Moral Foundations and Presidential Rhetoric

July 19th, 2011 by Brad

I have recently been interested in looking into the ways that politicians use the morally charged language to garner support for their agendas. Over the next couple of weeks, I plan on doing a few posts on the use of moral foundations language in State of the Union (SotU) addresses. These will be largely exploratory in nature, and it is very possible that I will miss something important (so please point out these omissions in the comments!).

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.

Harm Fairness Ingroup Authority Purity Prop. Moral n

Health

 1 10 3 9 1 0.36 781

Civil Rights

 14 1 14 1 13 0.36 478

Law/Crime

 3 7 2 2 7 0.30 681

Labor/Employment

 4 4 4 5 11 0.23 845

Defense

 2 16 12 6 6 0.20 2,493

Community Development/Housing

 18 15 1 14 12 0.20 304

Lands/Water Management

 5 11 18 3 2 0.18 233

International Affairs

 6 5 13 10 5 0.17 3,059

Agriculture

 9 2 6 12 15 0.17 434

Banking/Finance

 12 6 9 8 10 0.16 245

Environment

 7 17 19 4 3 0.15 293

Social Welfare

 10 14 5 17 9 0.15 711

Macroeconomics

 11 12 8 15 4 0.14 2,546

Government Operations

 15 9 11 11 8 0.14 1,072

Uncategorized

 17 13 7 16 14 0.13 2,761

Foreign Trade

 13 3 16 19 19 0.12 387

Transportation

 8 19 20 7 20 0.12 207

Energy

 16 8 15 20 18 0.11 363

Education

 20 20 10 13 16 0.10 702

Science/Technology

 19 18 17 18 17 0.08 259

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

Posted in Uncategorized, moral foundations, moral psychology, political psychology, unpublished results | 2 Comments »
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Libya as a moral war (except for libertarians)

July 17th, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

Many people believe that war and violence are inherently immoral, and some psychologists have begun to explore the idea that celebrating heroism is an antidote to the problem of evil. In contrast, other psychologists have highlighted the dark side of moral conviction (Skitka & Mullen, 2002) and the notion of idealistic evil (Baumeister, 1997) to explain how moral motivations might actually lead to increased violence.  I sometimes call this being hypermoral, not because I have any great further insight, but simply because I think it has a better chance of catching on as a pop culture meme.

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.

Libya as a Moral War

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

Posted in War and Peace, hypermoralism, idealistic evil, libertarians, libya, news commentary, political psychology, war, yourmorals.org | 2 Comments »

Relative vs. Absolute Good Choices for Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians

June 19th, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

Awhile ago, I read about a survey given to Harvard Medical school students about whether they would prefer to live in a world where they had a higher absolute amount of some beneficial good or a higher relative amount.  For example, participants had a choice of living in a world where they make $100,000 and everyone else makes $200,000 (absolutely better) or one where they make $50,000 and everyone else makes $25,000 (relatively better), explicitly assuming buying power remains the same.  The same types of choices were made for IQ, education, vacation time, attractiveness, and other goods, with the choice being between having more of something (absolute) or having more than other people (relative).  The survey results often generate a lot of discussion, in my experience, as people are intrigued by the idea that lots of people would give up money, just to be better than others.  In truth, other studies have shown that almost everyone cares about relative concerns, just perhaps in different circumstances.

I ran the same survey at yourmorals.org, and the results are similar to the original study, with some important differences (see graph below).  Importantly, the % of people who chose a world of relative income was smaller than in the original study, where 50% of participants chose relative position.  Perhaps people at Harvard are simply more competitive?  Mean scores are quite variable in different non-representative samples, so I wouldn’t put much stock in them, but perhaps more interesting is that the relationship between variables replicates.  Our results converge with the idea that some goods are more positional than others.  Specifically, the same things that people thought were more appropriate to think of in relative terms in the original study (praise and attractiveness) were thought to be relative in our sample, with vacation time being the least relative good.  The graph below shows questions in rough decreasing order of concern about relative position.

relative vs. absolution goods in liberals, conservatives, and libertarians

Our data suggests that some people think of things as more relative than others.  Cronbach’s alpha for the items in the graph was .80, meaning that answers positively correlate and it is reasonable to think of answers to these diverse questions as all representing some general underlying preference for relative or absolute position.

Interestingly, it appears that conservatives care more about relative position compared to both liberals and libertarians.  Perhaps this converges with the idea that conservatives have a more competitive orientation, leading to positive beliefs about competitive markets and competitive sports, both of which are found in our data as well.

The current data is based on 5,795 participants (3,559 liberals, 632 conservatives, 569 libertarians, and 1,035 others) who took this survey.  This means that aside from political orientation, we could look at other factors that are associated with preference for relative or absolute goods.  For example, concern for positional goods is negatively correlated with Big 5-Agreeableness (r=-.13, p<.001), Openness to Experience (r=-.09, p<.001), and positively correlated with Neuroticism (r=.07, p<.001).  These are very modest correlations made significant by the sample size that took both measures (3,844).  If other people have ideas for personality variables that may explain why some people prefer relative vs. absolute goods, please leave a comment with your ideas.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in consumer psychology, differences between republicans and democrats, libertarians, positional goods, relative income, relative vs. absolute goods, replications of other studies, unpublished results, yourmorals.org | 7 Comments »

Personality profiles of readers vs. non-readers and saving your local bookstore.

May 23rd, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

I recently attended the Los Angeles Times Book fair, which was held at USC this year.  For anyone who lives close to Los Angeles, I would highly recommend it, as over a 2 day period, I saw Andrew Breitbart, Larry Flynt, Father Greg Boyle, Steve Lopez, and countless other interesting people speak about books they had written.  I met and bought a book from a guy who biked from Alaska to Chile…on a tandem bike!

One thing that always interests me is attending panels on the book industry, and there happened to be a panel that included representatives from three of the best independent bookstores in the country, Powell’s Books, Vroman’s Books (that now owns Book Soup too), and City Lights.  The panelists talked about the challenges of selling books in an age of Amazon and e-readers, with many of them echoing themes about how independent bookstores have become a “3rd place” where people can browse and discover books, which may or may not lead to a sale of a physical book.

One thing I study is the tendency to make experiential vs. material purchases and I therefore asked a question, which relates both to my research and my own experience in bookstores, which is that what I really value about physical bookstores is the experience of browsing the shelves, not the ability to buy physical books.  I normally walk out with a number of books, but I’m not necessarily there to buy something…rather, I’m there to experience the world of ideas.  Buying a book there just seems like the polite thing to do.  It occurred to me that other readers might be like me and appreciate the experience of browsing books more than owning any physical book.  Indeed, this market research that I later found agrees, in that they found that younger buyers appreciate the brick-and-mortars shopping experience of physical bookstores, even as there is significant leakage whereby they actually purchase books online.

Both because I was curious and because I’d like to help booksellers, I decided to look at our yourmorals data to see if I could say anything about the personality profile of readers vs. non-readers.  This is certainly a unique sample  - over educated and likely non-fiction readers as we get a lot of people who find our website via science articles – but while the mean levels of reading are meaningless, the relationships between variables in our sample often generalize (see this article).  We actually have a question, “How many hours a week do you spend reading?”, that I used to characterize people as readers and non-readers and my first thought was that readers would be more experiential, as opposed to material purchasers.  However, in the 175 people who had taken our experiential vs. material purchasing measure, the correlation was insignificant (and negative), meaning that my hypothesis was likely wrong.  Readers are not experiential rather than material purchasers, at least in our data set.

I then thought I’d explore more and below is a graph of the Big 5 personality traits of readers vs. non-readers.

The trend for openness to experience is clear and robust.  It replicates within political groups and within each gender.  The effect size is about a half of a standard deviation.  People who are “original”, “curious”, “deep thinkers” read more.  This is perhaps different than stimulation seeking (readers also do not score higher on valuing stimulation on the Schwartz values scale) or experiential purchasing, in that readers aren’t necessarily seeking novelty or thrills (otherwise they might experience the world more directly, rather than reading about it).  Here are some related differences between light (under 10 hours per week – in blue) and heavy (more than 20 hours per week reading – in green) readers.

Heavy readers are more comfortable with uncertainty (low need for closure), enjoy deliberate cognitive thinking (high need for cognition), and tend to try to understand how the world works in a systematic way (higher systemetizer scores).

These are hardly earth shattering findings, but sometimes its useful to emphasize what you already know and doing this analysis perhaps crystallizes the question I proposed to the panel.  I asked if there was a way for those of us who enjoy the experience of bookstores to pay for the experience, perhaps through memberships, rather than the material goods, which are often more efficiently bought elsewhere.  However, readers are not necessarily more experiential purchasers, as I had originally thought and it isn’t just an experience that should be offered.  Rather heavy readers (at least in this sample) are people who enjoy engaging in the world of ideas.  Buying books is one way for readers to engage in effortful thinking and gain understanding of the world, but perhaps independent bookstores can think of other ways to charge people for better access to the world of ideas, leading to more congruence between what readers want and what only brick and mortar stores can provide.  The LA Times book fair, though free, is perhaps a good model, where people line up for access to intellectually stimulating panels with live discussions.  I am not in the book industry, but I’m hopeful that the idea that booksellers are selling ideas, rather than books, will be generative, in terms of thinking up ideas for supporting the livelihoods of independent booksellers.  Charging for panels, better access to authors, or providing a marketplace of ideas that are specific to a very local community are thoughts that come to mind, but I’m sure there are many other ways.  Personally, I’d happily give more money to my local bookstore, if they could somehow leverage their physical space in a way that would help me think of and discuss new interesting ideas in new interesting ways.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in consumer psychology, independent bookstores, los angeles times book fair, openness to experience, yourmorals.org | 3 Comments »

When Ingroup Love does not equal Outgroup Hate

May 9th, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

Recently, Jon Haidt wrote a an opinion piece about the death of Bin Laden, which points out that people are expressing love for their ingroup, it does not necessarily translate to hate of other groups.  As I’ve said before, few things in psychology are categorically one thing or the other, and certainly there is a minority who will use the death of Bin Laden to express dislike of Islam.  Testosterone, that accompanies winning, can have that effect.  However, several research studies have shown that ingroup love and outgroup hate are indeed separable, and that if you give people a chance to separate the two, they are often feeling ingroup love, not outgroup hate.

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

Posted in empathy, liberals and conservatives, news commentary, political psychology, testosterone, yourmorals.org, zero sum game | No Comments »

Liberals place more value on being funny than conservatives and libertarians.

April 23rd, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

I’ve been watching a lot of comedy central lately and have been wondering why there does not appear to be a conservative equivalent, just as there is no popular liberal equivalent to conservative AM talk radio.  Perhaps liberals value being funny more than conservatives?

To test this idea, I thought I’d look at the data from the Good Self Scale from yourmorals.org.  In it, participants are asked how important it is to have various traits, and one of them happens to be “funny”.  If you look at the below graph, you’ll see that liberals do indeed place a tiny bit more value on being funny, compared to others (p<.01 comparing liberals to non-liberals).

It is important to note that this does not mean that liberals are indeed funnier, but rather that they place a value on being funny.  The results seem plausible given that the rest of the results conform to previous research (e.g. conservatives care about loyalty more and care about being more responsible).  Some observations:

  • All groups are above the midpoint (2.5) of the scale for all traits, except for libertarians and their valuation of being generous, outgoing, and sympathetic.  Instead, libertarians score high on being intellectual and logical.
  • Moderates actually score highest in terms of valuing fairness and honesty.  A very interesting finding.
  • Liberals, in addition to wanting to be funny, also want to be creative, kind, sympathetic, and almost as intellectual as libertarians.
  • Conservatives value being responsible, loyal, and honest (comparable to moderates for honesty).

In all, these are fair descriptions of these ideological groups, and given that the other relationships are reasonable, I would conclude that it’s also reasonable to say that liberals likely do place more value on being funny than other ideological groups.  Whether they succeed or not is another question.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in comedy, conservatives, differences between republicans and democrats, liberals, libertarians, political psychology, unpublished results, yourmorals.org | 14 Comments »

Why should the US lead in Libya? Liberal-Conservative Value Differences.

March 30th, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

Why should the US lead in Libya?  This is a question I’ve been asking myself a number of times as I’ve heard one common criticism of Obama and our actions in Libya, specifically that we aren’t demonstrating leadership.  Personally, I would like Gaddafi stopped and perhaps most importantly, I’d like us to save lives when possible with minimal risk and cost, but I don’t necessarily understand why it is important if we lead the effort.  In fact, as a taxpayer, I would love it if France decided to bear the cost of the endeavor or better yet, an Arab country that is less likely to cause reactance in the population.  And if they would like our help, I would be happy for us to follow.

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

Posted in War and Peace, charles krauthammer, differences between republicans and democrats, libya, news commentary, sarah palin, war, yourmorals.org | 5 Comments »

Perceptions of Scarcity & Responsibility inform Budget Negotiations

March 25th, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

I was recently asked about the psychology of scarcity and it gave me an excuse to revisit an old paper by Skitka and Tetlock (1992, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) that contains a more complex version of the model I depict below.  Like many who are interested in politics, I’ve been following the recent budget debates with interest.  Beyond the issue specific partisanship (e.g. defunding NPR or Planned Parenthood), there is the larger issue of how much government can afford to provide a social safety net.  As the simplified model based on this paper argues, the desire to help others is based in large part on appraisals of how scarce resources are and how deserving people are of those resources.

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.

Posted in abundance, budget deficit, differences between republicans and democrats, justice and fairness, keynesian economics, liberals and conservatives, news commentary, political psychology, scarcity, yourmorals.org | 1 Comment »

Psychological Correlates of Feelings Toward Labor Unions among Liberals

February 27th, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

I have been reading a great deal lately about the labor battle in Wisconsin lately.  As someone who rarely has had a traditional job, I have never had a well formed opinion about unions and it has been an interesting opportunity to think about the role of unions in society.  There have been a great number of polls lately, each of which provides fodder for our innate abilities to confirm what we already believe to be true (confirmation bias).  What psychological (as opposed to demographic) variables might lead someone to have warm or cold feelings toward unions?

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

Posted in labor unions, news commentary, political psychology, scott walker, unpublished results, wisconsin unions, yourmorals.org | 2 Comments »

Reagan was a Union Member – Visiting his Library as an exercise in Civil Politics

February 22nd, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

Yesterday, in a strangely appropriate thing to do for President’s Day weekend, I visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.  When I first got there, I had this idea that I might need to keep a low profile considering my liberal leanings and when I told a docent there that I was from Venice Beach, I projected a liberal-conservative frame upon him, as I took his information that General Electric had given them a grant to bus kids from Los Angeles to the library as partisan gloating, even as I’ve myself wondered why Republicans care about our president addressing our children.  If I’m honest, there is not much difference and school children should be able to do both.  Perhaps visiting his library is an opportunity to remove myself from partisan framing and to understand someone with a different worldview than myself.

Perhaps the most important thing I got from his visit is that I realized that Reagan was a far more complex, sincere and likable person than I might have thought.  As someone who actively seeks to promote civility in politics, this was an opportunity to practice what I’ve often espoused.  I was born in 1974, and so perhaps was too young to have any direct ideas about Reagan, instead relying on the caricatures of his persona from the current political discourse.  These caricatures map onto the below graph of yourmorals.org data where strong liberals report being disgusted by conservatives and believe that conservatives are generally not good people (compared to the midpoint of the scale on a 1-7 disagree-agree scale). Vice versa, strong conservatives often believe that liberal democrats disgust them, are anti-country, and also are not good people.  Note that these effects hold for “strong” partisans rather than slight partisans.

On visiting the Reagan Library, I learned a number of things that add depth to my impression of Reagan as a likable person, even if I disagree with much of his worldview.  Among the things I learned were that:

  • Reagan was the “first president of the United States to hold a lifetime membership in an AFL-CIO union”.  While he may be famous for firing the air traffic controllers, who imperiled national safety for fairly ambitious demands, I didn’t get the impression that he would resolutely support Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s union busting ethos.  Reagan’s first political experience was actually in solidarity with students who wanted to strike to protest cuts at their university.

  • Reagan actually was a Democrat in his early career.
  • While governor of California, he actually signed legislation increasing the affordability of homes for low income individuals and funding grants for the disabled, meaning he was hardly as extreme as either liberals who villainize him or strong conservatives who hold him up as an example, make him out to be.
  • Reagan appreciated nature in that he spent a lot of time outdoors in his spare time, and praised the government of Sri Lanka for it’s “dedication to preserve God’s gift of nature.”

Civility does not mean that I have to agree with his policies, but rather that I am open to appreciating that he genuinely meant well for the country, was a good person, and was not someone to be disgusted by, in contrast to the above graph.  Of course, there were many points where I disagreed with the focus of the exhibits.

  • The cold war was portrayed as a struggle between good and evil, whereas much moral psychology would suggest that pure evil is far less common than we might think.  Indeed, while “peace through strength” is a common theme of exhibits, it is Reagan’s friendship with Gorbachev, not  force, that ultimately seemed to be the breakthrough in the cold war.

  • Reagan’s belief in unrestricted free enterprise and supply side economics seems to me like an exercise in motivated reasoning, in that people don’t like to make tradeoffs between helping the poor and rewarding those who produce more.

Still, my overall impression of Reagan was improved by my visit and perhaps a civil thing to do would be for all partisans to visit a presidential library of someone of the opposite party as familiarity breeds liking, and in these hyperpartisan times, we could all use a bit more appreciation for our friends across the aisle.

- Ravi Iyer

Posted in civil politics, civility, ronald reagan, yourmorals.org | 2 Comments »
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