Since this is a blog that is largely about psychology, I’d like to frame my discussion of the book in terms of one of my favorite psychological theories of personality, Simon Baron-Cohen’s Empathizing-Systemizing distinction.  Father Boyle is a great empathizer, who seems to “enjoy caring for other people”, is able to “predict how someone will feel”, and knows “what to do in a social situation” (quotes are from Baron-Cohen’s scale).  In contrast, he is a fairly mediocre systemizer (e.g. reading “legal documents very carefully”), if we are to infer that trait from the finance side of Homeboy Industries depicted in Fast Company.  Luckily, he now has help.  This empathizing dimension relates to the two things that I feel are most powerful about Father Boyle.  His ability to forgive and his ability to tell stories.  From the book:

We had lots of enemies in those early days, folks who felt that assisting gang members somehow cosigned on their bad behavior.  Hate mail, death threats, and bomb threats were common…From my office once, I heard a homegirl answer the phone, and say to the caller, “Go ahead and bring that bomb, mutha fucka.  We’re ready for your ass.”…”Uh, Kiddo, um,” I tell her, “Maybe we should just say ‘Have a nice day and God bless you.’”

Some of the gang members have done terrible things, but one of his favorite things to say to those whom most of society would rather ignore is that “you are so much more than the worst thing that you have done.”  In the Fast Company article, they give money to a woman who punched their receptionist in the face.  Sometimes the generosity seems so without limits as to be insane, yet for these youth who have no fear of prison or death, it seems hard to imagine anything but unconditional love being their salvation.  In some ways, Father Greg is giving these youth the unconditional love that many of us take for granted from our parents.

Our YourMorals.org data tells a similar story about the characteristics of empathizers.  Empathizers (the blue line) in our dataset, tend to forgive others (as measured by questions like being “understanding of others for the mistakes they’ve made”).

As well, empathizers, in our dataset, also tend to enjoy stories (r=.17, p<.001, N=495), and the second trait that makes Father Boyle unique is his ability to tell stories.  Stories are a way for human beings to communicate not just information, but the feelings that go along with that information.  Indeed, the most common measure of empathy used in psychology, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, uses items like “I really get involved with the feelings of the characters in a novel” and “Becoming extremely involved in a good book or movie is somewhat rare for me” (reverse scored) to measure empathy.  Stories are powerful things.  From the introduction of the book:

I have all these stories and parables locked away in the “Public Storage” of my brain, and I have long wanted to find a permanent home for them.  The usual “containers” for these stories are my homilies at Mass in the twenty-five detention centers where I celebrate the Eucharist…After Mass once, at one of these probation camps, a homie grabbed both my hands and looked me in the eye.  ”This is my last Mass at camp.  I go home on Monday.  I’m gonna miss your stories.  You tell good stories.  And I hope….I never have to hear your stories again.”

Father Boyle’s stories really are good and show the polish of years of curation.  They transform me every time I read them, reminding me that while justice may feel good, kindness is far more powerful.

If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.

Food for thought.  Please do read the book and I’ll be quite shocked if you can read the stories in the book without being similarly moved.  I can’t recommend it enough.

- Ravi Iyer

I thought I’d examine the Big 5 personality traits of people who think owning is “better” (e.g believing that home ownership is important to happiness) vs. those who prefer renting (e.g. believing that renting provides significant advantages compared to owneing a home) using ~800 people who answered these questions at yourmorals.org.  I had 7 questions about owning vs. renting (alpha = .87).  The Big 5 personality traits are 5 personality dimensions that are deemed most parsimoniously able to characterize people.  The dimensions are Agreeableness (e.g. how well do you want to get along with others), Conscientiousness (e.g. how detail oriented and tidy are you), Extraversion (e.g. how outgoing are you), Neuroticism (e.g. how tense are you), and Openness to Experience (e.g. how much do you seek out new experiences).

Predictably, people who prefer owning a home vs. renting are more conscientious (r = .08, p=.016) and less open to new experiences (r = -.08, p=.03), but the differences are quite small.

People who want to be owners also also tend to be more conservative (r=.18, p<.001), older (r=.13, p<.001), and tend to prefer buying material things rather than experiences (r=.13, p<.001).  Interestingly, there was no relationship to self described social status or gender.  Obviously many of these relationships are small, but they certainly are as I would predict, with perhaps the exception of the lack of relationship with wealth and gender (my guess would have been that women and wealthier people would prefer home ownership).

Got any interesting hypotheses relating to the personalities of those who prefer renting vs. owning?  I’d happily try them.  I’m eager to examing values with regard to owning/renting next.

- Ravi Iyer

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

The take home message is that, convergent with lab research using experimental manipulations, people who report having a preference for experiential purchasing report being happier relative to people who report having a preference for material goods.

The reasons for this have been detailed by other researchers who report that people adapt to experiences less quickly, meaning that good experiences last longer.  As well, people who buy experiences are less apt to compare their purchases to others, with the inevitable disappointment that exists when someone out there gets a better deal.  For example, I recently bought a Prius and still find myself visiting priuschat.com to see if I got the best deal, an exercise which has no utility whatsoever.  On the other hand, my recent hike  to Machu Picchu remains an unequivocally positive memory.

I’d like to thank the editor at Good Magazine for asking me to frame things in terms of the direction of the economy as that led me to this Forbes Magazine article, which has data on how Americans spend their discretionary income.  Spending generally has gone down due to the recession, but from the perspective of experiential vs. material purchasing, it’s clear that experiential purchases (e.g. dining out) are becoming a greater percentage of discretionary spending compared to material purchases (e.g. jewelry).  Anecdotally, I’ve noticed startups that seem to be trying to capitalize on the preference for experiences and my credit card won’t just reward me with stuff, but with experiences.

Perhaps if economists want to consider ways to jump start the American economy, they should consider the trend toward experiences, which are intrinsically difficult to outsource.  The world doesn’t need increasingly more stuff, but there is an experiential deficit out there.  Just think of all the elderly who lack humane care, the homeless for whom personal attention is needed, or the way that Zappos has thrived by making customer service a positive experience.  In economic terms, if experiences really do create more value for consumers, then the economy should necessarily shift in that direction and I’m hopeful that thinking of “the experiential economy” explicitly will be generative for business leaders, policy makers, economists, and perhaps most importantly, for consumers.

- Ravi Iyer

1) Create a Group. Sign in to YourMorals.org and then go to our “Group Creation” page, which you can also get to from near the top of the Explore page. From that page, create a group name. You’ll need to make it something unique, e.g., “Robertsons UVA ethics class” rather than “ethics class.” Spaces are allowed.

2) Send the link. You’ll get a unique URL – a link that you can forward to your group, to invite them to take surveys at YourMorals.org. (See below for an example of an email which you might modify for your purposes and send out.)

3) Pick a few studies. Anyone who creates an account using your group’s link will automatically see a special box at the top of the “explore” page, which says which surveys are the most popular for members of your group. At present, the only way you can get studies into that box is to take those studies yourself. (If you’re the person who created the group, then as soon as you complete a study, it becomes one of the most popular ones for your group).

4) Lead a discussion about the results. We’ll  soon post some ideas or lesson plans to help you or your group interpret and discuss your results.

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[Sample email to send out to your group]

Dear class [or congregation, or team, or whatever]:

For our next meeting, I thought it would be interesting for us to take a few surveys online and then discuss the results. We’ll use the site www.YourMorals.org, which is a non-profit academic research site run by a group of social psychologists who study morality. Please click on this link:

[paste your group-link here]

That will take you to the site. You should then register to create an account. After you’ve filled out the demographic questions, the site will take you to the “explore” page. At the top of the page you’ll see a table with a few studies listed for our group. The studies I think would be most interesting for us are:

1) Moral Foundations Questionnaire

2) Sacredness Survey

3) Business Ethics Questionnaire

[These three are listed as examples. Most groups will want to suggest the Moral Foundations Questionnaire or else the Sacredness Survey, because those are the two studies that give you scores on the five basic foundations of morality. We will soon offer suggestions for sets of studies that may be of interest to various groups]

After you complete each study, you’ll get an explanation of the study which will include a graph showing your score, the scores of everyone in our group averaged together, and the scores of other people who have taken that study. Please be sure to print this page out and bring it to our meeting. Rest assured that your responses are anonymous. Nobody other than you will see your scores. The researchers at YourMorals.org will only use your data for scientific research, and will never be able to link your responses to your name or identity.

If you have already registered at YourMorals.org, before receiving this email, then you can add your existing account to our group by clicking on this link:

[paste in your add-link here, which was at the bottom of the page when you created your group]

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

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

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.

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

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

Harm/Care Foundation

Fairness/Reciprocity Foundation

Ingroup/Loyalty Foundation

Authority/Respect Foundation

Purity/Sanctity Foundation

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

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