A simple possible convergent explanation comes from this graph of questions concerning how much how much a person identifies (e.g. feel's close to, has things in common with, uses the word "we") with people in their community, in their country, and around the world.  Ron Paul and libertarians like him, may think of themselves as individuals, moreseo than the typical liberal or conservative, and less as members of a community, a country, or the world.

From a psychological perspective, this is a further illustration of the idea that moral reasoning is intimately inter-twined with social functioning in that people tend to have a moral profile that correlates well with the types of social functioning they desire.

I would argue that a healthy society needs all types of social concerns.  Cohesive working units such as armies, companies, and to a lesser extent countries, are necessary for efficiently performing tasks and competing with/defending against other groups.  At the same time, it would seem callous to be an extraordinarily efficient society that doesn't care about the plight of others who are not in our group.  Finally, any society needs people who are less constrained by group concerns who can push society forward.  We should be thankful for the diverse ideological perspectives in our country and rather than seeing politics as war, we could see it as an exercise in finding balance between worthy concerns.

- Ravi Iyer

To some, the goal of the agency is to protect the poor, by regulating companies that provide "payday loans" to poor consumers, often charging extremely high interest rates.  I recently listened to an old episode of This American Life, entitled The Giant Pool of Money, which detailed the struggles of some who were given loans that they couldn't pay and the resulting human cost.  As a liberal, I am prone to be sympathetic to whatever we can do to improve the lives of the lease fortunate among us.

However, the thing that angered me most in the episode was the story of a veteran who qualified for a Veteran's Home Administration loan, but was instead given a loan for which the mortgage broker received a higher commission, and now pays a 10% interest rate.  This veteran has a job and continues to pay his mortgage, but clearly was taken advantage of by someone who likely presented themselves as working on his behalf, but instead wanted a better commission.  According to the episode, the commission for this purchase was $18,000 and mortgage brokers at the time were earning $75-100 thousand dollars per month (for a job with little societal benefit).

There will always be a way for people to take advantage of others, whether due to the desperation/need of others or due to their lack of understanding.  However, not all immoral ways of making a living are necessarily illegal.  Republicans have been consistent in their criticism of the Dodd-Frank law which created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Mitt Romney has promised to repeal it.  There is something to be said for the idea that sometimes protecting the poor can cause inefficiencies in the economy and there is no doubt that the liberal impulse to help the poor, and extend them credit, was one of a number of contributing factors to the financial crisis, in that incentives were created to loan money to those who could not afford it.  However, I think both liberals and conservatives would agree that when financial negotiations take place, steps should at least be taken to ensure that everyone understands the process.

Below is some data that is suggestive, though not definitive, that liberals and conservatives (as well as moderates and libertarians) might agree more about ensuring a fair process, as opposed to making sure that the poor are protected from predatory lenders.  While liberals might feel that protecting the poor is a more immediate concern, the most consensus exists (higher wrongness scores for conservatives/libertarians) for ensuring that everyone completely understands the process when a negotiation occurs.

In the wake of his controversial nomination, Cordray himself positioned the agency as ensuring a fair process, rather than a fair outcome.

The battle between liberal and conservative ideas can be seen as the battle between the balance between ensuring a prosperous society and ensuring a society that cares for the least fortunate in it.  Both goals are served by fair, open negotiations where all parties understand what is agreed to, and where people earn a living through activities that add societal value.  Whether it is via Dodd-Frank, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or some other means devised by Republicans, I'm hopeful that a consensus can occur around protecting consumers from those who might take advantage of their relative lack of information.

- Ravi Iyer

One of the great things about doing internet research is that web servers automatically collect information that makes it very easy to do cross-sample validation.  This information can also be used to compare the people who visited us from these articles. Which group is the most liberal and how do they compare on their moral foundations scores?

First, I thought do a simple comparison of these groups.

There are fewer people from the Daily Kos to be able to be sure about conclusions (hence the larger error bars), but it looks like (unsurprisingly) all of these groups are liberal, compared to people who find us via search engines, who tend to be only slightly liberal.  Their moral foundations scores show a similarly more liberal pattern with higher Harm/Fairness scores and lower Ingroup/Authority/Purity scores.  Daily Kos readers are the most liberal followed by ThinkProgress & Alternet and then NY Times readers and finally people who found yourmorals.org via a search engine.

To me, the most interesting results are where groups appear to be equally liberal (ThinkProgress & Alternet), but have differences.  ThinkProgress visitors appear esepcially low on Purity scores, while Alternet visitors appear significantly higher on Harm/Fairness scores.

An even stronger test of the kinds people who use these websites is to control for how liberal (slight, moderate, or extreme) individuals at these sites report themselves to be and examine individuals within each group of liberals. Those results are below.

This is the graph for people who said they were "very liberal".

These are the results for people who said they were "liberal".

These are the results for people who said they were "slightly liberal".  Interestingly, there weren't enough slight liberals in the Daily Kos sample to include them in this graph.

The pattern seems fairly robust in that ThinkProgress visitors care less about Purity.  Perhaps they are less religious?  Alternet visitors seem to care more about Harm/Fairness.  Perhaps they are more empathically motivated and ThinkProgress visitors are more rationally oriented.  I don’t know enough about the liberal blogosphere to theorize well about why these differences exist, but I’m hopeful that by sharing these differences, others will be able to enlighten me.  At the very least, I hope readers of these sites will find it interesting.

Would you be interested in seeing how your group compares to others on the moral foundations questionnaire?  Or visitors to your website?  You may have noticed a small "create a group" link on our explore page of yourmorals.org which lets you create a custom URL, whereby each visitor's graphs will not only let them compare their individual scores to other liberals/conservatives, but also to members of their group, and to compare their group scores to the average liberal/conservative.  Once you create those URLs, you can put them into blog posts, articles, or emails targeting your group.  We are still beta testing the feature, but would welcome anyone who wants to try it out and who perhaps has feedback on how we can improve it.

- Ravi Iyer

I have written about this before, using different data, but with renewed attention being paid to rising inequality, leading liberals to continue to push for rising taxes for the rich, I feel like it bears repeating, this time with different data.    While most Americans might prefer a more equal distribution of wealth, when positing such a distribution without considering who worked harder or contributed more, I doubt any study could show that any large group of people actually care about sharing some good equally more than adhering to the principle of deservingness.  People care more that people get what they deserve than if everything is shared equally.  Indeed if anybody knows of such a study, showing the oppositve, please share it with me.

Below is a graph of questions asking "how wrong" certain violations of fairness principles are.  For example, a violation of procedural justice concerns situations like a trial being decided with misleading information or a law being made without the input of affected parties (alpha = .77).  A violation of "lack of punishment" would concern a person going unpunished for a crime (alpha = .78).  A violation of equity/deservingness concerns a person contributing to society and not being rewarded or a bonus being awarded without considering the relative contributions of employees (alpha = .76).  A violation of equality concerns some employees being paid a lot while others are paid very little or a child inheriting a lot of money while another inherits nothing (alpha = .89).

To me, the interesting thing is not that liberals care more about equality than conservatives,or that liberals care less about punishing wrongdoers.  Both facts make sense but are almost self-evident if one pays attention to politics and current events.  Rather, the most interesting thing about this data (and any other data where I've pitted equality/deservingness against equality), is that everyone, including liberals, believes that equity/deservingness is a more important principle than equality.

There are certainly caveats to this data, in that it's a limited sample and the conclusions are somewhat reliant on the questions I choose to ask.  However, this is but one of many datasets we have collected which tell the same story...that equity concerns trump equality concerns.  Moreover, I think this idea is quite "post-dictable" meaning that most people who really think about it, realize that they themselves, no matter how liberal they are, care more about equity/deservingness than they care about making things more equal.  This article from the Atlantic blog sums it up nicely:

I think very few (completely misguided) people resent “wealth” per se.  I don’t remember anyone ever begrudging Bill Gates’ wealth, either.  When people resent wealth, more often than not the resentment is directed at how the wealth is accrued rather than at who has accrued it.  In certain instances, the how and the who become one and the resentment oozes toward the individual.  I’m thinking of the Paris Hilton’s of the world in this instance.  Here’s somebody who has done nothing of substance whatsoever; her wealth was accrued by virtue of genetic lottery.  But those instances where people resent a particular person for their wealth are, I think, rather rare.

So how can liberals argue for progressive taxation as a matter of equity rather than equality?  One problem for liberals is that research on system justification suggests that conservatives are more likely to believe that wealthy investors are more like Bill Gates than Paris Hilton.  I don't have data on this (though I hope to collect it), but one example that worked for me recently is to frame progressive taxation policies in terms of rewarding work, as opposed to investment.  Conservatives value hard work and I might even go as far as to say, anecdotally, that the conservatives I know work harder than the liberals I know (see this book which is tangentially related).  Yet, we live in a country where someone who works hard for a living pays taxes at a higher rate (the income tax rate) compared to someone who happens to buy the right stock or the right real estate property at the right time, and sells it later for a gain (taxed at the capital gains rate).  Or someone who inherits millions, and lives off their investments, a la Paris Hilton.  Hard work is penalized relative to profiting by owning things.  Is that fair?

- Ravi Iyer

Violence can occur in many forms.  War and terrorism may be more obvious forms of violence that are readily characterized as idealistic, but the current willingness by many to risk the fate of the world's economy in order to achieve some moral end could be thought of as a form of hypermoralism as well.  Since such an event has never happened before, it may be uncertain what would happen if the US debt ceiling negotiations do not produce a result, but anybody who has convinced themselves that they know that that raising the debt ceiling will not create a catastrophe is clearly engaging in speculation (and likely moral confabulation) beyond their experience (since no such actual knowledge of this hypothetical event exists) and contrary to the vast majority of experts/economists of all political persuasions.  Psychology studies, especially experiments, often show what can happen, in some controlled setting where variables are more easily isolated.  But sometimes it's useful to look to evidence from the real world to see what does happen.  I would argue that the below quotes show hypermoralism in action, in that individuals are willing to cause damage to innocent others (via the American economy) in order to achieve some moral end.

Some view the risk to the economy as a means toward promoting the protestant work ethic and self-reliance:

"It is not a bad thing for a society to have a cultural and moral bias in favor of productive work and to sanction the easy acceptance of charity and welfare payment when these are not necessary and when one can provide for oneself." - Robert Sirico in the National Review

"The welfare state seems to be corrupting some of our core moral principles....This moral corruption is eminently on display in the increasingly common, and increasingly loud, protests over cuts in state budgets, and we will soon see it in the looming fight over whether to raise the federal debt ceiling...To be specific: The welfare state encourages people to ignore, to violate--even to pretend does not exist--the moral principle that it is wrong to live at other people's expense." - James Otteson of Forbes.com

Some view the risk to the economy as a lesser evil, compared to the risk of leaving debt to our children:

"It is immoral to bind our children to as leeching and destructive a force as debt. It is immoral to rob our children’s future and make them beholden to China. No society is worthy that treats its children so shabbily." - John Boehner, Republican Speaker of the House

On the left, some would risk the economy because they feel that it is morally unfair that the rich are not asked to pay more:

"The Republicans have been absolutely determined to make certain that the rich and large corporations not contribute one penny for deficit reduction, and that all of the sacrifice comes from the middle class and working families ....I cannot support legislation like the Reid proposal which balances the budget on the backs of struggling Americans while not requiring one penny of sacrifice from the wealthiest people in our country.  That is not only grotesquely immoral, it is bad economic policy." - Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders

Some view any talk of compromise as disloyalty to one's partisan team:

Mitch McConnell is right now talking about making a historic capitulation...Consider sending McConnell a weasel as testament to his treachery. - Erick Erickson of RedState.com

Budgets are moral documents, and so it is unsurprising that politicians have strong moral feelings about them.  Reasonable people will disagree about what is or is not a moral way to run society, and that is exactly why we shouldn't give politicians the ability to do immoral things, like holding the economy hostage, to get their way.  Reasonable people may do unreasonable things, when confronted with a strong moral issue, and politicians are inherently moralistic individuals who constantly deal with moral questions.  We shouldn't give them tools like the debt ceiling, that allow them to threaten to hurt others in service of some ostensibly larger moral end.

- Ravi Iyer

President Obama started military action against Libya, following his belief in the concept of a “just war”, suggesting that Libya might be a useful example of morally motivated violence.  This was somewhat informed by the fact that I personally support intervention in Libya on moral grounds, meaning that I see no gain for the US or myself, but rather would like to help those who are attempting to gain their freedom.  Unfortunately, that requires violence.  While I may see this as 'good', others likely see this as evil, and I do see the unfortunate parallel with violent actions anywhere, in that I could see a suicide bomber having a very similar thought process, even as they kill many innocent people in an act that I would term evil.  The point of this research is to divorce normative judgments about which kinds of violence are good or evil from the more general psychological process, and simply to show that at least in this case, violence is often morally motivated, rather than being indicative of a person who is amoral.

As such, I conducted an experiment where participants were randomly assigned to answer questions about Libyan military intervention in terms of what is morally right or what is in the national interest.  For example, one question read "Considering what is (morally right/in the US national interest), I support the recent American intervention in Libya."

Results are shown in the graph below, broken down by ideological group, and indicated that many individuals are indeed more supportive of intervention when framed in terms of what is morally right. Liberals (p<.05) exhibited significantly greater support for Libyan intervention, framed in moral terms.  Conservatives exhibited a marginally significant effect (p=.06), though the magnitude of the difference is greater, so I likely just need to survey more conservative participants, who are a minority in this sample.  Consistent with our research on libertarian morality, whereby libertarians are not moved by the typical moral concerns of liberals and conservatives, libertarians were unaffected by moral framing.  Interestingly, moderates were also unmoved by moral framing.

This is one specific case and one specific study on a very specific sample, so there are certainly limitations in the conclusions one can make, as with most any social science research.  However, this does suggest that for many people, the case of Libya is a concrete example of morally motivated violence.  I'm hopeful that thinking about violence and war as morally motivated, divorced from whether you think the ends are good or evil, will be a useful paradigm for reducing violence and conflict more generally.  Perhaps violence will actually be reduced if people become less moral and instead more tolerant of other people's views and actions.

- Ravi Iyer

There is a psychological point to be made here too, about partisan motivated reasoning.  The results of the study are intuitive to most people who are not so ideological.  Of course increased access to health care leads to greater psychological and physical well-being for the insured as well as greater cost to society.  I have to admit that as a liberal, I'm tempted by arguments that the benefits of preventative medicine and reduced use of expensive emergency rooms means that increased health care for the poor will be essentially cost neutral.  While Obama touts improving health care access as a deficit reducing measure and liberal pundits minimize costs, the reality is likely that insuring everyone will cost significant money.  At the same time, arguments that state that medicaid doesn't improve poor people's health or that minimize the effect, seem psychologically motivated as well.  Indeed, the fairest summary of the results of the study would be this fairly obvious sounding ABC News headline which reads, "Medicaid makes poor healthier and states poorer". To add something to the numerous articles out there, I made the following graphs to summarize results:

People who received medicaid (in red) felt happier ("very happy" or "pretty happy" as opposed to "not too happy"), healthier, and less depressed (using this measure) than the control group (in blue).

People who received medicaid (in red) used more preventative services than control group (in blue) (yearly results for just women).

People who received medicaid (in red) used more medical services overall than control group (in blue), costing taxpayers more money, without any decrease in ER visits (yearly numbers, extrapolated from 6 month numbers in article - costs used per event in article, based on previous studies, are in parentheses).

Partisans will surely see it through partisan eyes, as one man's enormous gain in outcomes is another man's modest increase.  The National Review had a fairly detailed critique, but I can't help but feel that statements like "supporters must show not only that expanding coverage improves health but also that it does so at a lower cost to taxpayers than alternative policies" ring hollow unless advocates are forcefully pushing for those policies on the grounds of improving the health of the poor.  It has the same feel as liberal arguments that taxing the wealthy will actually stimulate the economy.  Both groups don't like to make tradeoffs, even obvious ones, but the reality is that expanding health coverage will both cost money and improve health.

Is it an unaffordable amount of money or a trivial amount?  The other neat thing about the study is that it actually translated health usage into actual dollars spent per year.  The control group still spent money on health care, which was presumably taken care of through existing services, charities, or emergency rooms.  The marginal cost of insuring the poor could be seen to be the difference between the experimental and control groups or the total cost of the experimental group.  Under medicaid, the government would pay all those costs, but there may be savings on what government is already spending on emergency room visits to public hospitals and other like societal costs.  In comparison, I found these links for the yearly cost of educating a child or incarcerating a prisoner in Oregon.

Yearly Cost

Of course, the above graph is perhaps misleading as there are far more school children than prisoners, so perhaps multiplying the total cost of care by the 213,000 medicaid eligible uninsured individuals or by the almost 650,000 total uninsured (numbers from statehealthfacts.org), and comparing it to the overall Oregon budget might put the cost of expanding coverage dramatically in context.  Below are yearly Oregon state budget items compared to extrapolated medicaid costs.  Note that the cost of insuring all uninsured is likely lower due to many uninsured being young working adults.  However, there is likely overhead and administrative costs to the program that are not taken into account as well, so perhaps this balances out.

Oregon Yearly Budget Items in Comparison to Potential Expanded Health Care Cost

I learned something from this exercise.  My liberal intuition was that expanding coverage to all the uninsured would not be that large a cost for a state.  In reality, it looks like expanding Medicaid in Oregon would be roughly equivalent to the entire budget of the Oregon University system or at least the community college system, depending on whether you count the entire cost of medicaid health care or just the marginal cost of increased usage.  Either way, it is a significant cost.  At the same time, providing health coverage to all the uninsured is not fiscally impossible.  It costs a fraction of the overall state budget and would cost a fraction of the Oregon health and human services budget.  Behind all the reactions to such studies is the attempt by both liberals and conservatives use motivated reasoning  to avoid a hard choice between a costly government program and failing to provide health care for our nation's poor.  There is a cost, in terms of money or well-being, to either position.

- Ravi Iyer

When does ingroup love lead to outgroup hate and when does it not?  The simple answer (see this review article for more detail), is that when people think of a situation in competitive zero-sum terms, they are likely to highly correlate.  Think of the difference between a rock concert and a baseball game.  If you are at a Prince concert, you don't shout slogans about how much Madonna sucks.  There is no competitive frame.  But a "yankees suck" chant can occur anywhere in Boston or inside the men's room of Comerica Park.

Politics is certainly a zero-sum game and for some liberals and conservatives, anything which is a congruent with either the politicians or beliefs of the other side is seen as bad.  So some conservatives have been reluctant to credit Obama and some liberals are reluctant to endorse patriotic zeal.  Indeed, in our yourmorals.org data, identification with your country (using a subscale of Sam McFarland's Identification with All Humanity scale) is negatively correlated with liberal identification.

However, given that ingroup love and outgroup hate are not always correlated, and in this case, Bin Laden is not popular in the Arab world, cases where ingroup love leads to outgroup hate are likely to be outliers.  Most people see it as love for their country, justice, and/or a blow for terrorists, not as a win in a larger battle against non-Americans.  One could see it as a victory for the type of universalism that liberals desire, given that what Bin Laden wanted most was a competitive zero-sum conflict with the west.  Indeed, patriotism itself has an empathic component to it, correlating with Empathic Concern (e.g. "I would describe myself as a pretty soft-hearted person", Davis, 1983) scores (see below).

I am generally liberal and have prototypically liberal angst about celebrating any death.  But in the case of the collective unity we are seeing, I think liberals should take yes for an answer to our universalist impulses and appreciate the resulting unity.  There are forces in the world (e.g. selfishness, competition, or threat) that cause us to restrict our circle of concern to ourselves and those immediately around us and there are forces in the world that cause us to expand our circle of concern and care.  I welcome the celebrations, because I'm hopeful this is a case of the latter.

- Ravi Iyer

I do not begrudge anyone their joy (life is short, enjoy it), but satisfaction and reflection dominate my thoughts as well, when I think about September 11th and the semi-closure that Bin Laden's death brings.  Some Muslims celebrated September 11th, perhaps influenced by Bin Laden, and some Americans since have wanted revenge on all of Islam.  In a sense, this is all the legacy of Bin Laden's terrible act on September 11th.  Why did he do what he did and how did he get so many people to join him?  Unlike a serial killer, who may have some weird grasp of reality, Bin Laden actually had to convince a number of sane people to join him in his crimes (perhaps by hypermoralizing them).  He did it by creating an us vs. them, zero-sum mentality with "images of Iraqi children starving under American-led sanctions, of Israeli soldiers manhandling Palestinian women, and of Osama bin Laden, looking messianic in his flowing robes, exhorting his brothers to rise up and end Islam's humiliation once and for all."  He wanted a long war divided along religious lines.  Given the risks he took, it is safe to say he was willing to die for such division, or in psychological terms, for the chance to create a zero-sum battle between west and east, where the losses of one side (even the losses of civilians) were a gain to the other.

We should deny him that goal, as that, not just death, would be his ultimate defeat.  One of the oldest findings in social psychology is that superordinate goals create unity.  Killing Bin Laden was one such superordinate goal, shared by Democrats and Republicans, Muslims and Christians.  Rather than worry about who gets credit for this, finding unity in his death would be the ultimate defeat for Bin Laden, whose life was all about sowing division.  As Robert Wright said, on the website for his book about Non-Zero sum thinking, "Killing Osama bin Laden and his kind is one thing. Killing his memes is getting trickier all the time."  Let's kill Bin Laden's zero-sum meme.

- Ravi Iyer

In case you haven't seen it, here is a summary:

The interesting thing to me of this story was a bit on the Daily Show where Wyatt Cenac points out that "in his defense, he's only lying about something that he believes in.  It's in service of a strongly held moral principle.  He's not lying to get out of jury duty or be boastful." (at about 1:10 in the below clip)

While the defense was intended to be comical, many might see Cenac's explanation as a truly mitigating circumstance.  Kyl likely believed what he was saying, given that an intentional lie would undoubtedly be revealed.  At some point in our lives, many of us also believe in something so much that our perceptions of reality are altered.  Many people do indeed believe that sometimes the ends justifies the means, and from our data, those people are actually more likely to be liberals (or libertarians).  One might argue that our incursion into Libya, for many, is a case where the ends (saving civilian lives, increasing freedom) justifies the means (violence).  In other examples, Democrats believe that the health care reform bill will improve access to health care, and also reduce the deficit.  Republicans believe that reducing taxes on the wealthy will actually increase revenue.  There are arguments to be made for either position, but an objective observer would probably believe neither of these claims and it seems likely that moral principles (Democrats believe in a social safety net & Republicans believe taxes on the wealthy are immoral) are shaping perceptions of reality, which is the definition of moral confabulation, when you believe in something so strongly, that you don't let objectivity get in your way.

- Ravi Iyer

ps. as if on queue, the Wall Street Journal published this perceptually skewed view of taxation, perhaps born out of their belief that higher taxes on the rich are immoral.  This article, by Jeffrey Sachs, details the correct math.  Of course, it is also possible that Sachs' view of the statistics is skewed by his own moral views.