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

The figures below show how Democratic and Republican presidents use moral language when speaking about different topics. For example, the first figure shows the proportion of statements that use one of the “Harm/Care” words (see my earlier post for more on the data and methods used here) for each statement. It is no big surprise that both parties are use these words very often when speaking about health issues. Moving down the figure, we can see that Democrats are much more likely to draw on “Harm/Care” language when speaking about the environment than are Republicans. Neither party uses “Harm/Care” rhetoric often when speaking about education.

Harm/Care Foundation

Fairness/Reciprocity Foundation

Ingroup/Loyalty Foundation

Authority/Respect Foundation

Purity/Sanctity Foundation

Several interesting differences between the parties appear when we break out the data by issue. In my next post, I will look more closely at the substance of the differences between the parties.

*[UPDATE] I neglected to credit James Keirstead whose code I liberally borrowed from in constructing the figures above. See this post at his blog for more.

Why focus on SotU speeches? First, the SotU provides modern presidents with an opportunity to lay out their legislative priorities. While political scientists have reached different conclusions as to the actual impact of the speech, several studies have found substantive effects. Hoffman and Howard’s Addressing the State of the Union (2006) finds that presidents achieve about 40 percent of the policy goals they outline in the SotU. The speech serves as a signal as to the priorities of the administration, but more importantly for my purposes, it gives the president the opportunity to frame the debate in favorable terms. This framing is often done by appealing to basic moral values.

A second and by no means secondary consideration for focusing on this particular speech deals with the ever pressing concern for data availability. The good people at the Policy Agendas Project (http://policyagendas.org/) have generously made their comprehensive datasets available. On the State of the Union addresses, they have coded each statement in the speech as belonging to one of about twenty different policy areas. Combined with the Moral Foundations dictionary available on Jon Haidt’s website (here), moving forward into analysis is a relatively painless process.

One of my key expectations going into this data exercise is that Republicans and Democrats will emphasize different moral foundations. A portion of this variance will be due to their focus on different policies. Political scientists have long known that each of the major parties is seen to “own” a particular set issues of issues in the mind of the voter (e.g., Democrats are trusted more with relation to social welfare programs and Republicans have traditionally been perceived to be better at handling foreign policy issues).* It is also probably true that certain moral appeals are just harder to make (for example, it might be difficult to credibly frame an appeal to increase spending on transportation infrastructure in terms of the authority foundation). To the extent that partisans gravitate to the issues that their parties own and these issues lend themselves to a certain kind of framing, we would expect to see differences in the moral appeals of Republicans and Democrats as a function of the subjects that they talk about. But, I would also expect Republicans and Democrats to differ in terms of their emphasis of moral foundations even after controlling in some sense for the particular policy they choose to focus on.

In future posts, I will look more directly at the way in which the different parties talk about different policy arenas. For this post, I want to just give the broad outlines of the data.

Using the Moral Foundations Dictionary (referenced above), I coded (or rather I had the computer code) each statement for whether or not it included one or more morally charged words. Of the 18,854 statements listed in the Policy Agendas dataset (which includes SotU speeches from 1948 to 2005), 3,378 (just under 18 percent) included one or more of the words associated with the moral foundations.

The table below breaks out the data by issue area. The cell entries are rankings (1-20) for the proportion of statements in that particular issue area that refer to one of the moral foundations. For example, Law/Crime ranks 3rd in the Harm/Care foundation. Statements made concerning law and order were much more likely to use language drawing on concerns for harm and care than those dealing with science and technology (which ranked 19th overall in the Harm/Care foundation). The last two columns present the proportion of statements using any of the words from the moral foundations dictionray and the total number of statements included in the dataset on each topic.

The table is sorted on proportion of statements using moral language. This gives a (very) rough sense for the degree to which presidents choose morally charged rhetoric when speaking on each topic. Health, Civil Rights, Law/Crime, and Labor/Employment issues are much more likely to be spoken about in moral terms than Transportation, Energy, Education, and Science/Technology.

Another way to look at these data is to examine the trends over time.This first figure shows the overall use of moral foundations words (don’t make too much of the exact divisions between the presidents as these were added by hand — in the figures that follow the divisions between the presidents are more precisely delimited).

The figures below show the proportion of statements that included words found in the moral foundations dictionary broken out for each of the five moral foundations separately between the period from 1948 to 2005.

One of the most striking things about these figures, from my point of view, is the lack of clear patterns based on partisanship. For several of the foundations, the secular trend seems to be more significant than the partisan differences (for example, the general increasing use of Ingroup language from the 1960s to the mid-1990s or the rapid decrease in Fairness language from Carter through Clinton).

There are several things that these simple trend lines miss, and in the coming posts I will drill down deeper into the data in an effort to better understand how American presidents use moral rhetoric in pursuit of their policy goals.

* For more on the theory of issue ownership, see John Petrocik’s work: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2111797

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables—Households, Table H-3, Mean Household Income Received by Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent All Races: 1967 to 2006 (2006 Dollars)

Fortunately, the Knowledge Networks panel study (referred to elsewhere) included an item asking individuals what they felt should be done about the gap. After describing the size of the difference between the top earners and those on the bottom, respondents were asked, “Should this difference be smaller, bigger, or about what it is now?” For the purposes of the analysis that follows, I combined the few respondents that indicated the gap should be bigger (only about 5 percent of the sample) with those who said it should remain the same (about 30 percent).

I ran a statistical model* that predicts the probability that an individual would say that the gap should be smaller (without any specifics about how this would be accomplished, but more on that later). Even after controlling for ideology and party identification, three of the moral foundations are statistically significant and substantively important to the probability of acknowledging the gap as a problem. Increasing the two liberal foundations (Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity) increases the probability of wanting to narrow the gap. Increasing the Ingroup/Loyalty foundation decreases the probability. The effects are shown in the Figure below.

In each panel, I’ve graphed the effect of moving across the range of each foundation on the likelihood of saying that the gap between the rich and poor should be smaller for a hypothetical individual who is a moderate Democrat (in Blue) or Republican (in Red) with income in the $50,000-$85,000 range who has average scores on all of the other moral foundations scores. Within each panel, the individuals are similar in every regard except for their party identification. The figure reveals a persistent partisan gap even after controlling for the moral foundations and ideology, but the gap between partisans with the same scores on the moral foundations is nowhere so large as the gap within each party across the ranges of the foundations listed above. The Authority and Purity foundations were not significantly related to attitudes about the income gap.

We know, however, that the foundations tend to move together (see this discussion for an example). Individuals who score high on Harm also tend to score high on Fairness. The figures above are interesting, but in some ways the “all else equal” assumption that they impose on the relationship between attitudes and the moral foundations is not as straightforward as the clean looking lines suggest. In the table below, I show some more probable combinations of scores. The entries in the table show the predicted change in probability from the baseline case described above. The changes in the foundations are modest (a one point increase or decrease from the baseline case described above for the “high” and “low” figures respectively).

So far, we have seen how increases in the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations serve to increase concern about income inequality, while the Ingroup/Loyalty foundation decreases concern. That the liberal foundations should increase the likelihood of considering large disparities in income is not especially surprising in itself. However, I was surprised that the effects of the moral foundation scores are substantially larger than partisanship and ideology (the prime movers in most political science literature). Earlier work done by Felicia Pratto and her colleagues on the relationship between social dominance orientation and merit-based versus needs-based allocation of resources (see this JSTOR link for more) suggests why these particular foundations might be important (maybe the psychologists can back me up on this…).

Understanding the factors that lead to one acknowledging that income inequality is a problem that should be solved is only part of the bigger question. A much stickier issue is determining a politically feasible way of narrowing that gap. The recent debate over extending the Bush tax cuts illustrates the powerful emotions and interests that are mobilized when real money is on the table. Both sides, it seems to me, attempt to frame the issue as one of harm and fairness. The right argues that tax raises on the wealthy unjustly punish success. The left argues that it is only fair that those who have benefited so much from the system established by government should pay a little more to support it and those who are hurt by it.

The same Knowledge Networks data included an attitude item asking whether the respondent would support raising taxes on those who make more than $200,000 a year. About half of the sample indicated that they would support raising taxes on the wealthy.

The most powerful relationship that emerged between attitudes about taxes and the moral foundations (indeed the only significant relationship) was found in the Harm/Care foundation. The figure below shows this relationship over the range of the Harm foundation. Even after controlling for party identification and ideological self-placement, income, and the other foundations, the tax issue emerged as an issue of caring rather than equity or fairness.

The figure below shows a partisan differential that persists even after controlling for all of the above factors. However the difference between partisans is nowhere as large as the difference between individuals who score highly on the Harm/Care foundation and those who have low score on that foundation.

The Harm/Care foundation appears to be a more important factor in determining one’s support for raising taxes on the wealthy than party identification or ideological self-placement. Indeed, as the figure shows, a Republican who scores highly on the Harm foundation has a higher probability of supporting taxes on the wealthy than a similarly situated Democrat with a low score.

Several interesting questions are suggested by this brief exploration of the relatively limited selection of items touching on income inequality available to us in this dataset. First, what role does issue framing play in activating certain moral considerations over others? Would the conservative frame described briefly above change the relationship between the Harm foundation and attitudes about taxes? What about the liberal frame? This should be easy enough to test once we identify the relevant frames.

Second, how do the moral foundations relate to other potential remedies for economic inequality. The range of policy options is wide, and, depending on the moral prism through which one looks at them, reactions are sure to vary. Estate taxes, minimum wage laws, maximum wage laws, changes to the tax code, and repealing the sales tax on food and other necessities all might be met with different reactions from individuals with who emphasize different moral foundations. This would be a little trickier to test as it would require coming up with neutral descriptions of fairly complex and unfamiliar policies.

Finally, how much does where you stand on the issues of economic inequality depend on where you sit in the relative distribution of wealth? Psychologists don’t seem to talk much about social class and other kinds of vulgar economic considerations, but they surely play a role. The poor and the rich probably diverge in their attitudes about redistributory policies for reasons quite apart from their morality. This might be the most difficult problem to address from the researcher’s standpoint, as it would require collecting data from a broad enough cross-section of the income distribution. We survey researchers generally have the most success in the middle of the distribution with response rates falling off rapidly toward either extreme.

*I ran a logit regression with controls for Democratic party affiliation, Liberal political identification, income terciles, and the moral foundations scores.

Although the movement’s political identity is still developing, Tea Party supporters’ scores on all of these moral foundations predicted a relatively coherent set of political attitudes.  Their strong moral valuations of both economic liberty and equity/proportionality are consistent with the movement’s core economic principles, and their low reliance on lifestyle liberty is consistent with the traditionally conservative viewpoints we observed across almost all social issues.

However, caution should be exercised before labeling the Tea Party as the rebranded base of traditional conservatism.  All of the above analyses were conducted with YourMorals visitors who indicated strong support for the Tea Party movement.  More recent data that we’ve collected in the past few months indicates that individuals who actually attend Tea Party rallies and events (under 30% of supporters in our data) show a strikingly different set of moral values than those described above.

Consider the following graph of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire.  Here, individuals who attended Tea Party events are clearly distinct from conservatives, endorsing all five foundations at low levels, just like true libertarians.

We already know that Tea Party supporters highly value economic liberty, but not lifestyle liberty.  However, those who actually attend Tea Party events appear to value both forms of liberty, much like true libertarians.

Do these moral sensitivities to both kinds of liberty predict specific attitudes toward social policies?  The answer appears to be yes.  Compared to conservatives, those who attend Tea Party events are more likely to support policies that enhance lifestyle liberty, including the choice to have an abortion, the legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage, and favoring immigration.

Why might those who attend Tea Party events differ from the majority of its supporters on these key political issues?  One explanation is that the Tea Party movement is not, and never has been, a monolithic entity.  Instead, we see somewhat of a “split” personality.  The movement’s emphasis on its economic philosophy—rather than its largely undefined social philosophy—has facilitated the union of a core group of true libertarians with a growing base of traditionally conservative supporters.  Because this young political movement is still developing, it will be interesting to watch and see if/how continued growth may influence the future of the Tea Party’s morality, and which side of this “split” personality will emerge from the Tea Party’s moral mind.

Sean Wojcik

However, I have never been convinced that there are specifically five foundations or even that the idea of thinking of moral concerns as categorically ‘foundational’ is better than thinking of them in some other less categorical way.  Fortunately, those that originally conceived of Moral Foundations Theory do not require such homogenous thinking and even welcome the idea that the five foundation model is likely to undergo changes.  I have outlined a few changes I would make previously, as well as the criteria that one might use to posit a new moral category.  Even if one does not believe in the categorical distinction that some moral concerns are ‘foundations’, while others are not, it would seem clear that some moral concerns are more common, distinct, and important.  I would now like to make that case for honesty.

Honesty is common.

One of the distinctive traits of MFT is the evolutionary focus.  People moralize various things (e.g. eating pork or driving while using a cellphone) in various cultures, but the purpose is to identify those moral concerns that appear cross-culturally and have an innate quality.  Innate, in this instance, means “organized ahead of experience”, such that people can make intuitive judgments beyond their socialization.  Put more concretely, if concern about honesty is innate and universal, one might expect individuals to be able to intuitively signal and detect honesty in others, as this study, where participants are fairly successful in figuring out who will cooperate or cheat, shows.  The idea that concern about honesty is universal enough that one might posit an evolutionary story is almost self-evident, but this paper provides evolutionary models about how honesty might evolve.  If one subscribes to the evolution of groups that out-compete other groups, one can witness the evolution of honesty in modern society as nations that have low levels of corruption tend to have better economies than countries with high levels of corruption, mirroring the evolutionary processes theorized.

Honesty is distinct.

The same paper I cited above has some evidence for this, but from the perspective of Moral Foundations Theory, it would be useful to show that honesty is distinct from other moral concerns.  We asked users on YourMorals 4 questions about honesty (alpha=.69, .76 if we remove the relevance question) in addition to the standard Moral Foundations Questionnaire that measures the existing five foundational concerns.  Factor analyses tell the same story, but examining the correlations tells the story more simply.  Specifically, the highest correlation between endorsement of honesty and any other foundation is .31 (with Purity), while all other foundations have fairly high inter-correlations with other foundations (e.g. Purity/Authority/Ingroup inter-correlate >.5, Harm/Fairness inter-correlation = .57).  Concern about honesty is empirically distinct from other moral concerns.

Honesty is important.

The pragmatic utility of using the moral foundations to predict ideological differences is perhaps the primary contribution of MFT to date.  Are questions about honesty also pragmatically useful?

On a 7 point scale, those who are more conservative endorse questions about honesty more than those who are liberal, but the amount of variance in political attitudes predicted by endorsement of honesty is smaller, though significant, compared to other foundations (beta = .10 vs. other foundations which range from .12 (ingroup) to .33 (purity)).  However, if we look at economic conservatism, we do find that endorsing honesty does predict identification as being economically conservative (beta = .13) as well as authority, ingroup & purity concerns (betas = .10, .09, &.11).

I looked at some political attitude variables and the predictive power of endorsing honesty was not impressive.  However, endorsement of honesty is a strong negative predictor (in a regression equation, including the other five foundations) of psychopathy (beta = -.23) and utilitarianism (beta = -.26, e.g. willingness to sacrifice one life to save five others).  Measurement of endorsement of honesty may have important pragmatic utility, but not for political outcomes.

- Ravi Iyer

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

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

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.