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

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

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

To test this idea, I thought I'd look at the data from the Good Self Scale from yourmorals.org.  In it, participants are asked how important it is to have various traits, and one of them happens to be "funny".  If you look at the below graph, you'll see that liberals do indeed place a tiny bit more value on being funny, compared to others (p<.01 comparing liberals to non-liberals).

It is important to note that this does not mean that liberals are indeed funnier, but rather that they place a value on being funny.  The results seem plausible given that the rest of the results conform to previous research (e.g. conservatives care about loyalty more and care about being more responsible).  Some observations:

• All groups are above the midpoint (2.5) of the scale for all traits, except for libertarians and their valuation of being generous, outgoing, and sympathetic.  Instead, libertarians score high on being intellectual and logical.
• Moderates actually score highest in terms of valuing fairness and honesty.  A very interesting finding.
• Liberals, in addition to wanting to be funny, also want to be creative, kind, sympathetic, and almost as intellectual as libertarians.
• Conservatives value being responsible, loyal, and honest (comparable to moderates for honesty).

In all, these are fair descriptions of these ideological groups, and given that the other relationships are reasonable, I would conclude that it's also reasonable to say that liberals likely do place more value on being funny than other ideological groups.  Whether they succeed or not is another question.

- Ravi Iyer

This is basically common sense, but the interesting part is when we combine the model with research suggesting that conservatives are more likely than liberals to react to threats and avoid negative outcomes, suggesting that in the first decision box, even given the same facts, conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe that scarce resources(e.g. the budget deficit) are likely to lead to ruin and therefore cut public assistance.  For example, this  might explain why a recent Pew Research Poll found that Republicans feel that the deficit is a bigger economic priority than adding more jobs (37% vs 22%), while the numbers were reversed for Democrats (41% think jobs is the most important economic concern vs. 15% for the deficit).

Further, when you get to the second decision box (appraising deservingness), conservatives are more likely to attribute success and failure to internal-controllable causes vs. liberals.  For example, this is a graph of yourmorals.org data and you'll notice that conservatives are more likely to attribute their success at work and in relationships to effort (an internal-controllable trait) versus ability (internal, but not necessarily controllable) or context/luck (external).  This attributional divide has been documented in other published research.

When you combine these two factors, it is no surprise that liberals and conservatives have very different ideas about a social safety net.  Each group may be psychologically predisposed to believing in more or less scarcity and more or less personal responsibility for outcomes, even given the same information about the world.

These dispositions may actually also cause people to be more liberal or conservative, or to support such policies, as research on mortality salience has succeeded in increasing support for conservative candidates.  There is a lack of research on causes of liberalism, but anecdotally, Michael Moore recently told a liberal audience that "America is not broke." and in my anecdotal experience of religion, one of the main principles of many liberal churches is the idea that we need to think of the world as full of abundance, not scarcity.  The ironic thing is that just when people need help most (conditions of scarcity) and Keynesian economics would suggest we should spend more, the psychology of the situation predisposes us to be less generous.  Of course, that's from my liberal point of view, where I'm predisposed to such beliefs.

- Ravi Iyer

ps If anyone knows of studies where an abundance mentality leads to liberal beliefs, I'd love to hear from you.

By the time we can vote, we have developed coherent narratives that help us make sense of our emotions, beliefs, and opinions.  In psychology, we often study individual variables and their impact on attitudes, but the real world is more complex and there are a whole host of attitudes, opinions, and dispositions that may have an impact on your opinion about unions.  As such, I thought it might be interesting to look at the whole picture of what our yourmorals data shows as the correlates of warm or cold feelings toward unions.

The below chart (click on it to enlarge) is sorted from measures/beliefs that are most associated with warm feelings toward unions to measures/beliefs that are negatively associated with warm feelings toward unions.  Warm/cold feelings were assessed using a feeling thermometer scale from 1-7.  Our sample is not representative, so any conclusion that you may draw would be based on the idea that the psychological associations in our overly educated, liberal leaning, internet user sample would hold for other groups.  To help isolate psychological variables, I ran the analysis on only those who self-identified in our sample as liberal, effectively holding that variable somewhat constant (I say somewhat because within this sample, some people were more liberal than others).

I would love to hear what others see in these patterns, but my initial impressions are:

• A lot of what is associated with being liberal is associated with being pro-union.  It is likely a mistake to try and figure out which comes first as people certainly adhere to their party positions, but people also certainly gravitate toward their parties due to psychological variables.  It is all tied together and research supports both relationships.  As such, it may make sense that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's decision to not only try and reduce pay, but effectively try to end all union representation for public workers, meets with such vehement opposition.
• Other oriented connections appear even more related to feelings about unions beyond what one might expect from simple liberal partisanship.  For example, identification with country is actually negatively associated with liberalism, but is positively associated with feelings toward unions.  All measures of connection to others seem to have positive relationships.  The Big 5 personality dimension of agreeableness (e.g. being trusting) has an almost equal relationship as the dimension of openness to experience, which is usually the dominant predictor of liberalism among Big 5 dimensions.
• Dispositional emotional reactivity appears to be a predictor of how liberals feel about unions.  Liberals who are empathizers (on Baron-Cohen's measure) who care about the less fortunate, feel emotional when perceiving beauty, and are also slightly more prone to depression tend to be those who feel warm toward unions.
• In contrast, rationality, a liberal hallmark, is not related to feeling toward unions.  Belief in scientific causation is strongly associated with liberalism, but not related to feelings toward unions among liberals.  Experiential thinking appears slightly positively correlated with positive feelings toward unions among liberals even as it is negatively correlated with liberalism in our wider dataset.  Rational thinking is not correlated with feelings toward unions, even as it generally is associated with being liberal.

Overall, the impression I get from the pattern is that it is the bleeding heart liberals, as opposed to the more rational, scientific liberals, who likely feel more connected to the ongoing protests in Wisconsin.  But I welcome alternative ideas/interpretations as well as ideas about how these results might not hold in other populations, as the interaction would likely prove instructive.

- Ravi Iyer

First, you can see that within the yourmorals dataset, liberals appear more neurotic than conservatives regardless of the question that is asked.

This even extends to asking about symptoms in the recent past.  The questions here are how often the participant has experienced "Being suddenly scared for no reason", "Spells of terror or panic", or "Feeling fearful" in the past 7 days, though the effect is tiny.

It appears that the effect is robust across questions.  Our sample is not representative of the broader US, but in this instance, this may be instructive.  Liberals may be more neurotic than conservatives within certain groups.  Our data is a large enough sample that it likely represents a sizable group of people, and it is possible that there is something peculiar to the kind of people who visit yourmorals that makes our liberals more neurotic than our conservatives.   As a broader test of this idea, I thought I'd examine those participants who visit yourmorals from sites like the New York Times or Edge, versus those who find yourmorals.org via search engines (e.g. searching for 'morality quiz'), with the idea that the NY Times and Edge readers are more like our core audience (people especially interested in social science).

Here is the graph by question for those who find us via search engines:

And here is the graph for those who find us via the New York Times and Edge.org.

It may be self-evident from the graphs, but put another way, the correlation between neuroticism and liberal-conservative identification (1-7) is -.03 (n=1634, p=.22) for those who find us via search engines, -.08 (n=7129, p<.001) in New York Times readers, and -.13 (n=2382, p<.001) for those who find us via Edge.org.  Overall, the correlation is -.08 (n=35,793, p<.001).

To me, this supports the idea that there is something peculiar about the kind of liberal that reads the New York Times or visits Edge.org or a site like YourMorals.org.  Perhaps the common thread here is the idea that these are people who are searching for answers in life.  It somewhat converges with this paper by Napier & Jost, where they find that liberals are less happy than conservatives, a finding that replicates in our data and has been found by others, and they found that this relationship is explained by the liberal un-acceptance of inequality.  It seems somewhat implausible that liberals walk around consciously thinking about inequality a lot.  But perhaps the inability to accept inequality is part of a general questioning of the way things are and what the larger meaning of things is, which inevitably leads to anxiety about why things are not 'better'.  I cannot show that with data, but I can say that, as a liberal, this rings true for me.  My search for meaning and desire to create change inevitably lead me to anxiety producing situations when I try to swim against a tide.  And yet it's a tradeoff I continue to be willing to make.

- Ravi Iyer