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

However, I have never been convinced that there are specifically five foundations or even that the idea of thinking of moral concerns as categorically 'foundational' is better than thinking of them in some other less categorical way.  Fortunately, those that originally conceived of Moral Foundations Theory do not require such homogenous thinking and even welcome the idea that the five foundation model is likely to undergo changes.  I have outlined a few changes I would make previously, as well as the criteria that one might use to posit a new moral category.  Even if one does not believe in the categorical distinction that some moral concerns are 'foundations', while others are not, it would seem clear that some moral concerns are more common, distinct, and important.  I would now like to make that case for honesty.

Honesty is common.

One of the distinctive traits of MFT is the evolutionary focus.  People moralize various things (e.g. eating pork or driving while using a cellphone) in various cultures, but the purpose is to identify those moral concerns that appear cross-culturally and have an innate quality.  Innate, in this instance, means "organized ahead of experience", such that people can make intuitive judgments beyond their socialization.  Put more concretely, if concern about honesty is innate and universal, one might expect individuals to be able to intuitively signal and detect honesty in others, as this study, where participants are fairly successful in figuring out who will cooperate or cheat, shows.  The idea that concern about honesty is universal enough that one might posit an evolutionary story is almost self-evident, but this paper provides evolutionary models about how honesty might evolve.  If one subscribes to the evolution of groups that out-compete other groups, one can witness the evolution of honesty in modern society as nations that have low levels of corruption tend to have better economies than countries with high levels of corruption, mirroring the evolutionary processes theorized.

Honesty is distinct.

The same paper I cited above has some evidence for this, but from the perspective of Moral Foundations Theory, it would be useful to show that honesty is distinct from other moral concerns.  We asked users on YourMorals 4 questions about honesty (alpha=.69, .76 if we remove the relevance question) in addition to the standard Moral Foundations Questionnaire that measures the existing five foundational concerns.  Factor analyses tell the same story, but examining the correlations tells the story more simply.  Specifically, the highest correlation between endorsement of honesty and any other foundation is .31 (with Purity), while all other foundations have fairly high inter-correlations with other foundations (e.g. Purity/Authority/Ingroup inter-correlate >.5, Harm/Fairness inter-correlation = .57).  Concern about honesty is empirically distinct from other moral concerns.

Honesty is important.

The pragmatic utility of using the moral foundations to predict ideological differences is perhaps the primary contribution of MFT to date.  Are questions about honesty also pragmatically useful?

On a 7 point scale, those who are more conservative endorse questions about honesty more than those who are liberal, but the amount of variance in political attitudes predicted by endorsement of honesty is smaller, though significant, compared to other foundations (beta = .10 vs. other foundations which range from .12 (ingroup) to .33 (purity)).  However, if we look at economic conservatism, we do find that endorsing honesty does predict identification as being economically conservative (beta = .13) as well as authority, ingroup & purity concerns (betas = .10, .09, &.11).

I looked at some political attitude variables and the predictive power of endorsing honesty was not impressive.  However, endorsement of honesty is a strong negative predictor (in a regression equation, including the other five foundations) of psychopathy (beta = -.23) and utilitarianism (beta = -.26, e.g. willingness to sacrifice one life to save five others).  Measurement of endorsement of honesty may have important pragmatic utility, but not for political outcomes.

- Ravi Iyer

As you can see, conservatives feel that ingesting all types of substances (cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine) are more moral issues, compared to liberals. Liberals appear to moralize driving while using a cellphone and eating unhealthy food a bit more than conservatives.

Interestingly, liberal visitors felt that distracted driving is about as immoral as using cocaine and much more immoral than smoking marijuana. Conservatives, on the other hand, felt that the use of illicit drugs (cocaine and marijuana) was more immoral than driving while using a cellphone. This is perhaps another way to show the robust moral foundations theory finding that liberals care more about issues of harm (e.g. distracted drivers might kill someone), while conservatives care more about issues of purity (e.g. taking drugs is unnatural) and authority (e.g. especially illegal drugs).

- Ravi Iyer

edit: I had a few request for the sample size.  1,538 liberals and 337  conservatives took this study for this analysis.