One of the great things about doing internet research is that web servers automatically collect information that makes it very easy to do cross-sample validation.  This information can also be used to compare the people who visited us from these articles. Which group is the most liberal and how do they compare on their moral foundations scores?

First, I thought do a simple comparison of these groups.

There are fewer people from the Daily Kos to be able to be sure about conclusions (hence the larger error bars), but it looks like (unsurprisingly) all of these groups are liberal, compared to people who find us via search engines, who tend to be only slightly liberal.  Their moral foundations scores show a similarly more liberal pattern with higher Harm/Fairness scores and lower Ingroup/Authority/Purity scores.  Daily Kos readers are the most liberal followed by ThinkProgress & Alternet and then NY Times readers and finally people who found yourmorals.org via a search engine.

To me, the most interesting results are where groups appear to be equally liberal (ThinkProgress & Alternet), but have differences.  ThinkProgress visitors appear esepcially low on Purity scores, while Alternet visitors appear significantly higher on Harm/Fairness scores.

An even stronger test of the kinds people who use these websites is to control for how liberal (slight, moderate, or extreme) individuals at these sites report themselves to be and examine individuals within each group of liberals. Those results are below.

This is the graph for people who said they were “very liberal”.

These are the results for people who said they were “liberal”.

These are the results for people who said they were “slightly liberal”.  Interestingly, there weren’t enough slight liberals in the Daily Kos sample to include them in this graph.

The pattern seems fairly robust in that ThinkProgress visitors care less about Purity.  Perhaps they are less religious?  Alternet visitors seem to care more about Harm/Fairness.  Perhaps they are more empathically motivated and ThinkProgress visitors are more rationally oriented.  I don’t know enough about the liberal blogosphere to theorize well about why these differences exist, but I’m hopeful that by sharing these differences, others will be able to enlighten me.  At the very least, I hope readers of these sites will find it interesting.

Would you be interested in seeing how your group compares to others on the moral foundations questionnaire?  Or visitors to your website?  You may have noticed a small “create a group” link on our explore page of yourmorals.org which lets you create a custom URL, whereby each visitor’s graphs will not only let them compare their individual scores to other liberals/conservatives, but also to members of their group, and to compare their group scores to the average liberal/conservative.  Once you create those URLs, you can put them into blog posts, articles, or emails targeting your group.  We are still beta testing the feature, but would welcome anyone who wants to try it out and who perhaps has feedback on how we can improve it.

- Ravi Iyer

To test this idea, I thought I’d look at the data from the Good Self Scale from yourmorals.org.  In it, participants are asked how important it is to have various traits, and one of them happens to be “funny”.  If you look at the below graph, you’ll see that liberals do indeed place a tiny bit more value on being funny, compared to others (p<.01 comparing liberals to non-liberals).

It is important to note that this does not mean that liberals are indeed funnier, but rather that they place a value on being funny.  The results seem plausible given that the rest of the results conform to previous research (e.g. conservatives care about loyalty more and care about being more responsible).  Some observations:

• All groups are above the midpoint (2.5) of the scale for all traits, except for libertarians and their valuation of being generous, outgoing, and sympathetic.  Instead, libertarians score high on being intellectual and logical.
• Moderates actually score highest in terms of valuing fairness and honesty.  A very interesting finding.
• Liberals, in addition to wanting to be funny, also want to be creative, kind, sympathetic, and almost as intellectual as libertarians.
• Conservatives value being responsible, loyal, and honest (comparable to moderates for honesty).

In all, these are fair descriptions of these ideological groups, and given that the other relationships are reasonable, I would conclude that it’s also reasonable to say that liberals likely do place more value on being funny than other ideological groups.  Whether they succeed or not is another question.

- Ravi Iyer

However, some people have trouble separating their attitudes toward war from their attitudes toward soldiers, especially the more liberal among us.  As a liberal myself, I can understand the cognitive dissonance that may arise from the idea of supporting those who carry out policies that we find destructive.  On the conservative end of the spectrum, it may seem dissonant to think that people can oppose a war and still support the people involved in the war.

In our YourMorals.org dataset, attitudes toward our troops do indeed appear highly related to attitudes toward war.

And this no doubt contributes to lower feeling thermometer ratings among liberals in terms of attitudes toward troops, though I should point out in the below graph that the midpoint of the scale is 4, so the range of mean attitudes toward soldiers ranges from neutral (very liberal) to extremely warm (very conservative), with no group being against our troops.  Of course, mean values are to be taken with a grain of salt for our dataset, given its non-representativeness, but here is a similar Gallup finding.

It may be hard to do, but especially on Veteran’s day, I think the civil thing to do for liberals is to attempt to separate their negative attitudes toward specific war decisions from their attitudes toward our nation’s troops, perhaps populating the upper left quadrant of the first graph above where negative attitudes toward war coexist with positive attitudes toward soldiers.   At the same time, perhaps those who support specific war decisions can take liberals at their word, that most of us do support our troops, even if we might have made different decisions about the policies that led to their deployment.

- Ravi Iyer

ps.  If you want to more fully explain liberal-conservative differences in feelings toward soldiers using our dataset (reducing ideology beta to .122, p=.055), you can add differences in identification with country (“How close do you feel to people in your country?”, beta=.215) and authoritarianism (“Our country needs a powerful leader, in order to destroy the radical and immoral currents prevailing in society today.”, beta = .221) to attitudes toward war (“War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict.”, beta = .387) in a regression model.

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

Last time, I gave a broad overview of the descriptive representation of the YourMorals dataset. In a nutshell, we discovered that the YourMorals respondents were much more educated, more likely to self-identify as liberal, and more likely to be white than the population.

In this post, I will explore the question of whether the YourMorals respondents are representative of the population after we condition on observable characteristics. Put another way, would we expect two individuals, one randomly chosen from the population and one drawn from the YourMorals data, who share all the same demographic characteristics (age, race, education, political ideology, place of residence) to look the same in terms of their scores on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire?

To conduct this kind of analysis, first we need a benchmark against which to compare the YourMorals data. As I mentioned in my previous post, the gold standard is a randomly drawn sample from the population. Luckily, we have just such a survey. Prior to the 2008 election, Knowledge Networks* fielded a version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire to a representative sample of the U.S. population. This provides a good point of comparison for our (much larger) convenience sample.

The first task is to process the YourMorals data so that it looks more like the general population. I used a basic sample matching technique to match individuals from the YourMorals data and the Knowledge Networks data. This is a crude technique, but effective. Basically for each individual in the Knowledge Networks sample (the “match target”), I found an individual (or individuals) in the YourMorals data that matched the demographic information for the “match target.” These cases then become the comparison group. After the samples have been balanced in terms of observable characteristics, any differences we observe between the two can be ascribed to the compounding factors that we cannot observe.**

The following figures show how the distributions of the matched YourMorals data compares with the distributions in the sample from Knowledge Networks. The dashed lines show the distribution for Knowledge Networks, the solid lines represent the YourMorals data.

The distributions of the foundations in the two data sources look very similar for the Fairness/Reciprocity foundation, but for all of the others, there are significant differences between the YourMorals and the Knowledge Networks respondents.

A little more digging reveals some interesting patterns. Splitting up the sample by ideology yields:

Liberals:

Conservatives:

Two of the foundations seem to stand out in these comparisons. Liberals in the YourMorals data are particularly low on the Purity foundation (when compared against liberals in the Knowledge Networks data), and conservatives from the YourMorals sample seem to score lower on the Harm foundation. In both cases, YourMorals liberals seem more like population liberals on the first two foundations (Harm and Fairness), and the conservatives in the sample seem more like population conservatives on the last two foundations (Authority and Purity). No matter how the data is cut, the YourMorals sample seems to score lower on the Ingroup foundation.

The comparisons between the general population sample and the convenience sample in this post raise some significant questions about the possibility of using the self-selected respondents in the YourMorals sample to make inferences about the population. These problems in the data are particularly evident in the Ingroup foundation, the purity foundation (for liberals), and the harm foundation (for conservatives).

As was the case with demographics, all is not lost. One last look at the data shows that again the foundations are more or less proportionally correct. Liberals score higher in on the Harm and Fairness foundations in relation to their scores on the other three, and conservatives show more or less equal scores across each of the foundations. The bar chart below shows the average scores of the foundations broken out by survey source (KN and YM for Knowledge Networks and YourMorals respectively) and ideology:

Next time, I’ll discuss how we might correct for some of these demographic and attitudinal biases in the data.

*For the uninitiated, Knowledge Networks is a survey research firm that has gone to great lengths to put together a panel of internet users that is nationally representative. They have recruited a large panel of individuals to take internet surveys. These individuals were generally contacted by telephone, and in cases where the respondent did not have internet access, Knowledge Networks provided access. See this link for more information.

**For a quick primer on the theory behind sample matching see this Wikipedia entry.  I am using exact matching on categories of age, race, education, ideology, and state of residence.

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

As you can see, conservatives feel that ingesting all types of substances (cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine) are more moral issues, compared to liberals. Liberals appear to moralize driving while using a cellphone and eating unhealthy food a bit more than conservatives.

Interestingly, liberal visitors felt that distracted driving is about as immoral as using cocaine and much more immoral than smoking marijuana. Conservatives, on the other hand, felt that the use of illicit drugs (cocaine and marijuana) was more immoral than driving while using a cellphone. This is perhaps another way to show the robust moral foundations theory finding that liberals care more about issues of harm (e.g. distracted drivers might kill someone), while conservatives care more about issues of purity (e.g. taking drugs is unnatural) and authority (e.g. especially illegal drugs).

- Ravi Iyer

edit: I had a few request for the sample size.  1,538 liberals and 337  conservatives took this study for this analysis.

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

I thought I’d examine the time elapsed in taking the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on YourMorals.org and the results are pretty much what you’d expect.  Time spent on the questionnaire is lower on the extremes of political liberalism and conservativism.  However, liberals did take more time on the page compared to conservatives.Below is a graph of the median time spent on the page by political orientation.  The last 3 bars are for libertarians, people who don’t know or are apolitical (strangely, they take the most time on the page…maybe they just have trouble making decisions), and people who are ‘other’.

Of course, it’s up to the reader to determine whether you buy the idea that time elapsed in answering questions about morality is correlated with considering the questions more deeply, which indicates more coginitive complexity in the moral realm.  Liberals do score higher on moral relativism measures, which could be thought of as a type of cognitive complexity.