Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere
I just finished Ted Conover's book, Rolling Nowhere, which I definitely recommend to anyone interested in understanding the human condition. In fact, I'd recommend any/all of Conover's books, where he assumes roles as diverse as a prison guard, illegal immigrant, and in this book, a train jumping hobo. Personally, psychology is always more convincing when placed in a larger context, with conclusions reached from different angles (consilience) and I think there is as much to learn about the human condition from one of Conover's books as in an issue of a psychological journal. In Rolling Nowhere, Conover hops trains for a few months and joins a subculture of 'tramps' that live a wandering, lonely lifestyle on the margins of society.
This may be an odd thing to say, but as a liberal, Rolling Nowhere helped me to appreciate American libertarians better. There are surely lots of differences between liberals and libertarians, but there are similarities as well. The book helped me contextualize the relationships we've found between being libertarian, which implies a sacredness placed on the value of freedom, psychological reactance, and the desire for stimulation. These are traits where liberals tend to score higher than conservatives as well.
The below graphs, taken from our yourmorals.org data, show these characteristics, using the Schwartz Values Scale, comparing liberals, libertarians, and conservatives. Notice that while self-direction is valued highly in all groups, it is highest in libertarians, and the difference between self-direction and the next highest value, is greatest for libertarians. Liberals score higher in self-direction than conservatives.
In the above graph, libertarians also show a relatively high desire for stimulation (equal to liberals, higher than conservatives) and a relatively low value placed on tradition and conformity. This is consistent with the idea that libertarians are experience seekers, an idea further confirmed by the below graph of libertarian big five personality dimensions, where libertarians score relatively high (similar to liberals) on openness to experience.
Conover writes a fair amount about the motivation that made him (who seems to lean liberal) seek to experience life as a tramp:
I hit the rails to learn and because, as Lonny said, when you become afraid to die, you become afraid to live. Confronted by the prospect of entering a laid-out and set-up life largely devoid of the need to be resourceful, I had desired an activity with an unpredictable outcome. Risk-taking, in a way, seemed its own reward.
Notice how in the above graph, libertarians score relatively low in agreeableness (e.g. "likes to cooperate with others"). That converges with the below measure of psychological reactance (e.g. "I become angry when my freedom of choice is restricted").
As Conover writes -
To understand tramps...you have to understand the idea that people cannot always do what they are told. Maybe you are told to get a job, but there aren't any; maybe you return from a crazy war and are told to carry on as though nothing ever happened...Many tramps' careers on the road began when the tramp told society, "You can't fire me-- I quit!"
There may indeed be a lot of overlap between the tea party movement and traditional republicans. But that doesn't mean that there isn't something that liberals can't identify with in the American libertarian. Both groups share a desire to escape established structure (liberals score higher than conservatives on reactance) and seek new experiences (high openness to experience scores), and I bet Rolling Nowhere, with it's portrait of individuals who have escaped life's routines, living by their own resourcefulness, is the kind of book that would appeal to many members of both groups.
- Ravi Iyer
How to publish a Replication of Disgust & Big Five Personality Trait Correlations
I have recently been following a discussion in my discipline about the peer review process, which led me to this very interesting paper about the history of and alternatives to the peer review process in psychology.
At the same time, I've been working with colleagues on a paper about experiential vs. material purchasing styles, for which we have found convergent correlations all suggesting that experiential purchasers are dispositionally motivated towards seeking new, stimulating experiences to promote positive emotion, while material purchasers often seek to avoid negative emotions. This is supported by the fact that, in the YourMorals.org dataset, experiential purchasers report higher levels of openness to experience, lower levels of neuroticism (both measured by the Big Five Personality Inventory), and lower levels of disgust (as measured by the Disgust Scale). The disgust finding does not necessarily fit with the idea that experiential purchasing is related to seeking new experiences, unless one looks at the literature on disgust. In particular, this study theorized about such a relationship and confirmed it by reporting correlations between disgust and big five personality dimensions.
It occurred to me that I could contribute to the original studies' findings, by examining the same correlations in our dataset, using a more diverse and far larger sample, and perhaps even including some internal cross-validation. The results are summarized in the table below.
Disgust Scale Correlations with Big Five Personality Traits
The main hypothesis of the original study actually dealt with the two robust relationships found in our dataset, specifically that disgust is negatively related to openness to experience and positively related to neuroticism. In all, these two relationships stand out as robust across groups and in both studies. Interestingly, the correlation between openness to experience and disgust is weaker in the two most 'rational' groups, edge.org and libertarians, which might be worth pursuing later. Given the smaller sample size and restricted diversity of the original study, I'd be inclined to say that conscientiousness and agreeableness are not robust correlates of disgust, though this could be an effect of the fact that yourmorals.org uses a different measures of Big Five personality traits from the original study.
Can I publish this finding? It's only correlational and says nothing about causality. It really doesn't say much that is new, but rather confirms the original study, more or less. Still, the 26 papers which cited the original study would be slightly more improved if they could cite this finding as well, since it's the same basic study with a different (larger and more diverse) sample. This is where the discussion of the peer review system converges with this analysis. According to this paper, "many natural science fields operate on a norm that submissions should be accepted unless they are patently wrong." In contrast, psychology papers are often rejected, not because they are wrong, but because they are not interesting or novel enough.
The paper and the listserve discussion bring up many points related to this, but one relevant one to this finding is that it is hard to build a cumulative science when you don't reward replication, but instead reward novelty. The end result is that you end up with a series of slightly different perspectives on the same subjects, all named differently, where authors are constantly trying to come up with something new rather than building on something existing. This may help academics, but it makes it very difficult for these theories to be used in the real world. Any research on humans is likely flawed in some way. Can anybody do double-blind experiments on representative samples of people with behavioral measures? The public is wisely skeptical of any social science finding as are academics...but the solution might lie in publishing more replications rather than in restricting the publication process toward the mythical goal of the perfect, novel study. No single study proves anything when dealing with research on people. It's the convergence of lots of studies that might potentially be convincing enough to outsiders.
- Ravi Iyer
ps. if anyone wants to write this up and publish it traditionally, feel free to contact me