We all witnessed the Tea Party’s hard-line position on the standoff leading up to the debt ceiling crisis — 68% of Tea Partiers wanted lawmakers to stand firm on their principles, even at the risk of government shut-down.  Some have argued that, along with their fiscally conservative values, their willingness to take such a stand, and their unwillingness to compromise, have become the defining features of the entire movement.  However, it is not entirely clear why Tea Partiers might be predisposed to these attitudes about compromise.  Although it is impossible to say that any one of the following variables caused or even contributed to any specific political behavior, it is nonetheless compelling to examine how a number of psychological variables might be related to Tea Partiers’ hard-line stance on compromise.

Most notably, Tea Party supporters are highly reactant, as measured on the Hong Reactance Scale. Reactance is an emotional resistance to the influence of others, and often manifests as defiance to attempted persuasion.  Our data show that Tea Party supporters express consistently high levels of this trait, much like libertarians.  They also show low levels of empathy, or the ability to share the feelings of others (much like conservatives and libertarians, as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index).  Taken together, these two traits may preclude one from a willingness to compromise: a reactive person is highly motivated to disagree with threatening others, and a person who lacks empathy is unlikely to fully consider or appreciate his opponents’ point-of-view.

These findings could also be said of libertarians, but unlike libertarians, Tea Party supporters score low on the Need for Cognition Scale.  This scale measures the extent to which people engage in and enjoy effortful thinking.  Low levels of Need for Cognition are associated with heuristic thinking styles and a lower likelihood of discounting erroneous intuitions and judgments.  As a result, groups that rely less on deliberative thinking styles (i.e., groups with lower Need for Cognition) may be more steadfast in their intuitive convictions, and less receptive to reconsideration.

Another interesting finding is that Tea Party supporters are very sensitive to social desirability concerns, as measured by the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale.  In other words, when presented with true-false questions about oneself that were either socially acceptable but unlikely, or socially unacceptable but likely, Tea Party supporters responded in the most self-promoting fashion.  Their results on the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding also showed relatively high scores on a related measure of self-deceptive enhancement, suggesting that these responses reflected internal beliefs, rather than intentionally over-reported ones.

Along the same lines, Tea Party supporters were also most likely to demonstrate the better-than-average effect.  That is, more than other groups, they reported possessing positive traits more than the average person, and negative traits less than the average person.  Although this effect is pervasive (e.g., over 93% of people report being above-average drivers), Tea Party supporters demonstrated the highest level of this bias compared to other political groups.

So what does this tell us about Tea Party psychology?  Tea Party supporters have a reactant and intuitive reasoning style, low levels of empathy, and they display a self-enhancing/over-confident style of evaluating themselves.  Could these psychological predispositions play an important role in Tea Partiers’ political behavior, particularly in their principled stands/resistance to compromise on their core values?

Although certainly possible, it would obviously be unwise and premature to claim a causal connection between these factors and any specific political behaviors.  Keep in mind that the analyses reported above were conducted with Tea Party supporters, rather than Tea Party participants, who show a slightly different pattern of results (not reported here).  In my next blog post, I’ll go into more detail about a number of other key predictors of Tea Party support that I believe can help inform our understanding of Tea Party psychology.  Stay tuned.

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

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time thinking about the idea that we can locate individuals in a moral “space.” If you’ve read much about moral foundations theory, you are probably already familiar with the equalizer metaphor. The basic idea is that individual differences in moral considerations can be thought of as different settings on a metaphorical moral equalizer. Moral foundations theory is based on five dimensions of morality: Harm, Fairness, In-group, Authority, and Purity.

A fully specified spatial model of morality would describe individuals as occupying a particular point in a five-dimensional space. Some of the regions of this five-dimensional space would be sparsely populated. Indeed, research on the moral foundations has found that some of the foundations seem to “go together.” For example, individuals who are high on the Harm foundation also tend to be high on Fairness.

Ravi’s post made me wonder if moderates are more likely to live in these lower density areas of the moral space. Maybe they register as moderates because they have several conflicting considerations. Political scientists long recognized that individuals hold many different opinions in their heads at a single time and have shown that this attitudinal ambivalence has measurable consequences for political activity.*

If we think that political elites in the United States are forced to create a one-dimensional (“left-right”) policy space out of the diversity of value structures that exist in the public, it seems natural that they would, by sheer trial and error, identify the most populous regions of the value space. Due to institutional forces in the United States, there is not always going to be a clear home for individuals who live in the moral hinterlands.

I have a really difficult time thinking in five dimensions, and the dataset I am working with doesn’t have enough cases to support much beyond three dimensions. In the graphs that follow, I’ve collapsed the Harm and Fairness foundations into a single category (labeled HF). Similarly, the In-group and Authority foundations form the IA dimension. I’ve left purity separate.

The figure above shows this hypothetical space. The lower right-hand corner would be the place where individuals who have low scores on all three of my dimensions. As one moves to the right, scores on the HF dimension increase (the place for individuals who value Harm/Fairness). Moving up the vertical axis corresponds with higher purity scores. Moving along the diagonal axis varies the In-group/Authority dimension.

Using fancy statistical techniques** and data from Knowledge Networks (which I’ve described a little elsewhere), I estimated a model of political moderation as a function of these three dimensions. We can then consult the model and see where in the space individuals have the highest probability of identifying as a political moderate. Think of the figures below as cross sections of the 3-D moral space displayed in the figure above. First, let’s take a slice from the middle of the cube. Holding the Purity dimension constant at its mean value, what does the landscape look like?

The shadings on the graph represent the predicted probability of identifying as a moderate given an individual’s coordinates in the moral space. Notice the two peaks in the graph (the darkest shaded regions). These occur in the regions where we would imagine the most conflicted individuals reside. Individuals who are high on the HF dimension and high on the IA dimension (as well as those who are low on both dimensions) are most likely to identify as moderate. When attitudes come into the “right” alignment (high on HF, low on IA or vice versa) individuals are least likely to identify as moderate.

Here is a similar picture looking at the interrelationship between HF and Purity (this time holding IA constant at its mean).

And finally, IA and Purity (holding HF constant):

In each case we see a ridge running through the middle of the space where individuals who don’t “fit” well into the existing value coalitions of American liberals and conservatives reside.

*see, for example, Jennifer Hochschild’s work on ambivalence or Diana Mutz’s work on deliberative versus participatory citizens. Most recently, Shawn Treier and Sunshine Hillygus have shown that ideology falls along two dimensions (social and economic) and conflicted individuals are most likely to identify as “moderate” or give a “don’t know” response to the ideology question.

**I’m using a generalized additive model (GAM) to model moderate ideology as a completely non-parametric function of the scores along the three dimensions. As they are non-parametric, GAMs don’t impose any functional form onto the data. In a normal regression context, the effects of each of the dimensions are constrained to be linear. This is problematic for this kind of analysis.

…there are two big incentives that drive behavior at the intersection where politics meets media. One is public attention. The other is money. Experience shows there’s lots more of both to be had by engaging in extreme partisan behavior.

Fox News has soared on the strength of commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, both of whom fanned the Sherrod story on the strength of the misleading Breitbart video. (A Fox senior executive, by contrast, urged the news side of the operation to get Sherrod’s response before going with the story, The Washington Post reported.) On the left, MSNBC is trying to emulate the success of primetime partisanship. Meanwhile, CNN, which has largely strived toward a neutral ideological posture, is battling steady relative declines in its audience.

If media executives hunger for ratings, politicians hunger for campaign cash and fame.

Obama put it best earlier this year, after Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “you lie” during the president’s State of the Union speech. “The easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude,” the president told ABC News.

Indeed, at first Wilson seemed embarrassed and apologized for his outburst. But within days, Wilson and his opponent were both flooded with campaign contributions; Wilson took in more than $700,000 in the immediate aftermath of his outburst and was a guest of honor on Hannity’s show and Fox News Sunday.

We reward politicians and news organizations, with our attention and our money, that engage in the very incivility that makes politics so ugly. This is true on both sides of the aisle.

At the recent meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Linda Skitka gave a talk which puts a lot of this in perspective for me. Her lab studies the dark side of moral conviction, which I call hypermoralism in the hope that the term catches on. Roy Baumeister studies a similar concept, idealistic evil. In Skitka’s talk, she demonstrates in a Chinese sample that political intolerance (e.g. “people with different positions than your own about this issue should be allowed to have their phones tapped by the Chinese government”) and social intolerance (e.g. “How willing would you be to have someone who did not share your views on this issue as a close personal friend?”) were best predicted by moral conviction (e.g. “To what extent are your feelings about this issue or policy based on your fundamental beliefs about right and wrong?”).  When controlling for moral conviction, all other variables (e.g. demographics, political position, attitude importance, and attitude strength) were all insignificant predictors of social and political intolerance. I look forward to seeing how this replicates on a US sample and how political intolerance is operationalized. Perhaps something along the lines of liberal consideration of censoring Fox news or conservative publication of what many would consider private discussion would make good operationalizations of political intolerance as they mirror what we see in reality, where considerations of privacy, context, and free speech are considered secondary to partisanship. Moral conviction may underlie the hyperpartisanship that Politico talks about.

Hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism may be another instance of the effects of what evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett calls “Supernormal Stimuli”. As the Wall Street Journal writes about her book:

As Ms. Barrett notes, modern life surrounds us with supernormal stimuli. An example: Humans evolved strong tastes for fats and sweets, tastes that conferred a reproductive advantage in the days when starvation was common. But these tastes can be a burden when we’re confronted with such supernormal stimuli as the 400-calorie Frappuccino at Starbucks. An evolutionary adaptation that once promised survival is more likely nowadays to produce Type 2 diabetes.

Ms. Barrett pushes her thesis too far at times, but her plain-spoken disquisition makes a strong case that supernormal stimuli “can help us understand the problems of modern civilization.”

One might even argue that supernormal stimuli—or perhaps our reactions to them—are the biggest problems faced by affluent societies.

In the case of hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism, our evolved moral senses, which allow human beings to cooperate, are now subject to the stimulus which is the 24 hour news cycle and the non-stop political campaign. Moral emotions are powerful forces, which are now activated routinely, rather than rarely.

If anybody has ideas on how to escape this cycle, I would love to hear them. Humanizing and getting to know the opposition, along the lines of intergroup contact theory, is an idea. Perhaps moral emotions can be activated against hyperpartisanship itself, rather than against individual ideologies. Or maybe with greater understanding, we can all learn to recognize supernormal moral stimuli and give them less power in our lives. Ideas welcome and I’m open to operationalizing particularly promising ideas as studies to be run on yourmorals.org.

- Ravi Iyer