I’m off to SPSP 2010 and will be presenting the below poster at the morality and justice pre-conference.  It’s based on a scale I found measuring separate war and peace attitudes (Vander Linden et. al, 2008) at the main political psychology conference 2 years ago.  The concept is pretty simple…I found scales that predicted pro-war and pro-peace attitudes, controlling for political ideology and the opposite construct.  For example, there are many reasons to be pro-peace….one could think war is a bad thing or one could be echoing one’s political party’s point of view.  Theoretically, by controlling for war attitudes and ideology, we get a picture of the kind of person who uniquely likes peace.

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.

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.

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.

I would like to coin the term moral confabulation (ok, I didn’t coin it first…there are 23 google results for it…but I’d like to popularize it) and I’ve now added it as a category on this site.  Confabulation is the formation of false beliefs or memories.  In the moral realm, one confabulates when ones emotional gut reaction to some event is so strong that it causes one to posit new beliefs that may be at strong odds with reality.

I do not believe that this is just a conservative phenomenon and I hope to illustrate this phenomenon in liberals (eg. social justice may be a confabulation of empathy for the poor).  However, I couldn’t let this video pass without sharing it.

Sometimes you dislike a group (homosexuals) or a thing (pornography) so much, that reasons why they are bad just keep coming to mind. It’s very related to this scenario which affects both liberals and conservatives. Without making any claims about the rightness or wrongness of these objects, I feel that moral confabulation is a phenomenon worth studying. And sometimes giving something a name makes it more study-able. If you know of more examples of moral confabulation, please share.

All social science research faces questions about the external validity of the results.  Much social psychology research is done on students and so the natural question is whether those findings generalize to non-student populations.  Even representative surveys of the population face questions about validity due to the assumptions which go into what representative means.  Since all measurement is imperfect, one of the main ways to determine the robustness of a finding is to examine many measurements and look for overall patterns.  FiveThirtyEight.com did this during the 2008 presidential election and became a national sensation.

The central finding of moral foundations theory to date is the split between what liberals and conservatives report caring about.  Specifically, Liberals care more exclusively about issues concerning harm and fairness, while conservatives also care about issues surrounding obeying rightful authority, being loyal to one’s ingroup, and avoiding “unnatural” violations of one’s purity.

How can we tell if this finding is robust?  All web servers keep track of referring traffic and so we can analyze the data we collect at yourmorals.org by the source of the traffic.  If the pattern holds among people who read the New York Times, people who come from conservative blogs (a minority, but there are some), people who read the Houston Chronicle, people who find the site by typing ‘morality quiz’ into a search engine, and people who read Libertarian magazines….then it is likely that the pattern is somewhat robust.  Of course, these patterns are all among internet samples, so it would be fair to say that if this pattern of liberal-conservative differences holds among all these groups, then it is fairly robust amongst the type of people who use the internet to read about news or politics.

Below are graphs across many of these groups.  You’ll see the same pattern where as you move from liberal to conservative, the exclusivity of concern about issues of harm and fairness gets less and less.

There is evidence that liberals have more desire for cognitive complexity compared to conservatives, which can either be framed as a virtue like intelligence or a vice like flip-flopping depending on where you stand (see Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski,and Sulloway 2003).  There is also evidence suggesting that extremists on both sides are the least cognitively complex.

I thought I’d examine the time elapsed in taking the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on yourmorals.org and the results are pretty much what you’d expect.  Time spent on the questionnaire is lower on the extremes of political liberalism and conservativism.  However, liberals did take more time on the page compared to conservatives.Below is a graph of the median time spent on the page by political orientation.  The last 3 bars are for libertarians, people who don’t know or are apolitical (strangely, they take the most time on the page…maybe they just have trouble making decisions), and people who are ‘other’.

Of course, it’s up to the reader to determine whether you buy the idea that time elapsed in answering questions about morality is correlated with considering the questions more deeply, which indicates more coginitive complexity in the moral realm.  Liberals do score higher on moral relativism measures, which could be thought of as a type of cognitive complexity.

Some of the group that run yourmorals.org are considering writing a paper focusing on Libertarians and so I’ve been looking at the data for triends.  One consistent pattern we have found is that Libertarians (unsuprisingly) are more self rather than other oriented.  They aren’t just extreme conservatives, but are qualitatively different.  They seem to moralize less and are more self vs. other oriented on scales like the schwartz values scale.One hypothesis about this would be that Libertarians are less positively affected by other people.  Happiness research consistently shows that relationships are very important for people’s happiness….This is true for both liberals and conservatives.  But is this the case for Libertarians?Consider the following 2 graphs.  The first one shows the relationship between a measure of depression symptoms (BSI - eg. “feeling blue” in the past 7 days) and a measure of abstract feelings toward others (Feeling Towards Others Scale by Belinda Campos at UC-Irvine, eg.  ”For me, happiness comes from performing acts of kindness for others.”).

….and here is a graph with a similar pattern replacing depression symptoms with Ed Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale.

The interesting pattern is that feeling close to abstract other people (not explicitly friends or family, for whom the pattern is different) is positively related to life satisfaction and negatively related to depressive symptoms for everyone, liberal or conservative, except libertarians.There are of course caveats to this result (as there are in any research).  Our sample is limited to people who visit our website, who tend to be well educated internet users, so this may only be true for those kinds of people.  Still, this result seems to converge with other evidence, both in our data and in society, that libertarians are more self than other oriented (eg. Ayn Rand’s book, the Virtue of Selfishness).  If positive affect motivates many people to be other oriented, then the fact that libertarians lack the other-orientation->positive emotion relationship would help explain their lack of other orientation.

I recently saw 3 posts on fivethirtyeight.com which may seem unrelated to many, but to my admittedly biased perception, which seeks supporting evidence for my thesis that the differing goals of harm reduction vs. productivity increase, underlie much of observed political divisions.  These were three interesting and convergent findings.  This thesis was first put forth by Morton Deutsch in the seventies and much psychology research on justice/fairness can be explained with this in mind.

From http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/pope-and-planet.html:

I noticed from this Gallup survey on attitudes toward global warming…that the percentage of persons who think global warming is manmade appears to be much higher in predominately Catholic nations than in Protestant ones

The protestant work ethic places an emphasis on the goal of productivity and as such, it would make sense that Protestant countries would have beliefs consistent with perceiving the productivity of business to be more important than the harm caused to the environment.

From http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/when-hope-is-enemy-of-change.html:

A Pew survey in January showed a precipitous 15-point decline in the number of American adults who describe global warming as a ‘top priority’. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll released last month showed a record number of Americans — 41 percent — who claimed that the seriousness of global warming is ‘generally exaggerated’. And just last week, a Rasmussen poll had likely voters increasingly skeptical of the idea that global warming is manmade.

The conventional wisdom — which I do not necessarily dispute — is that when the economy declines, so does concern over global warming. People have other things on their minds, like losing their jobs or 401K’s.

Concern about harm reduction vs. productivity increase is not static.  It depends a lot on the situation and on one’s interpretation of the situation.  If one is in a risky situation or one perceives greater threat, one is likely to value productivity more than concern for others (or the environment).  Concern for the harm caused to others is, from an evolutionary perspective, a luxury as when threat is low, there is a genetic benefit to caring for even distant relatives (see Hamilton’s rule concerning Kin Altruism).  This converges with mortality salience research which shows that the mere reminder of mortality promotes conservative attitudes.  Here, constant reminders about the state of the economy is serving as a threat manipulation for the general population.

From http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/are-republicans-going-galt.html:

A new Gallup survey suggests that 80 percent of Republicans think that big government is a bigger threat to the government than big business, versus just 10 percent who think the opposite. This represents an enormous partisan split from Democrats, among whom a majority think that big business is the greater threat. Moreover, the partisan split has grown significantly since 2006; it has now become almost a definitional issue for Republicans.

What does threat mean in this case?  My theory would be that big business is a threat to the welfare of the people.  Big government is a threat to the productivity of the people.  Again, it depends on your goal….productivity or harm reduction.

These results aren’t really surprising, but Obama and McCain supporters have different ideas about who they identify with, based on Sam McFarland’s Identification with All Humanity Scale.

Specifically, those who plan to vote for McCain identify most with their country while those who plan to vote for Obama identify most with the world as a whole.

More interesting is the fact that Obama supporters have a relatively flat identification pattern where they are a bit more identified with all people in the world vs. people in their country while McCain supporters have over a full point difference (on a 5 pt. scale) between their identification with their country vs. their identification with people all over the world (3.7 vs. 2.6).

Below are the results…

I wanted to explore the results a bit further, so I looked at differences within self identified conservatives based on whether they are slightly, moderately, or very conservative.  As you can see below, the more conservative one gets, the greater one identifies with one’s country and the less one identifies with the world.

The question that comes to my mind is:

Why is it necessary to have this tradeoff between loving one’s country and identifiying with people of all kinds?

And lastly, as a comparison, here are the results for liberals.  It seems like the main difference for extreme liberals is greater concern for the world as a whole.