We all witnessed the Tea Party’s hard-line position on the standoff leading up to the debt ceiling crisis — 68% of Tea Partiers wanted lawmakers to stand firm on their principles, even at the risk of government shut-down.  Some have argued that, along with their fiscally conservative values, their willingness to take such a stand, and their unwillingness to compromise, have become the defining features of the entire movement.  However, it is not entirely clear why Tea Partiers might be predisposed to these attitudes about compromise.  Although it is impossible to say that any one of the following variables caused or even contributed to any specific political behavior, it is nonetheless compelling to examine how a number of psychological variables might be related to Tea Partiers’ hard-line stance on compromise.

Most notably, Tea Party supporters are highly reactant, as measured on the Hong Reactance Scale. Reactance is an emotional resistance to the influence of others, and often manifests as defiance to attempted persuasion.  Our data show that Tea Party supporters express consistently high levels of this trait, much like libertarians.  They also show low levels of empathy, or the ability to share the feelings of others (much like conservatives and libertarians, as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index).  Taken together, these two traits may preclude one from a willingness to compromise: a reactive person is highly motivated to disagree with threatening others, and a person who lacks empathy is unlikely to fully consider or appreciate his opponents’ point-of-view.

These findings could also be said of libertarians, but unlike libertarians, Tea Party supporters score low on the Need for Cognition Scale.  This scale measures the extent to which people engage in and enjoy effortful thinking.  Low levels of Need for Cognition are associated with heuristic thinking styles and a lower likelihood of discounting erroneous intuitions and judgments.  As a result, groups that rely less on deliberative thinking styles (i.e., groups with lower Need for Cognition) may be more steadfast in their intuitive convictions, and less receptive to reconsideration.

Another interesting finding is that Tea Party supporters are very sensitive to social desirability concerns, as measured by the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale.  In other words, when presented with true-false questions about oneself that were either socially acceptable but unlikely, or socially unacceptable but likely, Tea Party supporters responded in the most self-promoting fashion.  Their results on the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding also showed relatively high scores on a related measure of self-deceptive enhancement, suggesting that these responses reflected internal beliefs, rather than intentionally over-reported ones.

Along the same lines, Tea Party supporters were also most likely to demonstrate the better-than-average effect.  That is, more than other groups, they reported possessing positive traits more than the average person, and negative traits less than the average person.  Although this effect is pervasive (e.g., over 93% of people report being above-average drivers), Tea Party supporters demonstrated the highest level of this bias compared to other political groups.

So what does this tell us about Tea Party psychology?  Tea Party supporters have a reactant and intuitive reasoning style, low levels of empathy, and they display a self-enhancing/over-confident style of evaluating themselves.  Could these psychological predispositions play an important role in Tea Partiers’ political behavior, particularly in their principled stands/resistance to compromise on their core values?

Although certainly possible, it would obviously be unwise and premature to claim a causal connection between these factors and any specific political behaviors.  Keep in mind that the analyses reported above were conducted with Tea Party supporters, rather than Tea Party participants, who show a slightly different pattern of results (not reported here).  In my next blog post, I’ll go into more detail about a number of other key predictors of Tea Party support that I believe can help inform our understanding of Tea Party psychology.  Stay tuned.

When does ingroup love lead to outgroup hate and when does it not?  The simple answer (see this review article for more detail), is that when people think of a situation in competitive zero-sum terms, they are likely to highly correlate.  Think of the difference between a rock concert and a baseball game.  If you are at a Prince concert, you don’t shout slogans about how much Madonna sucks.  There is no competitive frame.  But a “yankees suck” chant can occur anywhere in Boston or inside the men’s room of Comerica Park.

Politics is certainly a zero-sum game and for some liberals and conservatives, anything which is a congruent with either the politicians or beliefs of the other side is seen as bad.  So some conservatives have been reluctant to credit Obama and some liberals are reluctant to endorse patriotic zeal.  Indeed, in our yourmorals.org data, identification with your country (using a subscale of Sam McFarland’s Identification with All Humanity scale) is negatively correlated with liberal identification.

However, given that ingroup love and outgroup hate are not always correlated, and in this case, Bin Laden is not popular in the Arab world, cases where ingroup love leads to outgroup hate are likely to be outliers.  Most people see it as love for their country, justice, and/or a blow for terrorists, not as a win in a larger battle against non-Americans.  One could see it as a victory for the type of universalism that liberals desire, given that what Bin Laden wanted most was a competitive zero-sum conflict with the west.  Indeed, patriotism itself has an empathic component to it, correlating with Empathic Concern (e.g. “I would describe myself as a pretty soft-hearted person”, Davis, 1983) scores (see below).

I am generally liberal and have prototypically liberal angst about celebrating any death.  But in the case of the collective unity we are seeing, I think liberals should take yes for an answer to our universalist impulses and appreciate the resulting unity.  There are forces in the world (e.g. selfishness, competition, or threat) that cause us to restrict our circle of concern to ourselves and those immediately around us and there are forces in the world that cause us to expand our circle of concern and care.  I welcome the celebrations, because I’m hopeful this is a case of the latter.

- Ravi Iyer

These are not just data points, but actual human beings.  One human being discriminated against is one human being we could serve better, even if the vast majority of under-representation is due to self-selection.

Ravi exemplifies the compassion and open-mindedness of liberalism at its best. (In fact, his name was the 4th hit in my Google search for “liberal social psychologist”). In an effort to appeal to compassion from others, I have gathered here selections from the dozens of emails I’ve received in the weeks since my talk was publicized. My talk included the phrase “Closeted Conservatives.”  I made no effort to solicit such reports, and I have received no emails from conservatives who deny that they have faced difficulties because of their political identity. I have edited these reports only to shorten them. I obtained permission from all of the writers to post their words anonymously. All are graduate students or faculty in the social sciences, mostly in social psychology.

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As a closet conservative minority I read the transcript of your talk with great interest and gratitude…  Everything you describe fits my experience perfectly.  As a well liked minority, I experience what you describe even more intensely.  My career is beginning to take off, and I find myself needing to hold my tongue more than ever.  I am travelling and publishing, started my Ph.D. at an elite university… but I find myself hiding my intellectual views and values every single day…. Like everyone else you have heard from I prefer anonymity for my own survival.

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I can’t begin to tell you how difficult it was for me in graduate school, because I am not a liberal Democrat. As one example, following Bush’s defeat of Kerry, one of my professors would email me every time a soldier’s death in Iraq made the headlines; he would call me out, publicly blaming me for not supporting Kerry in the election.

I was a reasonably successful graduate student, but the political ecology became too uncomfortable for me. Instead of seeking the professorship that I once worked toward, I am now leaving academia for a job in industry. Universities boast about actively seeking to ever-increase the numbers of under-represented minorities in their ranks. Although, as a fiscal conservative, I have found my minority political beliefs abjectly unwelcome. While articles in my college alumni magazine celebrate the wonderful diversity and universal acceptation present on campus, they fail to mention the one exception: those whose political beliefs are not in lock-step with theirs.

I hope that a community of scientists would welcome a debate of ideas. Isn’t that how we learn and move forward our respective fields? Since when are academics so afraid of a dissenting opinion? If the political climate inside the graduate school is only comfortable to liberal Democrats, then only liberal Democrats will remain. This is not only in Berkeley and Madison, this is in many of our universities…  Hopefully, looking forward, your efforts will make room for someone whose views are in the minority to remain an academic and not leave for more accepting pastures.

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I am a conservative social psychologist. I would describe myself as socially moderately liberal but very fiscally conservative. My research focuses on the malleability of stereotyping and prejudice.  I can also attest to the “hostile environment” when one is a conservative amongst the many liberal social psychologists.  While in graduate school, I was one of two conservatives within the whole psychology department.  Thus, that is when I quickly learned to avoid political discussions and to keep my opinions to myself.  For instance, I once had a professor yell at me and refuse to speak to me for two days all because I was respectfully critical of a political speech that he loved.  For this reason, I have actually counseled some of my past undergraduate students about how to better deal with being a conservative in academia!

I have often tried to respectfully disagree or debate with some of my very liberal social colleagues without much success.  I’ve often been told that as a social psychologist I should “know better” or that they are “disappointed” in me for holding an opinion that differed from theirs. The whole situation is one that continuously frustrates me as I strongly believe that the ability to avoid emotional moral reasoning is one of the biggest principles towards critical thinking.  That point, however, seems to be ignored time and time again.  Still, I refuse to quit.  After all, I would hope that the abundant research on stereotypes, prejudice, and intergroup relations would help social psychologists carefully evaluate their own stereotypes and biases that they hold against conservatives.

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As a student at ________University (in the UK) I read with interest an article about your latest research relating to bias among academics. I completely agree, and I share the sentiments expressed by your students who are ‘in the closet’. I am one of them. In England, where cuts to Higher Education are framed by those on the left as being ideologically driven, the currency of liberal rhetoric is becoming increasingly valued. Those who support measures to increase student fees, typically those of the right such as me (I am a fiscal conservative but a social liberal), cannot confidently or even legitimately speak up. I remember one former professor, who is a member of the Conservative Party in the UK, told me that students and colleagues have such an ill-conceived idea of centre-right politics that he might as well be a member of the SS since anything which isn’t left-wing is so poorly regarded by the majority. It is my opinion that the dominance of left-wing opinion drowns out those with an alternative view, and institutions which should be fostering intellectual debates about the future of our country are in fact creating an intellectual vacuum. It is interesting that your findings, in my opinion at least, are not confined to a single country but can be found in higher education institutions across the Pond. I think it is a shame: we are less enriched because of it.

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I’ve got a Ph.D. in Experimental Psych – emphasis in Social. But I don’t do much in Social psychology any more. I’m sure the reasons are multiple and varied – but I believe one of them is the lack of comfort I feel around my social psych colleagues. I’m an evangelical Christian. I don’t know if “conservative” is the best label or not, perhaps libertarian would be better. I’m certainly liberal in many ways as well. But as I reflect on where my sense of discomfort comes from I would probably most directly finger the implied belief that I perceive most of my colleagues hold – and that is a belief in the inability that a person of faith could be a real scientist, ostensibly because they would not be able to “tolerate” that truth, so to speak. This notion that there is an inherent conflict between a Christian worldview and a pursuit for truth is so pronounced that it makes it very hard to even bother with trying to combat it.

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I’m currently a Ph.D. student in a department of sociology…  I’m actually quite liberal on both social and fiscal issues.  Prior to enrolling in the sociology Ph.D. program I served as a police officer in a large city.  But, after only a few weeks in graduate school, I began to hide this fact from others and never spoke about it openly.  Colleagues were looking at me and interacting with me differently than other students.  I finally realized that I was being “labeled” a conservative before people had even spoken to me.  It was astonishing: even being LABELED conservative, regardless of whether I actually was conservative or not, had become detrimental to my experience in the department.  I presume this label was applied to me since many police officers are very conservative.  However, I had become the victim of the very type of negative labeling that these academics would pride themselves on trying to fight…

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I am a conservative, and like the students you mentioned, I felt very frustrated during my time in grad school. All of the faculty members were liberal, and they constantly made political jokes and comments, assuming that we all shared their ideology… I had originally wanted to do my dissertation on an ideological topic, but my advisor kind of steered me away from that. …

This specific issue affected me so much during my graduate school years, that it actually steered me away from research, and I took a teaching position at a local community college after graduation. Of course, I now see the same exact situation at my community college. It seems that “everyone” (including my department head and dean) is very socially liberal, and the other faculty constantly make fun of conservatives and bad-mouth them, assuming that I am a liberal–like everyone else! I do feel that even at the community college level, I must keep my views to myself or risk being discriminated against.

I do think (in fact I KNOW) that conservatives can bring an important alternative voice to the science of psychology. I have seen many instances of bias in the research that is being done, and in the interpretation of specific findings (although researchers can be blind to this phenomenon because of their ideology!) I do believe that in order to further social psychology as a science, this alternative and critical voice that is missing must eventually be heard. I wanted to write you to let you know that by speaking up, you are providing a voice for individuals like me (who have felt excluded for a very long time)!

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Whatever the reason for the underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology, and in the social sciences more generally, the near-total absence of conservatives has allowed a tribal moral community to develop in many fields. Those who don’t share the same sacred values must either hide, leave, or live stigmatized lives with stunted career prospects. These are real people. We should do what we can to break up the moral force field and welcome them in.

Here at yourmorals.org, we have begun to address this question.  Over the past few months, we asked over 1400 visitors to indicate the strength of their support for the Tea Party movement.  Of the 9% who scored near the top of our scale, approximately two-thirds had previously identified as conservatives and about one-third had identified as libertarians.

So how do the moral values of these Tea Party supporters compare to conservatives and libertarians?  We found that they indeed showed a mix of both conservative and libertarian moral values.  On the foundations of Harm and Fairness, TP supporters recreated the libertarian pattern that is described in detail by Iyer et al. – that is, they scored even lower than conservatives on both of these foundations.  However, TP supporters showed a heightened sensitivity to the foundations of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity, forming a pattern that is nearly identical to that of conservatives.  The finding that TP supporters are low on Harm and Fairness, and high on Ingroup, Authority, and Purity, clearly distinguishes them from traditional libertarians in the moral domain.  Instead, they appear to endorse a slightly inflated form of traditional conservative moral beliefs.

We also examined how Tea Party supporters scored on several other moral dimensions, which were measured with newer versions of our Moral Foundations Questionnaire.  Again, they looked very similar to conservatives.  That is, they scored low on equality and high on equity (conservative “karma”); they had high scores on retribution and national sovereignty, with low scores on universalism; and they scored high on economic—but not lifestyle—liberty.

We have collected data about our users’ attitudes toward a number of current political issues and events.  So do Tea Party supporters’ scores on the moral dimensions predict specific attitudes about social and political issues?  In short, yes.

• Their high scores in economic liberty—and their conception of fairness as equity rather than equality—are likely related to their disapproval of bank regulation, their support for offshore drilling, and the perceived unimportance of healthcare reform.

• Tea Party supporters’ moral sensitivity to national sovereignty and Ingroup is consistent with their negative attitudes toward immigration, even specifically in their support for police verification of immigration status in Arizona, as well as their opposition to the mosque being built near Ground Zero.
• Their conservative stances on several social issues (e.g., same sex marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion) reflect their low moral valuations of lifestyle liberty, unlike traditional libertarians.

As can be seen in the chart above, TP supporters score nearly identically to conservatives on all of these social issues, and are clearly distinct from true libertarians, who score similarly to liberals.

As might be expected, Tea Party supporters also showed consistently unfavorable views about President Obama.  They were also most likely to believe he was born in another country, and they were the most likely to believe he was a Muslim.  Their scores on these measures were consistently lower than both libertarians and conservatives.

Our investigation into the psychology of support for the Tea Party, like the Tea Party movement itself, is still in its early stages. We are still collecting data on these topics, and these charts are only a sneak peek of our developing findings.  We are currently investigating the potential role of several additional factors in predicting Tea Party support, including attitudes about economic fairness, racial identity, and behavioral participation in the movement.

However, the current data paints a relatively clear picture of how Tea Party supporters compare to other conservatives and libertarians: their values are closely aligned to those of traditional social conservatives, but with an inflated investment in economic freedoms that occasionally resembles libertarianism.  Although the Tea Party movement is anything but a monolithic group with a single identity, the clear moral and psychological underpinnings that predict support for the movement will be a continued topic of investigation here at yourmorals.

Sean Wojcik

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

Democrats could learn something from this graph.  Perhaps inspiring empathy in the electorate will motivate liberals to be politically active more than conservatives?  and how exactly might one appeal to empathy?  Perhaps by pushing poverty reduction programs, increases in foreign non-military aid, or putting a human face on health care reform?

btw, empathic concern is measured using Davis’ Interpersonal Reactivity Index which contains questions like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”  The next obvious step is to manipulate empathy and see if it has any impact on political behavior, or at least on the intention to engage in political behavior, as there is only so much that can be inferred from this correlation.  Still, it’s a promising research lead with interesting potential applications toward inspiring political interest.

- Ravi Iyer