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

There is lots of psychological research on how to reduce these inhibitions (e.g. dehumanization, Milgram’s obedience studies), but there is little research (feel free to let me know if I’m wrong about this and I’ll edit this) on the positive pressures towards aggression. Among the ideas I am familiar with are Sherif’s classic studies on competition for limited resources, which are echoed in Robert Wrights’s ideas about zero-sum competitions leading to conflict. However, competition itself is just a circumstance and it doesn’t necessarily get at the psychological mechanism for group level aggression. For example, people may compete because they covet a particular resource or they may compete because they need that resource to survive.

A couple years ago, I hypothesized that individuals are moved to aggression because of an excess of moral principle, rather than the absence of moral principle. In the context of the health care reform debate, this may mean harming others “for the greater good”, which could be defined as saving unborn fetuses, providing health care to the sick, defending the constitution, fighting for liberty, or an assortment of other moral principles which have been asserted by both sides as justifying actions that might normally be considered out of bounds. In the past few days, we have seen gun threats, windows broken, the elderly disrespected, and slurs and spit hurled at politicians. These incidences of crossing boundaries in the name of a cause are not limited to one party as those in favor of health care have harassed Bart Stupak and tried to have Joe Lieberman’s wife fired. No side has a monopoly on the ugliness.

I don’t have data that speaks directly to this question, but I do have this graph to consider. At the time that I started thinking about what I call ‘hypermoralism’, I created a small educational website that I thought I’d use to gather some exploratory data as I thought about these issues. The website is still in beta but the results of the initial survey are interesting. I asked people to think of a group that committed violence against civilians (e.g. 30% picked the Nazis) and think of the motivations behind that violence. I then asked people to think of reasons why, in an extreme case, they themselves might endorse violence against civilians.

Reasons to support violence against civilians

As you can see in the above graph, people believe that notorious groups that kill civilians are amoral (“They were amoral, having no moral standards.” or “They were seeking personal gain at the expense of others.”) most of all and were willing to entertain the idea that they were hypermoral (“They were killing people who belong to a specific group to avenge a past injustice committed by other members of that group.”) as that value was still close to the midpoint of the scale. Survival (“They were killing people because they themselves would be killed if they did not.”) was a distant third motivation.

In contrast, when people considered when they would potentially resort to violence against civilians, survival (of both the individual and the family, which loaded on the same factor in a factor analysis) was the prime potential motivator. Unfortunately, for my hypothesis, moral reasons were deemed no more likely than non-moral reasons for individuals, but I still think there is something to be learned.

Clearly, these scenarios are not directly comparable as the average respondent is likely actually different than the average Nazi or member of the Khmer Rouge. It’s not just a matter of perception. But if we believe in the vast amount of research on the fundamental attribution error, which shows that we underestimate situational pressure when others do bad things, there likely is some amount of attribution error occurring in this instance. It seems likely that many individuals within these notorious groups actually did feel some survival motivation that spurred their actions. For example, Hitler was quite poor, though clearly his actions went way beyond mere survival.

In the health care reform debate, it seems that a precursor to the ugliness is indeed couching the debate in terms of a life or death struggle for survival, justifying questionable behavior.  Is America hanging by a thread? Then I suppose it’s worth taking extreme measures to save it. Are people dying every day that reform isn’t enacted? Then I suppose a few harassing calls to a congressman’s home are a small price to pay.

Politics in America can often be a zero-sum game and it is inevitable that passions will be inflamed on both sides. Liberals may have ‘won’ this vote, but we all lose when the debate gets too ugly and liberals are just as guilty of exaggeration when things don’t go their way. Indeed, I just received an email asking for help to “stop big corporations from taking over our democracy”, a reference to a recent Supreme Court decision which conservatives “won”. Such rhetorical devices may be useful, but we should all guard against where such exaggeration inevitably leads….ugliness.

- Ravi Iyer