Having your cake and eating it too: Representativeness and the YourMorals Data

July 28th, 2010 by Brad

[This is the first in a several part series on creating representative samples from convenience sampling data]

Earlier Jon Haidt discussed the “problem” of representativeness of the YourMorals data and concluded that it wasn’t such a problem after all. Convenience samples drawn from the internet can produce reliable data. This is particularly true when we are more interested in taking valid measurements than in painting a representative picture of some underlying population.

But what if we would also like to know something about the underlying population? If we had data that were representative of the country as a whole, we would be able to ask a new set of questions. Does knowing where the states fall in terms of their Moral Foundations tell us anything about voting behavior? We might expect scores on the purity foundation to explain state-level attitudes about gay marriage or the fairness foundation to explain attitudes about tax policy. To answer these kinds of questions, we need representative samples (also see Jesse Graham’s comment in the above link).

In sampling theory, the gold standard is the probability sample. When all individuals in the population have a known (but not necessarily equal) probability of being included in the sampling frame, we can construct reliable estimates of the population parameters and, given sufficient sample size, be confident that these estimates are within some distance of the true values in the population. However, the central assumptions of sampling theory are violated in convenience sampling (but see this discussion of the representation problems in traditional “random” sample polls).

First, we would like to get a sense of how the YourMorals data stacks up against other population measures. We collected data on several demographic characteristics of individuals in the YourMorals dataset. We can easily compare these against population values collected from the census or other representative samples.

One area where we can clearly see the representation problems in the YourMorals data is self-reported ideology. Considering only U.S. respondents for the time being (as all of the following analyses do), recent national samples put the proportion of people who consider themselves “liberal” at between 18 and 22 per cent. In the YourMorals data, this figure is nearly 65 percent.* Given this skew in the data, we might be hesitant in trying to make inferences about the general population from a sample that looks so much different.

The figures below show how the YourMorals data compares with the population values across a handful of demographic and attitudinal variables.

Figure 1

Source: Pew Center for the People and the Press, 2001-2008

This figure shows how even with a significant intercept shift (almost 50 points), the rank ordering of the states stays pretty close to the same. This is encouraging as it means we are not drawing the same type of individual from each state. Put differently, knowing the state that an individual resides in tells us something about the probability that he or she identifies as a liberal. What we would not want to see here would be a horizontal line (indicating no relationship).

Figure 2

Source: American Community Survey, 2006-2008

Figure 3

Source: American Community Survey, 2006-2008

With race it is much the same story as ideology. For whites, there is a substantial intercept shift (almost 70 points), but states with larger white populations also are proportionally more white in the YourMorals data. The data for African Americans is noisier (there were fewer than 900 in the sample of over 60,000), but shows the same pattern. Here there is not a large intercept shift (as we have reached the floor of the data), but we see the same kind of increasing pattern.

Figure 4

Source: American Community Survey, 2006-2008

With respect to education, the data are further afield. The figure shows that the YourMorals sample is significantly more educated than the general population, but it becomes more difficult to draw a convincing trend line through the data. Individuals who came from states with higher levels of education were only marginally more likely to be highly educated themselves.

So where does all of this leave us? It is obvious from the plots that the individuals who self-selected into the YourMorals data look very different than the general population. It would clearly be inappropriate to use the raw data in trying to make inferences about the general population parameters (average levels of a particular foundation in a particular state, for example). The sample is much more liberal, highly educated, and white than the general population. But it is not as bad as it could be. The worst-case scenario would show uniformly weird sample across the states. Instead, what we saw in the figures above is a picture that is more-or-less proportionally correct. It is encouraging that the general relationships hold up.

All of this is not to say that we should throw out the analyses presented elsewhere in this blog and in publications based on the YourMorals data. If we condition on ideology (which we saw was particularly skewed) and make statements like “Liberals generally score higher than conservatives on the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations,” we are probably treading on safe ground.

In the next few posts, I will be revisiting the question of how to construct a representative picture from a convenience sample.

*Beyond the obvious sampling issues, there are a few other problems with directly comparing the measure of ideology in YourMorals with that in nationally representative samples. First, there is a mode difference that could account for some of the discrepancy (although certainly not all or even a very significant portion of it). Another (and more serious) difference between nationally representative samples and the YourMorals data is the choice of a seven point scale rather than a five point scale. Five point scales are used more regularly in telephone samples with the options being “Very Conservative,” “Conservative,” “Moderate,” “Liberal,” and “Very Liberal.” The YourMorals data includes options for “Slightly liberal” and “Slightly Conservative” as well as “Libertarian” and “other” categories. The 65 percent figure lumps all of the “liberals” together. If you believe that the “slightly liberal” respondents might have self-identified as “Moderate” given fewer options, the proportion turns out to be just over 50.

Posted in Uncategorized, yourmorals.org | No Comments »
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On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics

July 23rd, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

Today’s lead story from Politico, The Age of Rage, probably summarizes a lot of what people think is wrong with politics. Rather than make good policy, politicians and media are more concerned with scoring points for their political ideology (hyperpartisanship). However, as the Politico article points out, their actions are largely driven by the general populace. Politicians and media reflect what people respond to, which happens to be hyperpartisanship, rather than causing the incivility we see.

…there are two big incentives that drive behavior at the intersection where politics meets media. One is public attention. The other is money. Experience shows there’s lots more of both to be had by engaging in extreme partisan behavior.

Fox News has soared on the strength of commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, both of whom fanned the Sherrod story on the strength of the misleading Breitbart video. (A Fox senior executive, by contrast, urged the news side of the operation to get Sherrod’s response before going with the story, The Washington Post reported.) On the left, MSNBC is trying to emulate the success of primetime partisanship. Meanwhile, CNN, which has largely strived toward a neutral ideological posture, is battling steady relative declines in its audience.

If media executives hunger for ratings, politicians hunger for campaign cash and fame.

Obama put it best earlier this year, after Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “you lie” during the president’s State of the Union speech. “The easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude,” the president told ABC News.

Indeed, at first Wilson seemed embarrassed and apologized for his outburst. But within days, Wilson and his opponent were both flooded with campaign contributions; Wilson took in more than $700,000 in the immediate aftermath of his outburst and was a guest of honor on Hannity’s show and Fox News Sunday.

We reward politicians and news organizations, with our attention and our money, that engage in the very incivility that makes politics so ugly. This is true on both sides of the aisle.

At the recent meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Linda Skitka gave a talk which puts a lot of this in perspective for me. Her lab studies the dark side of moral conviction, which I call hypermoralism in the hope that the term catches on. Roy Baumeister studies a similar concept, idealistic evil. In Skitka’s talk, she demonstrates in a Chinese sample that political intolerance (e.g. “people with different positions than your own about this issue should be allowed to have their phones tapped by the Chinese government”) and social intolerance (e.g. “How willing would you be to have someone who did not share your views on this issue as a close personal friend?”) were best predicted by moral conviction (e.g. “To what extent are your feelings about this issue or policy based on your fundamental beliefs about right and wrong?”).  When controlling for moral conviction, all other variables (e.g. demographics, political position, attitude importance, and attitude strength) were all insignificant predictors of social and political intolerance. I look forward to seeing how this replicates on a US sample and how political intolerance is operationalized. Perhaps something along the lines of liberal consideration of censoring Fox news or conservative publication of what many would consider private discussion would make good operationalizations of political intolerance as they mirror what we see in reality, where considerations of privacy, context, and free speech are considered secondary to partisanship. Moral conviction may underlie the hyperpartisanship that Politico talks about.

Hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism may be another instance of the effects of what evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett calls “Supernormal Stimuli”. As the Wall Street Journal writes about her book:

As Ms. Barrett notes, modern life surrounds us with supernormal stimuli. An example: Humans evolved strong tastes for fats and sweets, tastes that conferred a reproductive advantage in the days when starvation was common. But these tastes can be a burden when we’re confronted with such supernormal stimuli as the 400-calorie Frappuccino at Starbucks. An evolutionary adaptation that once promised survival is more likely nowadays to produce Type 2 diabetes.

Ms. Barrett pushes her thesis too far at times, but her plain-spoken disquisition makes a strong case that supernormal stimuli “can help us understand the problems of modern civilization.”

One might even argue that supernormal stimuli—or perhaps our reactions to them—are the biggest problems faced by affluent societies.

In the case of hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism, our evolved moral senses, which allow human beings to cooperate, are now subject to the stimulus which is the 24 hour news cycle and the non-stop political campaign. Moral emotions are powerful forces, which are now activated routinely, rather than rarely.

If anybody has ideas on how to escape this cycle, I would love to hear them. Humanizing and getting to know the opposition, along the lines of intergroup contact theory, is an idea. Perhaps moral emotions can be activated against hyperpartisanship itself, rather than against individual ideologies. Or maybe with greater understanding, we can all learn to recognize supernormal moral stimuli and give them less power in our lives. Ideas welcome and I’m open to operationalizing particularly promising ideas as studies to be run on yourmorals.org.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in book reviews, civil politics, consilience, hypermoralism, idealistic evil, incivility, joe wilson, news commentary, partisanship, political ideology, political psychology, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

The Psychology of the JournoList “Scandal”: Mirror Image Stereotypes

July 21st, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

As a regular reader of political blogs, I could not help but notice that a number of my favorite sites were writing about the same thing, specifically, their participation in a discussion group called JournoList, which included numerous media members such as Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight and Politico writer Ben Smith, both of whom I read with some regularity. These posts were prompted by the publication of numerous emails from this largely liberal group by a conservative blog, the Daily Caller, which recently ran this story (one of many on this topic):

On Journolist, there was rarely such thing as an honorable political disagreement between the left and right, though there were many disagreements on the left. In the view of many who’ve posted to the list-serv, conservatives aren’t simply wrong, they are evil. And while journalists are trained never to presume motive, Journolist members tend to assume that the other side is acting out of the darkest and most dishonorable motives.

Reading other people’s private emails evokes an embodied moral reaction in me. Maybe it’s motivated reasoning as a liberal myself, but I would hope that I’d find it similarly distasteful for a business to make money by posting the private emails of conservatives. Still, I think that the above paragraph is likely correct for some (not all) members of the list, along the lines of this wonderful post by Peter Ditto of UC-Irvine, concerning the ways that liberals and conservatives mirror each other in their negative attributions.  In it, he notes that a “mirror image pattern, two opposing sides in an ideological struggle having virtually identical stereotypes of each other, is a common characteristic in intergroup relations.” The idea is that when you find these mirror image perceptions, they are often more a function of partisanship and group conflict than reality.

It’s not hard to find quotes from conservatives that mirror the above observation of journolist members.  Consider this article entitled “Why does Obama hate America so badly?” My guess is that Democrats don’t hate the economy and Republicans don’t hate poor people, yet these mirror image negative attributions of malicious intent exist.

Here is the same story in graph form, using our yourmorals.org data, where liberals and conservatives rate both republicans and democrats on “warmth”…

and on “competence”….

Hardly surprising, but liberals think Republicans are cold and incompetent, while conservatives think Democrats are cold and incompetent.  (strangely, we generally think that we ourselves are both more warm and more competent than the average member of either party..:))

I’m sure that cherry picking any person’s email archive would lead to embarrassing material, but I would agree with Andrew Sullivan’s take on JournoList:

The far right is right on this: this collusion is corruption. It is no less corrupt than the comically propagandistic Fox News and the lock-step orthodoxy on the partisan right in journalism – but it is nonetheless corrupt…….

…..I’m glad Journo-list is over. It should never have been begun. I know many of its members are good and decent and fair-minded writers. But socialized groupthink is not the answer to what’s wrong with the media. It’s what’s already wrong with the media.

These mirror image negative perceptions are an inevitable part of intergroup conflict, so rather than morally judging the individuals involved for behavior that is likely quite common, I prefer to take this as a cautionary tale for all who want better policy. On both sides of the aisle, we should be seeking to recognize and reduce these biases, not amplify them through ideologically homogeneous discussions, such as what appeared to occur on JournoList.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in civil politics, conservatives, journolist, liberals, news commentary, partisanship, political psychology, unpublished results, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere

July 4th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

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

Posted in book reviews, consilience, differences between republicans and democrats, libertarians, openness to experience, political psychology, psychological reactance, ted conover, tramps, yourmorals.org | 3 Comments »

Psychological Causes of Violence in Sports Riots

June 30th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

Recently, the Los Angeles Lakers won game 7 against the Boston Celtics and there were riots in the streets of los angeles.  Below is a video of some of the scene.

This scene is not unique to Los Angeles.  In fact, riots appear to occur with regularity when sports teams win.  There were riots in Boston when the Celtics won in 2008 and riots in Los Angeles when the Lakers won in 2009 too. This seems to counter the common sense idea that people should be happy when they win, such that they are more generous with others. Happy people tend to be generous people (though the causal relationship might run in the reverse direction), not rioters.  Shouldn’t the people in the losing cities be the ones who rampage out of frustration?  Yet there is an astonishing correlation between rioting and winning in the Lakers-Celtics series and in sports rioting more generally.

A colleague of mine dug up this study (Bernhardt et al, 1998) to explain it to me and I think it’s worth sharing. It’s been replicated by others as well.  Unfortunately, the article itself is protected by the wall of the academic journal system, but the basic pattern of results is illustrated below.

Fans of Winners Experience Testosterone Increases

Basically, fans of the winning team gain testosterone, which has been linked to aggressive behavior. Fans of losing teams lose testosterone, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Winners are encouraged to compete more…losers cut their losses.

Does this same effect extend to politics?  My gut tells me no, as politics is less primal and the results develop over months, not hours.  In fact, most of the time, we know who will win before an election and so what the winners feel is relief (an idea somewhat validated by this study).  This article (fully visible by the public, since it was commendably published in an open access journal) illustrates that for some individuals, there was indeed no testosterone increase among winners, but the same decrease among losers, in the 2008 presidential election.

Another interesting resource, for those interested in the consilience of multiple views on the subject, is Bill Buford’s book, Among the Thugs, where he lives among chronic sports rioters, fans of English football.  His explanation dovetails nicely with Bernhardt et al’s research (quote thanks to this source):

I had not expected the violence to be so pleasureable….This is, if you like, the answer to the hundred-dollar question: why do young males riot every Saturday? They do it for the same reason that another generation drank too much, or smoked dope, or took hallucinogenic drugs, or behaved badly or rebelliously. Violence is their antisocial kick, their mind-altering experience, an adrenaline-induced euphoria that might be all the more powerful because it is generated by the body itself, with, I was convinced, many of the same addictive qualities that characterize synthetically produced drugs.

For more information, here is another parallel view and a link to a more general overview of the causes of violence in sports riots (unfortunately, again, full text inaccessible without a university login…hrm!…I hope someday to be in a position to publish only in open access journals).

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in book reviews, consilience, los angeles lakers, open access, political psychology, riots in boston, riots in los angeles, testosterone, yourmorals.org | 2 Comments »

On the Morality of Torture Utilitarianism

June 24th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

I personally do not believe in torture, but I have to admit that when I think of it, my mind prototypically thinks of the potential harm that might befall an innocent person caught by an unscrupulous policeman who is all too sure of his moral superiority. What would I do if I knew with 100% certainty that torture of a known murderer/rapist would save countless lives, including the lives of many people I knew and loved?

Is support for torture restricted to the evil among us (e.g. liberals who think that Dick Cheney = Darth Vader)? When individuals say that they are torturing an evil few in order to save many innocents (an argument based in Utilitarianism), are they lying about their noble goals? A recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that individuals may not be honest about their utilitarian motives. From the abstract:

The use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects is typically justified on utilitarian grounds. The present research suggests, however, that those who support such techniques are fuelled by retributive motives.

This is a very well done experimental study, which illustrates an important point about other potential motives for torture, specifically a desire for retribution or vengeance. However, it may be nitpicking or splitting hairs, but I might instead have written “those who support such techniques may also be fuelled by retributive motives.” Indeed, in the study itself, there is an increase in support for severe interrogation techniques when there is a greater likelihood that the suspect is withholding information that may save lives, especially among Republicans, the group most likely to be “those who support such techniques.” The fact that retributive motives exist, does not necessarily mean that utilitarian motives do not. One could probably design a study that shows the opposite, where utilitarian motives dominate, given the total control one has in a lab environment.

Our yourmorals.org data suggests that utilitarian motives are indeed important in predicting attitudes toward torture. There are a number of measures that tap utilitarian thinking, but the most convincing to me are the classic moral dilemmas that ask people if they are willing to take some action (e.g. flipping a switch) to save 5 innocent people at the cost of 1 innocent life. They are convincing because they are generally free of any political content or judgment about the worth or guilt of individuals.  Below is a graph relating responses to these dilemmas to attitudes toward torture.  Higher scores on the Y axis indicate more willingness to sacrifice 1 life for 5.  Higher scores on the X axis indicate willingness to support torture in more situations.

Torture and Utilitarian Moral Judgments are positively correlated

There is a fairly robust positive correlation between utilitarian judgments on these dilemmas and support for torture (the dip on the far right for liberals is likely due to there being such a small number of liberals who think torture is often justified).

If I look at other utilitarian measures such as moral idealism (using the Ethics Position Questionnaire – e.g. “The existence of potential harm to others is always wrong, irrespective of the benefits to be gained.”, r=-.35) or moral maximizing (using an adapted version of Schwartz’s maximizing-satisficing scale – e.g. “In choosing a moral action, one should never settle for a morallyimperfect action.”, r=-.15), you find the same relationship. Controlling for political affiliation and beliefs about punishment and disposition toward vengeance, one still finds significant relationships between utilitarianism and support for torture.

My take home. Part of promoting civil politics is to take people at their word for their motives, rather than questioning them. There may indeed be some vengeful motive behind torture…but there are utilitarian motives as well and those of us who dislike torture might actually get further confronting torture on utilitarian grounds rather than attempting to question the motives of those who believe in torture.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in civil politics, harsh interrogation techniques, moral maximizing, moral psychology, political psychology, torture, unpublished results, utilitarianism, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

What can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities cannot?

June 15th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

Some colleagues of mine were fortunate enough to gather in Herzilaya, Israel for a conference on morality, the product of which is publicly available online. As I reach the end of my graduate school career, I find myself wondering about the greater purpose of some of the research psychologists do and I found particular resonance in this chapter from the conference, Paradigm Assumptions About Moral Behavior: An Empirical Battle Royal by Lawrence J. Walker, Jeremy A. Frimer, & William L. Dunlop of the University of British Columbia.

What interested me was not the data, but the critique of how psychologists attempt to illuminate the human condition.  A few quotes from the chapter summarize the points I’d like to emphasize.

Psychologists often study phenomena in isolated, artificial environments, which allows researchers to necessarily isolate variables of interest, but….

Aiming to isolate phenomena, scholars in this research enterprise are prone to devise somewhat peculiar and overly constrained assessments of moral functioning that are remote from everyday moral experience.
Psychologists then generalize these findings to natural settings that are ‘messy’ with extraneous factors.
A gold nugget in Gilligan’s (1982) critique of moral psychology was her skepticism concerning such constrained dilemmas and her advocacy for assessing moral judgment more naturalistically, tapping moral problems from individuals’ own experience.
If 60% of participants in a study do X in situation Y, psychologists are prone to saying that “people” tend to do X in situation Y, not addressing the 40% who did not do that.  Or in experiments, it may be said that Y causes X, rather than saying that Y can sometimes cause X.
Another paradigmatic assumption to which we draw attention asserts that people are psychologically “cut from the same cloth,” uniformly operating by the same moral psychological
processes. This assumption is manifest in the frequent reliance on a single type of research participant (e.g., undergraduate students garnering course credit), a lack of consideration for
individual differences, and a homogenizing “people” label.
Sometimes psychologists point out such methodological flaws with the conclusion that psychologists need to do more rigorous research. I would say that instead, perhaps there are inherent limits on how convincing any single piece of research can be. Published research can be seen as evidence to be shared, rather than conclusive final words on a subject, which they rarely are when dealing with something as complex as human behavior. Similarly, the author’s conclusion is not to throw out psychological research, but rather to use “multiple lenses” on the same phenomena before concluding anything.
Our proposal contends that lab experimentation should be balanced with real-world observation of socially significant affairs and that morally relevant aspects of personality should
be tapped across all levels of personality description. Different methodologies should be mutually informative. Multiple lenses on the same phenomena contribute to a more comprehensive understanding, whereas divergent findings across methodologies hearken our attention.

So what can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities, or simply reading the newspaper thoughtfully, cannot?  I would say not much, but rather that psychology can help buttress what can be learned by other methods and vice versa. They both get at the same questions. A colleague of mine once shared that he thinks of psychology studies as statistical parables, in the same way that stories of the real or fictional world provide us with different kinds of parables. Anyone who has read a really good novel might believe Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote that “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”

The authors I quote above want us to use multiple lenses to understand the human condition, referring to the lenses that psychologists might use (different samples, different methods). I would further extend that analogy to all fields that attempt to understand the human condition, such as literature and the humanities, but also just reading the news. This is not to say that there is not something powerful about quantitative analysis and methodologically rigorous psychological research. But as I step back from the research, I find that I’m only convinced by findings where there is a web of evidence, of the type that one researcher, paper, study, method, or discipline, could never produce…where the statistical parable has been replicated in other ways by other people and is echoed in situations I’ve faced and news stories I’ve read about. Fortunately, the internet and semantic web technologies promise to make it easier to discover such webs of evidence…but that’s a subject for another post.

If you have the patience, it’s worth reading the results of the conference in Herzilaya, but if not, perhaps I’ll make a practice of summarizing some of the other chapters as I read them. Social psychology can be unfortunately unintelligible, in ways that literature is not.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in business of psychology, consilience, moral behavior, moral psychology, research psychologists, social psychology, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

Armando Galarraga demonstrates the relationship between happiness and forgiveness

June 3rd, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

Watching baseball can be a frivolous pursuit and a distraction from psychology research, but last night something happened which demonstrated a psychological finding far more effectively than any study or paper.

Armando Galarraga, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, was very close to pitching a perfect game. For non-baseball fans, its a very rare occurrence, comparable to other rare unpredictable events that take some amount of skill and luck, like bowling 300 or climbing Mount Everest and seeing the perfect sunset. Its something you can work hard for, but even the best of pitchers may not achieve the feat.

On the very last batter that Galarraga had to get out, a close play occurred at first base, and the umpire incorrectly ruled the batter safe. TV replays have confirmed that the batter was actually out, and the umpire agrees he made a mistake. Still, Galarraga has been deprived of his perfect game.

Perfect games happen and personally, I dont normally care that much. But the reaction of Galarraga will make me a fan of his for life. Does anyone remember Roberto Alomar spitting at an umpire because of a relatively inconsequential strike call? Some have called Galarraga the anti-Alomar for his forgiving reaction. Watch how Galarraga smiles after the play or watch his reaction in the below video, talking about it later.

Galarraga’s remarkably calm and forgiving reaction has led to a series of articles talking about him, probably a lot more than if he had completed his perfect game. He plans to shake hands publicly with Jim Joyce, the umpire who missed the call, and present him with the lineup card in the next game, in a public show of forgiveness in front of thousands of fans who might otherwise be irate at Joyce the entire next game.

Personally, I learned something from Galaragga’s reaction that I’ll take with me the next time I am wronged. Its something subtle and true about the power of forgiveness…something that I always know, but often dont have the strength or awareness to practice. Galaragga is not just reducing the amount of animosity in the world, but he is also ensuring his own happiness.

Studies confirm the relationship between being a forgiving person and being a happier person (Maltby, Day, Barber, 2005). Below is a graph of our yourmorals.org data showing the relationship between forgiveness of others (using the Heartland Forgiveness Scale – “I continue to punish a person who has done something that I think is wrong.”) and satisfaction with life (“The conditions of my life are excellent.”). As in the Maltby et. al study, forgiving people are indeed happier.

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It may not have been a perfect game….but it was as close to a perfect reaction as we generally see and I’m hopeful this story will be remembered far more than if an actual perfect game had occurred. It’s a stark contrast to the ugliness we often see in most news and politics. As Galarraga put it himself, everything happens for a reason.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in armando galarraga, jim joyce, news commentary, pitching a perfect game, positive psychology, power of forgiveness, replications of other studies, roberto alomar, unpublished results, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

The Purity Foundation’s Global Influence

May 22nd, 2010 by Jonathan Haidt

The purity foundation is the hardest one of our five foundations of morality for most secular Westerners to understand. It is also the best one to examine when you find yourself puzzled by the odd things that people and nations do, particularly if those things involve sexuality or sanctity. For example, I was reading the New York Times yesterday and was struck by fact that there were three major purity stories in the international section:

18 Orgies Later, Chinese Swinger Gets Prison Bed

Gay Couple in Malawi Get Maximum Sentence of 14 Years in Prison

Pakistan Widens Online Ban to Include YouTube

All of these actions seem absurd and outrageous from either a utilitarian point of view or a human rights point of view, because none of the actions being punished had harmed anyone. I don’t want to defend any of the three repressive actions; I too think the authorities were wrong in each case. I just want to point out that in all three stories the authorities are either directly motivated by concerns about purity/sanctity, or else they are responding to political pressures from citizens or factions that are motivated by purity/sanctity concerns. (The deepest analysis of purity/sanctity is found in Richard Shweder’s discussion of the “ethics of divinity” in this article.)

We have a paper under review in which we examine which moral foundations underlie people’s attitudes about a broad range of political issues, from flag burning to cloning to gay marriage. The big surprise in our data was that people’s scores on the purity foundation were excellent predictors, above and beyond self-ratings of politics, for many of these issues — and not just the ones that related to sexuality. Purity is emerging as the “magic foundation” — the one that exerts a pervasive but often unrecognized influence on moral and political judgment and behavior. The paper is titled:

The Ties that Bind: How Five Moral Concerns Organize and Explain Political Attitudes

The lead author is Sena Koleva. You can find a copy of the manuscript on this page, publication IIe. If you read it, it might help you understand the international section of your newspaper, just as it helps you understand culture-war issues in your own nation.

—Jon Haidt

Posted in Purity/Sanctity/Disgust, disgust, moral foundations, news commentary, political behavior, purity, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

Wanted: Motivated Academic Writers to Help Publish Our Data

May 11th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

Thanks to the publicity which moral psychology (and specifically Jon Haidt’s work) has begun to receive, along with the average person’s insatiable appetite for knowledge about themselves, facilitated by the internet, we have collected a truly unique dataset at yourmorals.org. It is a large community sample and includes some reaction time data. It is non-representative (skewed liberal and educated), but includes individuals from diverse trackable sources such that some robustness analysis is possible.  However, even if we wanted to (an open question), it would be impossible for those of us who collected this data to formally publish all the results. Hence, we would like to potentially solicit your help.

Academic publishing is not easy. In psychology (though we’d be happy to publish outside of psychology), it’s not enough just to have a valid results, but the results often have to be novel as well. Therefore, many replication studies may not be publishable or may only be publishable in lesser known journals or just on this blog. That doesn’t necessarily make that endeavor unworthwhile, as replication, or the failure to replicate, is an essential part of the scientific method, but we want people to know what they are getting into. We’re open to anyone who is motivated to publish in peer reviewed journals, and there is no inherent reason that limits this to academics. However, it’s a labor intensive process with no monetary reward, so it’s quite possible that only those with an eye toward building an academic CV might be interested.

Here is a running list of potentially publishable results which are in our publication queue, but there are many more possibilities. We are open to proposals on a variety of topics. Some of you might be interested in a specific topic and might find this list of measures useful in determining if we have data on that topic.  Data might potentially serve as the 1st study in a 3 study package where a community sample reinforces the results of a lab experiment, or as convergent evidence in something you already are working on. In rare cases, we may even be willing to collect new data using additional measures, even including experimental methods, if your ideas are compelling enough. However, there are only so many resources we have and the degree of effort required is definitely a consideration, balanced against the contribution which could be made. Also bear in mind that some number of papers are already in progress, and it may be possible that your idea is already being worked on.

If you are interested, please use this form to contact me as it has important questions to be answered. Beginning any publication process is a commitment and we would obviously like to work on projects that have successful conclusions. Thanks for your potential interest.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in business of psychology, publication opportunities, replications of other studies, unpublished results, yourmorals.org | No Comments »
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