A simple possible convergent explanation comes from this graph of questions concerning how much how much a person identifies (e.g. feel’s close to, has things in common with, uses the word “we”) with people in their community, in their country, and around the world.  Ron Paul and libertarians like him, may think of themselves as individuals, moreseo than the typical liberal or conservative, and less as members of a community, a country, or the world.

From a psychological perspective, this is a further illustration of the idea that moral reasoning is intimately inter-twined with social functioning in that people tend to have a moral profile that correlates well with the types of social functioning they desire.

I would argue that a healthy society needs all types of social concerns.  Cohesive working units such as armies, companies, and to a lesser extent countries, are necessary for efficiently performing tasks and competing with/defending against other groups.  At the same time, it would seem callous to be an extraordinarily efficient society that doesn’t care about the plight of others who are not in our group.  Finally, any society needs people who are less constrained by group concerns who can push society forward.  We should be thankful for the diverse ideological perspectives in our country and rather than seeing politics as war, we could see it as an exercise in finding balance between worthy concerns.

- Ravi Iyer

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

I have written about this before, using different data, but with renewed attention being paid to rising inequality, leading liberals to continue to push for rising taxes for the rich, I feel like it bears repeating, this time with different data.    While most Americans might prefer a more equal distribution of wealth, when positing such a distribution without considering who worked harder or contributed more, I doubt any study could show that any large group of people actually care about sharing some good equally more than adhering to the principle of deservingness.  People care more that people get what they deserve than if everything is shared equally.  Indeed if anybody knows of such a study, showing the oppositve, please share it with me.

Below is a graph of questions asking “how wrong” certain violations of fairness principles are.  For example, a violation of procedural justice concerns situations like a trial being decided with misleading information or a law being made without the input of affected parties (alpha = .77).  A violation of “lack of punishment” would concern a person going unpunished for a crime (alpha = .78).  A violation of equity/deservingness concerns a person contributing to society and not being rewarded or a bonus being awarded without considering the relative contributions of employees (alpha = .76).  A violation of equality concerns some employees being paid a lot while others are paid very little or a child inheriting a lot of money while another inherits nothing (alpha = .89).

To me, the interesting thing is not that liberals care more about equality than conservatives,or that liberals care less about punishing wrongdoers.  Both facts make sense but are almost self-evident if one pays attention to politics and current events.  Rather, the most interesting thing about this data (and any other data where I’ve pitted equality/deservingness against equality), is that everyone, including liberals, believes that equity/deservingness is a more important principle than equality.

There are certainly caveats to this data, in that it’s a limited sample and the conclusions are somewhat reliant on the questions I choose to ask.  However, this is but one of many datasets we have collected which tell the same story…that equity concerns trump equality concerns.  Moreover, I think this idea is quite “post-dictable” meaning that most people who really think about it, realize that they themselves, no matter how liberal they are, care more about equity/deservingness than they care about making things more equal.  This article from the Atlantic blog sums it up nicely:

I think very few (completely misguided) people resent “wealth” per se.  I don’t remember anyone ever begrudging Bill Gates’ wealth, either.  When people resent wealth, more often than not the resentment is directed at how the wealth is accrued rather than at who has accrued it.  In certain instances, the how and the who become one and the resentment oozes toward the individual.  I’m thinking of the Paris Hilton’s of the world in this instance.  Here’s somebody who has done nothing of substance whatsoever; her wealth was accrued by virtue of genetic lottery.  But those instances where people resent a particular person for their wealth are, I think, rather rare.

So how can liberals argue for progressive taxation as a matter of equity rather than equality?  One problem for liberals is that research on system justification suggests that conservatives are more likely to believe that wealthy investors are more like Bill Gates than Paris Hilton.  I don’t have data on this (though I hope to collect it), but one example that worked for me recently is to frame progressive taxation policies in terms of rewarding work, as opposed to investment.  Conservatives value hard work and I might even go as far as to say, anecdotally, that the conservatives I know work harder than the liberals I know (see this book which is tangentially related).  Yet, we live in a country where someone who works hard for a living pays taxes at a higher rate (the income tax rate) compared to someone who happens to buy the right stock or the right real estate property at the right time, and sells it later for a gain (taxed at the capital gains rate).  Or someone who inherits millions, and lives off their investments, a la Paris Hilton.  Hard work is penalized relative to profiting by owning things.  Is that fair?

- Ravi Iyer

President Obama started military action against Libya, following his belief in the concept of a “just war”, suggesting that Libya might be a useful example of morally motivated violence.  This was somewhat informed by the fact that I personally support intervention in Libya on moral grounds, meaning that I see no gain for the US or myself, but rather would like to help those who are attempting to gain their freedom.  Unfortunately, that requires violence.  While I may see this as ‘good’, others likely see this as evil, and I do see the unfortunate parallel with violent actions anywhere, in that I could see a suicide bomber having a very similar thought process, even as they kill many innocent people in an act that I would term evil.  The point of this research is to divorce normative judgments about which kinds of violence are good or evil from the more general psychological process, and simply to show that at least in this case, violence is often morally motivated, rather than being indicative of a person who is amoral.

As such, I conducted an experiment where participants were randomly assigned to answer questions about Libyan military intervention in terms of what is morally right or what is in the national interest.  For example, one question read “Considering what is (morally right/in the US national interest), I support the recent American intervention in Libya.”

Results are shown in the graph below, broken down by ideological group, and indicated that many individuals are indeed more supportive of intervention when framed in terms of what is morally right. Liberals (p<.05) exhibited significantly greater support for Libyan intervention, framed in moral terms.  Conservatives exhibited a marginally significant effect (p=.06), though the magnitude of the difference is greater, so I likely just need to survey more conservative participants, who are a minority in this sample.  Consistent with our research on libertarian morality, whereby libertarians are not moved by the typical moral concerns of liberals and conservatives, libertarians were unaffected by moral framing.  Interestingly, moderates were also unmoved by moral framing.

This is one specific case and one specific study on a very specific sample, so there are certainly limitations in the conclusions one can make, as with most any social science research.  However, this does suggest that for many people, the case of Libya is a concrete example of morally motivated violence.  I’m hopeful that thinking about violence and war as morally motivated, divorced from whether you think the ends are good or evil, will be a useful paradigm for reducing violence and conflict more generally.  Perhaps violence will actually be reduced if people become less moral and instead more tolerant of other people’s views and actions.

- Ravi Iyer

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

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

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

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

- Ravi Iyer

In contrast, Sarah Palin was perturbed that “We get in the back of the bus and wait for NATO, we wait for the French.”  Newt Gingrich said that when Obama stated that Gaddafi has to go, “he pitted the prestige and power of the United States against a dictator who’s been anti-American for over 40 years.”   Conservative Charles Krauthammer believes that Obama is “overly modest about his country” at a time when “the world is hungry for America to lead“.

Does it really matter if we are perceived to be leading or following and does every desire the President expresses have to come true, lest we are diminished?  A belief certainly isn’t wrong just because I don’t share it.  There are many things that people value more than me (e.g. etiquette or aesthetics) that are nevertheless important in the world.  However, what puzzles me about calls for the US to lead in Libya is that I don’t necessarily understand the underlying value differences that drive this.  What do we get for being the “leader” in Libya?  Would it be so bad to let the French bear the cost and risk involved?

I don’t have a good empirical answer for this, but I did examine some value differences in our yourmorals dataset that I wanted to share, in part because certain hypotheses I had are demonstrably wrong.  Below is a graph of how much conservatives, liberals, and libertarians value humility, influence, social power, and authority from the Schwartz Values scale in our dataset.  The overall average bars are the average across all values on the scale, indicating that none of these values overly important in any group.  Still, these differences may play a role in the underlying psychology of geo-political leadership.

Perhaps blinded by my liberal bias, I thought one possibility was that liberals believe in humility more than conservatives and/or perhaps conservatives have a greater desire to be influential.  Surprisingly, though probably not to conservative readers, some of whom likely share Krauthammer’s belief that liberals are immodest, conservatives in our dataset value humility more than liberals and both groups value being influential fairly evenly.  The belief that the US should lead does not appear to be a function of conservatives lacking modesty about our country or wanting to wield influence in the world.

Conservatives do report valuing being in positions of authority and having social power more than liberals.  One hypothesis that is possible,  is that conservatives might believe that it would be a bad thing if the US had less power and authority in the world, as these are things which they value more than liberals.  Some people may get a sense of power and authority from being associated with a powerful and authoritative country.  From that perspective, it might make sense to want the US to take a leadership position, even if it does result in a higher tax bill and more risk.

Of course, bear in mind that I haven’t actually connected these values to any attitudes toward Libya, and these results may only hold for the types of educated internet users that tend to visit our website.  Still, this was informative to me for the hypothesis that this rules out, as it seems unlikely that pride is driving calls for the US to lead intervention in Libya amongst conservatives, given that liberals may actually be more prone to pride.  The desire for our country to remain in a prestigious position of power and authority is a more likely candidate and perhaps underlies the desire to see us play a leading role in Libya.

I would welcome any other hypotheses or ideas, especially from conservatives who do feel that it is important that the US take a leadership role in whatever we do.  Why do you feel this is this important to you?  What am I possibly missing?  Perhaps those thoughts would help me design a more conclusive study.  In addition, I’m going to start monitoring my own levels of modesty.

- Ravi Iyer

This is basically common sense, but the interesting part is when we combine the model with research suggesting that conservatives are more likely than liberals to react to threats and avoid negative outcomes, suggesting that in the first decision box, even given the same facts, conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe that scarce resources(e.g. the budget deficit) are likely to lead to ruin and therefore cut public assistance.  For example, this  might explain why a recent Pew Research Poll found that Republicans feel that the deficit is a bigger economic priority than adding more jobs (37% vs 22%), while the numbers were reversed for Democrats (41% think jobs is the most important economic concern vs. 15% for the deficit).

Further, when you get to the second decision box (appraising deservingness), conservatives are more likely to attribute success and failure to internal-controllable causes vs. liberals.  For example, this is a graph of yourmorals.org data and you’ll notice that conservatives are more likely to attribute their success at work and in relationships to effort (an internal-controllable trait) versus ability (internal, but not necessarily controllable) or context/luck (external).  This attributional divide has been documented in other published research.

When you combine these two factors, it is no surprise that liberals and conservatives have very different ideas about a social safety net.  Each group may be psychologically predisposed to believing in more or less scarcity and more or less personal responsibility for outcomes, even given the same information about the world.

These dispositions may actually also cause people to be more liberal or conservative, or to support such policies, as research on mortality salience has succeeded in increasing support for conservative candidates.  There is a lack of research on causes of liberalism, but anecdotally, Michael Moore recently told a liberal audience that “America is not broke.” and in my anecdotal experience of religion, one of the main principles of many liberal churches is the idea that we need to think of the world as full of abundance, not scarcity.  The ironic thing is that just when people need help most (conditions of scarcity) and Keynesian economics would suggest we should spend more, the psychology of the situation predisposes us to be less generous.  Of course, that’s from my liberal point of view, where I’m predisposed to such beliefs.

- Ravi Iyer

ps If anyone knows of studies where an abundance mentality leads to liberal beliefs, I’d love to hear from you.

By the time we can vote, we have developed coherent narratives that help us make sense of our emotions, beliefs, and opinions.  In psychology, we often study individual variables and their impact on attitudes, but the real world is more complex and there are a whole host of attitudes, opinions, and dispositions that may have an impact on your opinion about unions.  As such, I thought it might be interesting to look at the whole picture of what our yourmorals data shows as the correlates of warm or cold feelings toward unions.

The below chart (click on it to enlarge) is sorted from measures/beliefs that are most associated with warm feelings toward unions to measures/beliefs that are negatively associated with warm feelings toward unions.  Warm/cold feelings were assessed using a feeling thermometer scale from 1-7.  Our sample is not representative, so any conclusion that you may draw would be based on the idea that the psychological associations in our overly educated, liberal leaning, internet user sample would hold for other groups.  To help isolate psychological variables, I ran the analysis on only those who self-identified in our sample as liberal, effectively holding that variable somewhat constant (I say somewhat because within this sample, some people were more liberal than others).

I would love to hear what others see in these patterns, but my initial impressions are:

• A lot of what is associated with being liberal is associated with being pro-union.  It is likely a mistake to try and figure out which comes first as people certainly adhere to their party positions, but people also certainly gravitate toward their parties due to psychological variables.  It is all tied together and research supports both relationships.  As such, it may make sense that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s decision to not only try and reduce pay, but effectively try to end all union representation for public workers, meets with such vehement opposition.
• Other oriented connections appear even more related to feelings about unions beyond what one might expect from simple liberal partisanship.  For example, identification with country is actually negatively associated with liberalism, but is positively associated with feelings toward unions.  All measures of connection to others seem to have positive relationships.  The Big 5 personality dimension of agreeableness (e.g. being trusting) has an almost equal relationship as the dimension of openness to experience, which is usually the dominant predictor of liberalism among Big 5 dimensions.
• Dispositional emotional reactivity appears to be a predictor of how liberals feel about unions.  Liberals who are empathizers (on Baron-Cohen’s measure) who care about the less fortunate, feel emotional when perceiving beauty, and are also slightly more prone to depression tend to be those who feel warm toward unions.
• In contrast, rationality, a liberal hallmark, is not related to feeling toward unions.  Belief in scientific causation is strongly associated with liberalism, but not related to feelings toward unions among liberals.  Experiential thinking appears slightly positively correlated with positive feelings toward unions among liberals even as it is negatively correlated with liberalism in our wider dataset.  Rational thinking is not correlated with feelings toward unions, even as it generally is associated with being liberal.

Overall, the impression I get from the pattern is that it is the bleeding heart liberals, as opposed to the more rational, scientific liberals, who likely feel more connected to the ongoing protests in Wisconsin.  But I welcome alternative ideas/interpretations as well as ideas about how these results might not hold in other populations, as the interaction would likely prove instructive.

- Ravi Iyer

Predictably, the response to the shooting has taken on a partisan tinge, with each side claiming that Loughner, the shooter, is a far-right activist, evidenced by his interest in Ayn Rand, or a far-left activist, evidenced by his interest in the Communist Manifesto.  More indirectly, those on the left have blamed the right for their militant rhetoric, while those on the right have pointed out that the left sometimes uses similar rhetoric.

Some on the left have pointed out that the use of extreme rhetoric is unbalanced, and while I don’t think this is necessarily wrong, I think it is a mistake to focus upon, especially for liberals and those who want less divisiveness in politics.  It sets up an “us vs. them” dynamic at a time when all leaders, including Republicans that are sometimes characterized as obstructionist, are open to unity.

Have you ever noticed that liberal churches often have the word ‘unity’ in their title?  That conservatives want to solve health care by increasing competition across state lines?  That liberals prefer diplomatic, while conservatives prefer military solutions to conflicts?  Doesn’t it seem as if Fox News sees purportedly unbiased (e.g. NPR is run by fascists) and moderate (e.g. the Rally to Restore Sanity) entities as greater existential threats than the more obviously opposed, MSNBC?

Liberalism is congruent with cooperation, while conservativism is oriented toward competition.  In social science, linguist George Lakoff shows how conservatives use the language of competition.  In psychology, Morton Deutch’s considerable work was inspired by the difference between competitive and cooperative systems and his work can be explicitly connected to liberal-conservative differences.  Consider the below YourMorals data showing that liberals feel less warm towards sports fans than conservatives.

Neither cooperation or competition is inherently superior as there are situations where each is needed.  Sometimes war is the only way to prevent injustice (e.g. stopping Hitler) or competition does lead to greater productivity (e.g. capitalism vs. communism).  However, competitive framing  and divisiveness is likely to increase both conservativism and vitriolic rhetoric (see this page on how competition leads to incivility) and most Americans now say that, at least in politics, competition for office has gotten out of hand, at the expense of cooperation on policy and now at the expense of innocent lives.    We are in a moment when moderates on both sides of the aisle are preaching unity and civility, which should naturally lead to less divisiveness, threatening to marginalize extremists on both sides.  If there is anything that the killer’s reading list is indicative of, it is of extremism, not any particular political view. As such, those liberals who are using these events to specifically attack conservative rhetoric, further polarizing debate, are fighting a fire with gasoline.

- Ravi Iyer

ps. if you are interested, here is Jon Haidt’s reaction to these events.

Want proof of this reality?  In June, the United Farm Workers union attempted an interesting experiment whereby it offered to train American citizens to replace migrant labor.  Colbert testifies that 16 people took them up on the offer (him included) and press reports indicate that only 7 people took the offer.  Whichever number it is, it seems fairly low.  Still, immigration reform seems unlikely to pass anytime soon as it seems to stimulate conflicting ideas of what is ‘fair’.  Migrant workers are virtually powerless and easily taken advantage of….but they are also breaking the law by coming to this country, and these conflicting considerations are differentially appealing to liberals and conservatives.

The below graph illustrates this differential appeal with data from yourmorals.org.  I asked individuals how ‘wrong’ different situations felt to them.  Some concerned equity (“A person who contributes more to society is not rewarded.), equality (“A bonus is given to a work team for good performance and the money is not divided equally.”), need(“‘A free meal is given to the rich, rather than to the hungry.”), retribution (“A person commits a crime and goes unpunished.”), and procedures (“A negotiation occurs without everyone completely understanding the process.”).  These situations may all be of varying severity, so it is difficult to interpret differences between dimensions, but one can make inferences about liberals and conservatives within dimensions.  Specifically, liberals (in blue below) felt that violations of equality and need (which formed one factor) were more wrong than did conservatives.  Similarly, conservatives (in red below) felt that violations of retributive justice principles were more wrong than did liberals.

Fair policies toward migrant workers depend on what you want to focus on….their lack of equal status, equal opportunity and need (which liberals seem to care about more).  Or their illegal entry into the United States (which conservatives care more about).  Colbert says as much in a rare break of character when responding to questions during the congressional hearing.

- Ravi Iyer