do you know if there is any evidence that conservatives would be more upset (defined loosely) by a guilty person getting away with a crime than by an innocent person being convicted of a crime? and would it be the opposite for liberals?

None of us could come up with a ready answer of a published study to this effect (feel free to let me know of one and I’ll add it here), so I thought it would be useful to share a quick analysis of a few YourMorals.org questions that help answer this question.

The below question was asked on a 7 point scale, meaning that liberals (and libertarians) generally agree that it is better to let 10 people go free than to convict one innocent person, while conservatives are somewhat torn given a 10-1 scenario.

Another way to ask this question is to ask how wrong it would feel for a criminal to go unpunished.  Again, we see a similar result where liberals and libertarians are less punishment oriented, while conservatives feel it would be more wrong.  This is perhaps a gut-level intuitive rationale for the above graph.

Everyone agrees that we should punish the guilty (indeed, everyone is above the midpoint on the above scale) and free the innocent.  The issue is that we operate in an uncertain world and some kinds of errors bother some people more than other errors.

I believe a similar asymmetry drives the differences between Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.  Most people will admit that there are lazy people who take advantage of government generosity (e.g. the prototypical welfare queen) and that there are poor people who work hard and encounter a disaster that is out of their control and deserve help (e.g. the guy who works 2 jobs that don’t provide health care, and gets a chronic disease).  The question is which case bothers you most.

Similarly, there are cases of wealthy people who clearly deserve their wealth and who create wealth for others (e.g. Steve Jobs) and there are cases of wealthy people who game the system and create negative wealth for others (e.g. the aggressive mortgage bankers of the sub-prime crisis).  Is it worse to unfairly tax Steve Jobs or unfairly let the bankers keep their windfall of ill-gotten rewards?  There is no right answer to this.  I would submit that in such uncertain circumstances, we all let our intuitions lead our moral thinking, and hence we see the strong divisions we see in society.  Personally, I think it’s a good thing (that the conversation is had, though not that it gets so personal and uncivil), as society needs a healthy balance between punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent.

- Ravi Iyer

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

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

Libertarians believe in the importance of individual liberty, a belief that may be related to lower levels of agreeableness and higher scores on a measure of psychological reactance (e.g. “regulations trigger a sense of resistance in me”).  They moralize concerns about harm less than liberals, in part because they have lower levels of empathy .  They moralize principles concerning being a group member (obeying authority and being loyal) less than conservatives in part because they have less attachment to the groups around them.

If you want to read more about what the paper, says, you can click here or download the paper here, but right now, I’d like to focus on why we wrote the paper, as I have previously written about how people are attracted to why you write things as much as what you write.

Of course, some part of paper writing is driven by curiosity and the practical desire to publish.  But in writing this paper, I have undergone my own personal intellectual journey, and I’m hopeful that others may have a similar experience. A lot of my impression of libertarianism was previously shaped by images of the Tea Party (who aren’t necessarily libertarians after all) and I thought of libertarians as uncaring, from my liberal perspective, in that they typically don’t support progressive taxes and social programs. The original title of the paper was “the Search for Libertarian Morality”, implying that libertarians are potentially amoral, and in retrospect showing my own ideological bias.

But as I read more about libertarian philosophy and looked more carefully at the data, I found that libertarians do indeed have a coherent moral code, that simply differs from my own. Like my liberal leanings, which have some relation to my dispositions and preferences, libertarians also moralize their preferences and dispositions, in ways that mirror my own processes. For example, liberals and libertarians both score high on desire for new experiences and stimulation, which may be a common reason why both groups tend to emphasize individual choice over group solidarity, compared to conservatives, as cohesive groups can limit choice.  Libertarians may be less moved by emotions such as disgust and empathy, which may lead them to moralize certain situations less than others.  But who am I to say that my moral compass is any better or worse than theirs, given my view that at some level, the basis for my liberal moral compass is driven by subjective sentiment.  I previously wrote about the dangers of liberal moral absolutism, and villainizing libertarians for not sharing my particular vision of morality would be a step down that road.

Why do we seek to publicize this paper?  In a time when partisanship dominates, policy suffers,  and people on both sides of the aisle villainize the other side, it is our hope that with greater understanding comes greater acceptance. We may not all agree about the relative merits of empathy, disgust, or reactance as moral emotions…but we all have some level of all of these emotions and can respect principles born out of these.  Even liberals can find things so disgusting that they are seen as wrong, and conservatives actually give a lot of money to the poor.  In attributing moral disagreements to dispositions, largely out of our control, perhaps we can learn to see others as different and attracted to other positive moral principles, rather than amoral and oblivious to the moral principles that are important to us.

- Ravi Iyer

I do not, however, find his response convincing.

1. He has read my article as a critique of his Social Intuitionist Model. But it isn’t.  The point of the article was to argue for the importance of deliberative reasoning as an important aspect of moral psychology. I make this argument by outlining what I see as the modern consensus, which is, as Hume put it, that moral reasoning is “the slave of the passions”. Jon is probably the most prominent defender of this view, but other scholars who accept it, to varying degrees, are Stephen Stich, Philip Tetlock, Jesse Prinz, Philip Zimbardo, Drew Westin, and Michael Gazzaniga. When I begin my third paragraph by saying that I predict that “this theory” will be proven wrong, I’m referring to the reason-as-slave view, not any more specific theory.

In my second paragraph, I say that many psychologists think that reasoned arguments for moral beliefs are “mostly post-hoc justifications for gut reactions.” Then I write: “As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, although we like to think of ourselves as judges, reasoning through cases according to deeply held principles, in reality we are more like lawyers, making arguments for positions that have already been established.” This is a perfectly accurate summary of his view from the 2001 paper, which is the paper of his that I cite.

2. It’s clear from the text, though, that Jon is categorized among those who endorse “the wholesale rejection of reason” in the formation of moral judgments. He is right to complain about this. The adjective was an overstatement of my part — one web dictionary says that it means “extensively and indiscriminately”, and it’s clear from his 2001 paper and elsewhere that Jon allows for some limited role of reason — and I apologize for it.

What about “rejection of reason”? Theories lie on a continuum and, in the space of views concerning morality, Jon’s theory in his 2001 paper really is famous in its rejection of reason. Jon seems to disagree; he modestly says “I merely rejected the worship of reasoning common in the Kohlbergian tradition.” – implying that his paper was nothing more than a gentle corrective to some over-zealous Kohlbergians! Well, I’ll leave this for the reader to judge. But I will point out that his title is “The emotional dog and the rational tail” And abstract begins with this:

Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. Four reasons are given for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it de-emphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals, emphasizing instead the importance of social and cultural influences.

And the paper ends with this:

The time may be right, therefore, to take another look at Hume’s perverse thesis: that moral emotions and intuitions drive moral reasoning, just as a surely as a dog wags its tail.

3. There is a lot of the Social Intuitionist Theory that I agree with. But I think it is mistaken in the view that private moral deliberation is irrelevant and unimportant. On the contrary, I would argue that it’s a central aspect of our moral lives. David and I argued for this in our response to Jon’s 2001 article, and I’ve expanded on this point in my 2004 book and again in my Nature article. Jon begins his reply to me that “we agree on the basic story”. But, unless his views have changed, we don’t.

All this leaves little room for rational deliberation in shaping our moral outlook. Indeed, many psychologists think that the reasoned arguments we make about why we have certain beliefs are mostly post-hoc justifications for gut reactions. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, although we like to think of ourselves as judges, reasoning through cases according to deeply held principles, in reality we are more like lawyers, making arguments for positions that have already been established. This implies we have little conscious control over our sense of right and wrong. I predict that this theory of morality will be proved wrong in its wholesale rejection of reason.   Emotional responses alone cannot explain one of the most interesting aspects of human nature: that morals evolve.

I have underlined the two main mistakes Bloom makes in setting up his difference with me. I’d like to correct them here

1) The “wholesale rejection of reason”

I have never engaged in a “wholesale rejection of reason.” Four of the six links in the Social Intuitionist model are kinds of reasoning. I merely rejected the worship of reasoning common in the Kohlbergian tradition. I took seriously the research on motivated reasoning and the confirmation bias, which show that, just as David Hume said, reasoning is extremely effective as a servant, but rather ineffective as a tool for discovering the truth, at least when carried out by individuals. (A forthcoming review article on the “argumentative function of reasoning” will make this case far better than I did.) But I have always made it clear that reasoning is carried out for a purpose, and that purpose is to influence other people, particularly by triggering moral intuitions in them. For example:

The discussion thus far may have given the impression that the model dismisses reasoning as post-hoc rationalization (link 2). However it must be stressed that four of the six links in the model are reasoning links, and three of these links (3, 5, and 6) are hypothesized to have real causal effects on moral judgment. Link 3, the reasoned persuasion link, says that people’s (ex post facto) moral reasoning can have a causal effect – on other people’s intuitions. In the social intuitionist view moral judgment is not just a single act that occurs in a single person’s mind. It is an ongoing process, often spread out over time and over multiple people. Reasons and arguments can circulate and affect people, even if individuals rarely engage in private moral reasoning for themselves.  (Haidt, 2001, p. 828)

2) “Emotional response alone cannot explain…”

I fully agree with Bloom that emotions cannot be the whole story of morality. That’s why I shifted from talking about emotions in the 1990s to talking about intuitions, which are clearly a form of cognition, in the 2000s. It’s true that I used the phrase “the emotional dog,” which I thought sounded better than “the intuitive dog.” But I stated clearly in that paper, and many others, that the key terms in the debate are “intuition” and “reasoning,” which are both forms of cognition:

It must be stressed that the contrast of intuition and reasoning is not the contrast of emotion and cognition. Intuition, reasoning, and the appraisals contained in emotions (Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991) are all forms of cognition. Rather, the words “intuition” and “reasoning” are intended to capture the contrast made by dozens of philosophers and psychologists between two kinds of cognition. The most important distinctions (see Table 1) are that intuition occurs quickly, effortlessly, and automatically, such that the outcome but not the process is accessible to consciousness, while reasoning occurs more slowly, requires some effort, and involves at least some steps that are accessible to consciousness. (Haidt, 2001, p. 815)

Of course, even intuitions, which are much more common and flexible than emotions, are not the whole story in the SIM. They’re just most of the story. They’re where the action is. So if you want to produce social change, you’ve got to change intuitions.

Oddly, Bloom uses narrative and story-telling as examples of the sorts of processes that are powerful in producing moral change. But these are exactly the sorts of processes that the SIM emphasizes, because stories and narrative are so effective at triggering intuitions. In order to contradict the SIM he’d need to show that logical reasoning (which does not appeal to emotions and intuitions) is often the cause of social change. Instead he states that “Humans are natural story tellers, and use narrative to influence others, particularly their own children.” But narrative is a crucial part of SIM, which Craig Joseph and I have linked to virtue ethics:

Moral education, on our account, is a matter of linking up the innate intuitions and virtues already learned with a skill that one wants to encourage. Parents and educators should therefore recognize the limits of the ‘direct route’ to moral education. It is helpful to espouse rules and principles, but only as an adjunct to more indirect approaches, which include immersing children in environments that are rich in stories and examples that adults interpret with emotion. Those stories and examples should trigger the innate moral modules, if possible, and link them to broader virtues and principles. (Haidt & Joseph, 2004, p. 65)

It seems, therefore, that once again, Paul Bloom and I basically agree on the outlines of moral psychology. We also agree that moral change is possible, particularly when gifted orators and story tellers — such as Martin Luther King Jr. — can create a new narrative and trigger supporting intuitions. In fact, I concluded my 2007 Science article with this paragraph, which would have been right at home in Bloom’s Nature piece:

Yet even though morality is partly a game of self-promotion, people do sincerely want peace, decency, and cooperation to prevail within their groups. And because morality may be as much a product of cultural evolution as genetic evolution, it can change substantially in a generation or two. For example, as technological advances make us more aware of the fate of people in faraway lands, our concerns expand and we increasingly want peace, decency, and cooperation to prevail in other groups, and in the human group as well. (Haidt, 2007, p. 1001)

So please. go out and buy Bloom’s fascinating new book, How Pleasure Works. Read his wonderful work on how the harm foundation is already operational in 6-month-old babies. But don’t make the mistake that he made, and that so many of my critics make, in assuming that I’m an emotivist who denies either the existence of reasoning or its importance for social change. We reason often, in order to persuade people.  We just don’t do it often, or well, as part of our own private search for moral truth.

–Jon Haidt

[To read Paul Bloom's response, click here]

=====================================================

P.S., Here are three additional quotes that I hope potential critics will read before accusing me of siding with “emotion” versus “cognition,” or claiming that social change is impossible because we are “prisoners of our emotions.”

Link 5, the reasoned judgment link, recognizes that a person could, in principle, simply reason her way to a judgment that contradicts her initial intuition. The literature on everyday reasoning (Kuhn, 1991) suggests that such an ability may be common only among philosophers, who have been extensively trained and socialized to follow reasoning even to very disturbing conclusions (as in the case of Socrates, or the more recent works of Derek Parfit and Peter Singer). Yet the fact that there are at least a few people among us who can reach such conclusions on their own, and then argue for them eloquently (link 3), means that pure moral reasoning can play a causal role in the moral life of a society. (Haidt, 2001, p. 829)

The social intuitionist model also offers more general advice for improving moral judgment. If the principal difficulty in objective moral reasoning is the biased search for evidence (Kunda, 1990; Perkins, Farady, & Bushey, 1991), then people should take advantage of the social persuasion link (link 4) and get other people to help them improve their reasoning. By seeking out discourse partners who are respected for their wisdom and openmindedness, and by talking about the evidence, justifications, and mitigating factors involved in a potential moral violation, people can help trigger a variety of conflicting intuitions in each other. If more conflicting intuitions are triggered, the final judgment is likely to be more nuanced and ultimately more reasonable. The social intuitionist model, therefore, is not an anti-rationalist model. It is a model about the complex and dynamic ways that intuition, reasoning, and social influences interact to produce moral judgment. (Haidt, 2001, p. 829)

Affective reactions push, but they do not absolutely force. We can all think of times when we deliberated about a decision and went against our first (often selfish) impulse, or when we changed our minds about a person…. There are at least three ways we can override our immediate intuitive responses. We can use conscious verbal reasoning, such as considering the costs and benefits of each course of action. We can reframe a situation and see a new angle or consequence, thereby triggering a second flash of intuition that may compete with the first. And we can talk with people who raise new arguments, which then trigger in us new flashes of intuition followed by various kinds of reasoning. The social intuitionist model includes separate paths for each of these three ways of changing one’s mind, but it says that the first two paths are rarely used, and that most moral change happens as a result of social interaction. Other people often influence us, in part by presenting the counterevidence we rarely seek out ourselves. (Haidt, 2007 p. 999)

[To read Paul Bloom's response, click here]

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

Is support for torture restricted to the evil among us (e.g. liberals who think that Dick Cheney = Darth Vader)? When individuals say that they are torturing an evil few in order to save many innocents (an argument based in Utilitarianism), are they lying about their noble goals? A recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that individuals may not be honest about their utilitarian motives. From the abstract:

The use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects is typically justified on utilitarian grounds. The present research suggests, however, that those who support such techniques are fuelled by retributive motives.

This is a very well done experimental study, which illustrates an important point about other potential motives for torture, specifically a desire for retribution or vengeance. However, it may be nitpicking or splitting hairs, but I might instead have written “those who support such techniques may also be fuelled by retributive motives.” Indeed, in the study itself, there is an increase in support for severe interrogation techniques when there is a greater likelihood that the suspect is withholding information that may save lives, especially among Republicans, the group most likely to be “those who support such techniques.” The fact that retributive motives exist, does not necessarily mean that utilitarian motives do not. One could probably design a study that shows the opposite, where utilitarian motives dominate, given the total control one has in a lab environment.

Our yourmorals.org data suggests that utilitarian motives are indeed important in predicting attitudes toward torture. There are a number of measures that tap utilitarian thinking, but the most convincing to me are the classic moral dilemmas that ask people if they are willing to take some action (e.g. flipping a switch) to save 5 innocent people at the cost of 1 innocent life. They are convincing because they are generally free of any political content or judgment about the worth or guilt of individuals.  Below is a graph relating responses to these dilemmas to attitudes toward torture.  Higher scores on the Y axis indicate more willingness to sacrifice 1 life for 5.  Higher scores on the X axis indicate willingness to support torture in more situations.

Torture and Utilitarian Moral Judgments are positively correlated

There is a fairly robust positive correlation between utilitarian judgments on these dilemmas and support for torture (the dip on the far right for liberals is likely due to there being such a small number of liberals who think torture is often justified).

If I look at other utilitarian measures such as moral idealism (using the Ethics Position Questionnaire – e.g. “The existence of potential harm to others is always wrong, irrespective of the benefits to be gained.”, r=-.35) or moral maximizing (using an adapted version of Schwartz’s maximizing-satisficing scale – e.g. “In choosing a moral action, one should never settle for a morallyimperfect action.”, r=-.15), you find the same relationship. Controlling for political affiliation and beliefs about punishment and disposition toward vengeance, one still finds significant relationships between utilitarianism and support for torture.

My take home. Part of promoting civil politics is to take people at their word for their motives, rather than questioning them. There may indeed be some vengeful motive behind torture…but there are utilitarian motives as well and those of us who dislike torture might actually get further confronting torture on utilitarian grounds rather than attempting to question the motives of those who believe in torture.

- Ravi Iyer