% of Americans might fall in this category.  In our YourMorals.org dataset, 9.4% used this category.  For comparison, 24.7% picked Atheist and all the Christian denominations combined make up ~15%.  From personal experience as a Californian, I could also see people who fit Fuller's description as wanting a more open, exploratory, personal religious experience picking Buddhism (1.5%) or Unitarian-Universalist (1.8%).  Obviously, our sample is skewed because we reach a largely educated liberal audience.  However, according to Fuller, that is exactly the type of audience that is "unchurched", so I think it likely that we reach a fair portion of unchurched America.

What separates those who are "Spiritual, but not religious" from those who are "Atheist"?  or those who are "churched"?  Below is a comparison of scores on the Schwartz Values Scale.

What patterns jump out?

• Spiritual, but not Religious means something VERY different from Atheism.  Atheists seem to be markedly lower on conformity, benevolence, and universalism and higher on hedonism.  The pattern is somewhat like that of libertarians.  
• In contrast, people who are spiritual, but not religious are more similar to other religious people than atheists...EXCEPT the biggest difference is that the spiritual, but not religious value universalism.  Perhaps this universalism is the common thread which keeps these people away from organized religion, some of which can be seen as exclusionary.
• There is also a pattern of movement towards openness to change values (stimulation, hedonism, and self-direction) and away from conservation values (tradition, conformity) for the spiritual, but not religious, compared to "all others".
• As I suspected, Unitarian Universalists and those who are Spiritual, but not Religious have a lot in common and most differences fall within the margin of error.  
• Buddhists also have a lot in common with this group, except that they are lower in valuing power and achievement.

The results converge with the census of the Burning Man community where 72% feel that spirituality is important or very important, while over 80% go to no religious services in a month.  Universalism, benevolence, and self-direction are the top 3 values in their survey, just as in ours (spirituality is not an official Schwartz value).