How is the quality of being engaged by moral beauty related to political ideology, gender, and various personality constructs, moral foundations, and values? To examine these questions the Engagement with Beauty Scale (EBS) was placed on YourMorals.org in May 2009 and 5,039 participants completed it by April 19, 2010. The EBS is a 14-item self-report scale comprised of three subscales: engagement with natural beauty (α = .81), engagement with artistic beauty (α = .86), and engagement with moral beauty (α = .91); summing those 3 subscales yields an EBS total score (α = .90).  The participants who took these measures are 52% women; 83% Americans; and had a mean age of 40.0 (SD = 15.9) (all the data reported in the table below had similar demographics).

Moral Beauty and Politics

I anticipated a substantial relationship between political ideology and engagement with beauty because previous studies with the Big 5 showed openness predicts both political liberalism and appreciation of beauty. However, the YourMorals.org data with a 7-point political ideology scale (1 = very liberal; 7 = very conservative) showed a very low correlation with the moral beauty subscale: -.05 (n = 4,672, p < .001).  The negative sign on the .05 indicates a slight liberal leaning for engaging with moral beauty, but primarily it shows that being engaged by the moral beauty of others is unrelated to political ideology. As an aside, the EBS engagement with natural beauty subscale x political ideology had a r = -.10 (p < .001) and the EBS engagement with artistic beauty subscale x political ideology had a r = -.19 (p < .001).

Moral Beauty and Gender

Women (N = 2,299) scored higher (M = 33.9; SD = 7.2) than men (N = 2,397; M = 30.6; SD = 8.3) on the EBS moral beauty subscale; t(4694) = 14.37, p < .001, d = .42; and in fact scored higher on the engagement with natural and artistic beauty subscales as well.  This aligns with Haidt and Keltner’s brief review of gender issues in their chapter on appreciation of beauty and excellence in Character Strengths and Virtues; it also reinforces a previous study I’ve done with the EBS which also found women scoring somewhat higher than men. That men tend to score lower on engagement with beauty than women may lend some empirical support to Wendy Steiner’s assertion, in her Venus in Exile. The Rejection of Beauty in 20^th-Century Art, that artists and academics of the 20^th century denigrated the classic feminine qualities of sympathy, empathy, and love that are associated with beauty in favor of the power and horror of a masculine sublime.

Because of the substantial gender difference (d = .42) on the EBS moral beauty subscale I partialled out gender in regard to correlations with a variety of relevant measures – see the table below.

What predicts engaging with moral beauty?

Note: *p<.01, **p<.001; n indicates the number of participants in the partial correlation analysis.

Summary

As can be seen in the table above, partialling out gender had very little influence on the various relationships that engaging with moral beauty has with a variety variables. Being engaged by moral beauty predicts being concerned about caring for and preventing harm to others; being agreeable across situations; valuing universalism, benevolence, and spirituality; being grateful for the small and large bounties in life; and being forgiving of and having empathy for others.

Feel free to complete an EBS at YourMorals.org and see your score.  Also, to access a copy of the EBS and related papers, see http://www.lcsc.edu/diessner/.

–Rhett Diessner

I analyzed data on our support for war and peace measure (e.g. “War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict” – Van der Linden et. al 2008) as well as a measure of trait anxiety (e.g. how accurately “get stressed out easily” describes you – from the IPPI BIS/BAS scale).  Unfortunately, the analysis I ran isn’t particularly conclusive, but part of science is hopefully sharing both conclusive and inconclusive results so that others can build on it.  There is a small significant negative correlation (r=-.166, p<.001) between trait anxiety and support for war.  From the below graph, this relationship appears strongest in moderates (perhaps because they have made up their minds less about war/peace), but is consistent across groups except libertarians.

The straight lines above are linear relationships and the curvy lines are if we allow SPSS to fit a curvy line to the data.  There is a semi-consistent result, but the slopes certainly aren’t dramatic.  I also ran the analysis for Big 5 Neuroticism and the correlation between that and support for war was even smaller (r=-.052) though still negative and significant (p=.004 since there were 3,041 participants vs. 604 in the above graph).

The take home message?  I would say that it seems likely that there is an overall slightly negative relationship between general anxiety and general support for war.  However, it seems likely (and consistent with previous research) that in a specifically threatening situation, the results might be quite different as the chronically stressed individual might perceive much greater threat and therefore support war in specific threatening cases to a greater degree than a less anxious individual.  I hope to have more to report on this in the future as to what these cases look like and I’d welcome any comments pointing to other relevant research as it’s something I’m learning about.

- Ravi Iyer