Sarah Palin confabulates that “Jewish people will be flocking to Israel”
Sarah Palin, in contrast to the Obama administration, believes that Jewish settlements in disputed territory should be allowed to expand. She is very clear about this belief in her recent interview with Barbara Walters. But does she understand the reason for these beliefs? Consider the below statement...
"I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead."
In contrast, here is the view of the Prime Minister of Israel from this article:
"We do not intend to build any new settlements, but it wouldn't be fair to ban construction to meet the needs of natural growth or for there to be an outright construction ban," Netanyahu said.
"Natural growth" is the term Israel uses for expansion to accommodate population growth inside the boundaries of existing settlements.
Perhaps a minor point, as Palin has part of the story about population growth right, but her opinion about a mass immigration into Israel causing a need for settlement is at odds with the official government position, which stresses that the population which needs to be accommodated is growth from within. It's possible that there is some immigration pressure, but it isn't an opinion that is generally put forth by supporters of settlers and if population growth were the real "because" in her stated opinion, then one might think she would be equally concerned about the population growth of the Arab population, which is growing at a far faster rate, and where those people will live.
The moral intuitionist perspective would hypothesize that she has a really strong intuitive support for Israeli settlers and that when pressed, she may have to confabulate logical reasons for this support. If you want to see moral confabulation in action, fast forward to 4:20 in the below video.
For the sake of balance, Palin's detractors are certainly capable of motivated reasoning (see this article by Andrew Sullivan) and moral judgment and I have to admit that I doubt my own immunity to such processes. So maybe there really is lots of flocking going on and I'm just unaware of the validity of that argument. Or maybe not...;)
Is Keith Bardwell confabulating his reason for being against interracial marriage?
A current hot topic in the news is this story of Keith Bardwell, a Louisiana justice of the peace who refused to marry an inter-racial couple. His stated reason is that "my main concern is for the children", meaning that the children may not be accepted by either racial group. Further, he claims that he is not a racist as proven by the fact that he regularly performs ceremonies for black couples in his house.
I obviously have never spoken to Mr. Bardwell, but I would speculate that his reasoning is a classic case of moral confabulation. He believes that interracial marriage is wrong and he believes that the children would be hurt. But I would contend that he believes the children would be hurt because he believes interracial marriage is wrong while he has confabulated a story with reversed causality, whereby he believes interracial marriage is wrong because the children would be hurt. If there were no potential harm to children (for example, if the couple is sterile), would he marry the couple or would he spontaneously confabulate a new reason for being unable to marry them? My guess would be the latter.
J Street vs. The Weekly Standard: Is it possible to be pro-peace and pro-Israel?
A group called J Street has recently sought to question the wisdom of military action by the Israeli government. Their influence is supposed to be a counterbalance to the traditionally hawk-ish Israel lobby embodied by AIPAC. Many lobbying groups which oppose military action by Israel identify with the groups that Israel has conflicting interests with or inherently believe that war is a terrible thing. J Street is unique in that it is pro-peace AND is pro-Israel, taking the stance that the best way to support Israel is by taking a pro-peace stance. In taking this stand, they are questioning one of the most powerful implicit arguments for military action....that support for military action is related to being patriotic. As a result, groups like the Weekly Standard have been questioning just how pro-Israel J Street really is.
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.
Facebook Launches Gross National Happiness Index
Facebook just launched a gross national happiness index which uses analysis of words used in Facebook posts to measure the country's mood. I'm sure those who study the taxonomy of emotion would love to see more complex measures included. However, this is a potentially wonderful tool and the fact that Facebook is willing to publish this data means that someday they could end up allowing the research community to examine their data. The possibilities are endless.
Some interesting trends from their limited graph....
Thanksgiving (2 years running) is the most positive day of the year...social pressure to be thankful? Does it mean people are happier or not?
Why is the day after Father's day the least positive day (they have separate indexes for positivity and negativity)?
Why is the 4th of July the least negative day?
Moral Confabulation: Glenn Beck says Obama is a racist, Liberals compare Bush to Hitler
I would argue that moral confabulation is the common thread between these two videos. Is Obama, who is half white and surrounded by white people, really a racist?
I don't think everything that liberals are saying about Bush is wrong, but disliking someone so much that you compare them to Hitler is a stretch, unless the person you are comparing them to is systematically setting up camps to kill millions of people. What part of what liberals say about conservatives is confabulated as well? Could denial of global warming be a type of moral confabulation?
Hyperpartisanship & Obama’s speech to kids in US schools
This was the actual speech which Obama gave for the nation's kids which generated so much controversy. What does that say about the polarization and lack of ability to form consensus in our country? I find it hard to believe that 95% of the country doesn't agree with these messages, yet many still can't get past the partisan divide.
Similarly, I bet 80% of the goals of healthcare reform are shared across parties including reducing costs by eliminating waste, increasing competition amongst insurers (the true goal of the public option, which would also be accomplished by Republican proposals to allow interstate competition or by cooperatives), stop insurers from dropping sick people, insure the working poor, insure the self-employed, and allow people with pre-existing conditions to get coverage.
Democrats and Republicans agree that Justice & Fairness are about Equity, not Equality or Impartiality
I was browsing CNN today and I decided to expand my moral imagination by watching Glenn Beck Speak at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting. I was surprised how reasonable his message sounded to me, as I my previous impression of him was not good.
I believe that people should be able to get what they deserve too. I don't begrudge small businesses who succeed through hard work. I appreciate hard work as much as anyone. Does that mean that I should switch parties?
None of my posts would be complete without a graph, so I decided to look at some of our data on justice and fairness from yourmorals.org. Below is a graph of how various ideologies would view changing a hypothetical allocation of a reward from ambiguous toward the use of some specific type of justice or fairness.
Equity concerns giving more to those who contribute more. Equality concerns making the distribution more equal. Need concerns giving more to those who need it more. Open information concerns making sure everyone understands the process. Equal voice concerns allowing everyone an equal say in how to make the allocation. Retribution concerns giving less reward to those who violate some relevant group norm. Higher bars indicate that making a change toward that principle is more desirable.
What did I learn from this graph? Liberals do care more about equality and need than conservatives and conservatives do care more about equity and retribution. However, both liberals and conservatives (and libertarians) find an equity based distribution (e.g. "Suppose the company instituted a way of quantifying each employee's contributions, and it then adjusted the bonuses up or down accordingly") to be more desirable to an equal distribution (e.g. "Suppose the company divided the money such that each employee received an equal share.") This somewhat captures how I feel about things. I care about people getting what they deserve, but perhaps I am willing to consider equality and need in some situations as well.
Below is another graph using different participants, which concerns endorsement of abstract principles rather than hypothetical allocations and again, we see that the proportionality principle (e.g. "Whether or not those who contribute more are rewarded more") is deemed most important.
The take home message for Democrats? Stop letting Republicans define policy as choices between equity and equality/need. Nobody is trying to stop small businesses from succeeding...few people want a completely equal society.
Rather, let's see if people are really getting what they deserve in life. Do investment bankers really deserve million dollar bonuses? I don't think they necessarily produce much more than many, and obviously in the past few years, their collective output has been negative. So I see taxing banks to recoup losses as a matter of equity/proportionality, not equality.
How about the working poor who work hard and then are bankrupted by a single medical expense? What percentage of Americans actually make enough money to pay for a chronic illness? We all need health care that doesn't go away when we get really sick and need to use it. So maybe health care isn't a right, but how can one argue with making sure the working poor and children all have health care? Does Glenn Beck's father, who owned a bakery and therefore would have immense trouble buying health care without a large risk pool, deserve health care less than those investment bankers who drove the economy into the ground with high risk derivatives? If not, maybe we should do something about that.
Democrats should welcome a debate about how to really give people what they deserve in life.
- Ravi Iyer