Last summer, I began work on a project which is only now launching, VoteHelp.org. The idea is that people need a simple interface where they can input their opinions on issues and compare their positions to those of politicians. In this case, we decided to create the site in advance of the 2008 presidential election, but we’re hopeful that it’ll take off enough that we’ll have the resources to create similar versions for local races, where information is even harder to come by.

Check it out at http://www.votehelp.org.

As a psychologist, I’m especially interested in the personality ratings that people ascribe to candidates and how that correlates with issue positions. I’ll certainly share some of that data here in the future.

I am just getting back from the Gallup Positive Psychology conference where we talk a lot about measuring happiness and well being rather than GDP to inform policy. In case anyone wonders what some of my posts on happiness have to do with public policy, here is a tidbit I recently came across.

The basic idea is that much policy is informed by the idea of maximizing gross national product (GNP).  However, GNP is a crude attempt to measure the greatest good for the greatest number that is obviously flawed.  For example, if I break a window in my neighbors house and he pays someone to fix it, GNP is increased, but nobody is really better off.  A better measure would be Gross National Happiness…Is such a measurement possible?  It’s at least something worth trying.

The Serial Comma » Gross National Happiness

US film maker Karen L. Mintz is in the process of making what looks like a fascinating documentary about the nation of Bhutan: Gross National Happiness, 68 Miles from Thimphu.

One of the main ideas behind the moral foundation theory is that greater understanding of the differences between liberals and conservatives will lead to less demonization of the other side. This is a goal that is shared by liberals and conservatives alike. However, most of the people who work on this theory are liberal and most of our friends are liberal, so when we see this theory in action, we are possibly getting only one side of the picture.

For example, one of the ideas is to help liberals realize that conservatives do care about the harm and fairness foundation and so we should stop thinking of them as ‘heartless’. Conservatives simply care about other things as well. Anecdotally, this seems like it works as I have a few liberal friends who have softened their attitudes toward conservatives through greater understanding.

Does the opposite work? Are conservatives less likely to demonize liberals upon hearing that liberals have fewer moral foundations they care about? I blogged about this anecdotally here, but there is a more objective way to test this, specifically to see if there is a difference between liberals and conservatives in terms of endorsing moral relativism (or it’s opposite, moral absolutism). The idea is that some people feel that there is one system of morals that one should go by, while others are more willing to accept the idea that some people live by one moral system and others live by another. We have a survey on yourmorals.org which deals with this issue and below are the results (green=me).

So liberals do score higher on moral relativism than conservatives. BTW, moral idealism is the idea that it is sometimes necessary to make moral tradeoffs (ie. kill 1 person to save 10).

For further confirmation, let’s take a look at conservatives and see how ‘very conservative’ individuals rate on moral relativism vs. ’slightly conservative’ individuals.

It looks like there is a pretty clear trend that the more conservative you are, the less of a moral relativist you are. Indeed, in my opinion, this is one reason why people like Ann Coulter see liberals as ‘immoral’. If you believe that loyalty is an objective absolute moral, then people who don’t believe in loyalty are immoral.

So where does this leave those of us who research moral foundations? Perhaps we need to collect data on actual reactions to our theories so as to see if understanding really does bring people together. And perhaps we need to further refine our take home messages if we really do want to achieve the goal of reduced demonization of the ‘other’ in American politics.

So I’m just starting this blog and who knows where it will go, but so far so good and to continue the enjoyment of the process, I went to a ‘bloggers night out’ organized by Vik Rubenfeld who runs The Big Picture. Also in attendance were Bridget Johnson, a blogger from Libertas, and a writer from Mayor Sam’s Blog in addition to my friend’s who also blog, Zendi and Tara. It turns out that everyone who I didn’t already know there was a conservative blogger, which was great because I didn’t realize that Los Angeles had a political blogging scene.

In addition, it is always wonderful to get fresh perspectives from people who are really passionate about politics about some of the academic theories that we study. So what did I learn…

• As a group, they lament the lack of civility and demonization of the other side that is pervasive in politics. Naturally, their focus was on the demonization of conservatives by liberals rather than vice versa. Still, it is good to know that at least among this group, one of the central goals of our political morality research is shared.
• It is hard to get passionate conservatives to dispassionately hear the academic theory that liberals don’t care as much about ‘loyalty’. While I tried to spin it in as non-judgemental a way as I can, my example that liberals may not care about patriotism was not taken in as dispassionate a way as I might have hoped. I think the idea that someone who doesn’t care about loyalty to other Americans as much is not a bad person, is rather radical. Indeed, much of the criticism of liberalism I heard at the table had tinges of loyalty based arguments (ie. why do liberals bash America?).
• In a face to face encounter, it’s hard to not get along, no matter what the differences…indeed, I think we all parted as friends and I look forward to drinking with them in the future.

The 2nd point above actually contains a somewhat testable hypothesis. Specifically, some people see morality as absolute (ie. people who don’t believe in my moral system are bad people) and some people see morality as more relative. The reaction I got to my revelation that liberals don’t care about group loyalty as much as conservatives leads me to believe that conservatives would score higher on scales of moral absolutism. We actually have a test that measures moral absolutism on yourmorals.org and I’ll be sure to run that analysis and post it soon.

Update: Here is the promised analysis and here is a blog post by Tara on the same evening.

So I was in my office today when my advisor came in to chat and I mentioned that I started a blog, which got us talking about yourmorals.org. I was showing him some of the political graphs when he noticed an interesting thing about our political candidates survey (built by Sena Koleva, btw). Specifically, he noticed that conservatives rated republican candidates lower than liberals rated democratic candidates. The graphs are below and you can see that the average liberal ratings of democrats are around 5 (blue bars), while none of the conservative ratings of republicans have an average rating close to 5 (red bars - Thompson comes closest at 4.6).

….interesting, eh? Good news for liberals? not so fast…yourmorals.org is clearly not a representative sample of the population as we’ve gotten a lot of subjects from liberal blogs, liberal new york times readers, etc…So our ‘conservatives’ are likely to be more liberal than most samples of conservatives.

Still, there is a way to test this theory better and that is to look at the results for people who described themselves as ‘very conservative’. The results are below.

Now I think the democrats can take a bit of solace in this as while self described ‘very conservative’ subjects do rate republican candidates higher, they still rate republican candidates lower than the average liberal rates democratic candidates. So unless even our ‘very conservative’ subjects are less conservative than average (I doubt it), it seems like this is evidence that republicans really aren’t as happy with their choices for 2008.

Still, there is plenty of time for democrats to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.

You can read more about republican dissatisfaction here.

Over the past year, I’ve gotten involved in research on moral psychology and it’s political implications, specifically working with a theory put forth by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham at the University of Virginia called the moral foundations theory. You can read more about it here.

The main idea is that there are a finite number of moral areas that people can care about (the exact number is still to be determined, but 5 is the current number). Liberals care about harm and fairness. Conservatives care about those 2 and in addition, care about group loyalty, authority, and purity. Understanding these differences will hopefully lead to more civil dialogue.

Anyways, their wonderful work is getting noticed and together with collaborators at the University of California-Irvine (Pete Ditto and Sena Koleva), we put together a website at yourmorals.org to collect data on this theory.

Recently, this article was published in the New York Times and this reference to this article was published by Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic. As someone who enjoys playing with data, I thought it would be interesting to compare people who took the moral foundations quiz via the New York Times vs. those who came from Andrew Sullivan’s blog (who should be largely Libertarian). The results of this are below (green = me).

Not the most exciting graph as I thought there might be more differences. Andrew Sullivan’s audience should skew largely libertarian while the New York Times audience should be largely liberal. Haidt’s theory is largely focused on social issues, so it’s actually somewhat unsurprising in retrospect that Sullivan’s audience and the Times audience score similarly.

Always looking for another reason to distract myself from “real” work, I decided to compare Libertarians vs. Liberals vs. Conservatives on the same quiz.

As one might have guessed, Libertarians do indeed score similar to Liberals with perhaps a slightly lower emphasis on the harm and fairness foundations (they actually score very similarly to conservatives there…and if you believe in this small difference, Sullivan’s audience looks more liberal than libertarian). I’m actually somewhat skeptical that “fairness” means the same thing to liberals and libertarians and so I’m developing a scale to test that which will run at yourmorals.org soon. Specifically, it seems likely that liberals will endorse equality, the idea that everyone should receive an equal share of the pie, while libertarians will endorse equity, the idea that people who bake the pie should eat the pie, as the “fairest” way to divide a pie. Stay tuned.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: ON ORDINARY PEOPLE AS TORTURERS (references in article)

Social psychological evidence emphasizes the power of social context; in other words, the power of the interpersonal situation. Social psychology has accumulated a century of knowledge about how people influence each other for good or ill [1]. Meta-analysis, the quantitative summary of findings across a variety of studies, reveals the size and consistency of such empirical results. Recent meta-analyses document reliable experimental evidence of social context effects across 25,000 studies of 8 million participants [2]. Abu Ghraib resulted in part from ordinary social processes, not just extraordinary individual evil. Meta-analyses suggests that the right (or wrong) social context can make almost anyone aggress, oppress, conform, and obey.

also check out http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051009/NEWS01/510090392

Louise Ogborn expressed shock when assistant manager Donna Jean Summers told her that the caller on the phone, who identified himself as “Officer Scott,” said Ogborn would have to be strip-searched. One lawyer described the caller as “a freak who plays God.”

Psychological experts say it is human nature to obey orders, no matter how evil they might seem – as was illustrated in one of the most famous and frightening human experiments of the 20th century.

Seeking to understand why so many Germans followed orders during the Holocaust, Dr. Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, took out a classified ad in 1960 and 1961, inviting residents of New Haven, Conn., to take part in what they were told was a study of the relationship between punishment and learning.

If drug laws make no difference in drug use, why bother having them?  (disclaimer:  I’m anti-drug…and anti-drug war…)

AJPH – Abstracts: Reinarman et al. 94 (5): 836

With the exception of higher drug use in San Francisco, we found strong similarities across both cities. We found no evidence to support claims that criminalization reduces use or that decriminalization increases use.

I went to the Los Angeles “Festival of Books” and there happened to be space at Laura Schlessinger’s (known as “Dr. Laura”, though I don’t think she’s a doctor) discussion of her new book (The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands?), hosted by Marta Waller. I was prepared for an hour of “fair and balanced” opinion about why discussion of the Iraq was is unpatriotic.

I thought she was actually pretty smart and humorous as well. Her main points were that there were some ideas that came out of the women’s movement which were actually detrimental to women. For example, women get the idea that the fact that they should have equal oppornity means that men should be just like them. In truth, we all know that men and women are different…not really worse or better, but just different in the way we approach things and it’s useful to act as such. As well, women shouldn’t feel less because they choose to stay at home and raise children. Children are important. Bravo.

She even said that there were important things that came from feminism, though perhaps as a result of her need to entertain and sell books, she constantly made fun of the very same feminists. I can’t help but think that she would reach more people if she stopped insulting them as a lot of feminists would perhaps listen to her. She also had extreme views on “the diversity crowd” who she felt were trying to eliminate all traditional values, leaving no room for those of us (ie. me) who truly believe in diversity, including allowing those people who believe in traditional values to practice them….just don’t try to force them on the rest of us.

I actually ended up asking her a question about this, concerning whether she felt the need to villify the “opposing” view in order to entertain and sell more books. Predictably, she answered that she was too “intellectually honest”, but I think if she stopped and thought, she’d realize that there is a contradiction there. A lot of conservative talk radio (and some liberal stations too) entertain by villifying the other side at the expense of any meaningful debate.  But as research on motivated reasoning would say, her entertainment is probably more effective than meaningful debate anyways.

My biggest complaint was for Marta Waller, KTLA anchorwoman, who “off handedly” threw out how much admiration she had for Dr. Laura because she didn’t “flip-flop” unlike others….like public officials. This went on for several minutes and it was painful. She was so obvious about trying to un-obviously attack Kerry that I felt insulted as an audience member. If she really wanted to say “I think Kerry flip-flops on issues and so you should vote for Bush”, I would have respected it MUCH more if she’d just said that. The way she said it was so calculated and unnatural that it made me wonder if she approached her newscasts with the same degree of calculation. I’ll likely write a letter to KTLA to that effect.

The ironic thing is that Dr. Laura’s nuanced views of feminism (though masked behind her outrageous personality) are exactly the kind of nuance that her conservative ilk (ie. Marta Waller) brand as flip-flopping. Perhaps she has intelligent things to say, but they are bound to get lost if the general societal trend to demonstrate what conservatives call “resolve”, or what I would call “lack of open mindedness” or “stubborness”, continues.

I have no misconception about changing Republican votes in November, but I think we all (me too) have to look at where we fall into the classic poli-sci trap of believing what we want to believe. Everyone wants to believe that they’re candidate is right on every issue because nobody likes to make value tradeoffs. Nobody wants to say, “I support Kerry because I agree with 80% of his stances and only 60% of Bush’s”. Believe it or not, I actually was ambivalent about the war. There were good reasons for it (humanitarian, IMHO) and against it (complex, volatile situation). I have no doubt that there are lots of Iraqis who do like our being there just as I have no doubt that there are lots of Iraqis who don’t (the ones who throw bombs).

The thing which saddens me most about the direction of our country is how polarized we’ve become and how unwilling we are to tolerate complexity. Bush “doesn’t do nuance” which I thought was great for Afghanistan but has been disastrous in Iraq…and somehow he’s convinced the country that simplicity is a virtue. Definitely not all the time. And this desire to have simple positions leads us to super-polarized debates like the one we’re having here. There is a kernel of truth in most things we post or most things people debate about in life, but people are generally too passionate/angry to acknowledge the kernel of truth in what people they disagree with have to say. The net result is not only a lack of meaningful debate, but also an animosity that pervades neighborhoods. People all over the US are angry at each other and spiritually, it diminishes all of us.