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.

Why focus on SotU speeches? First, the SotU provides modern presidents with an opportunity to lay out their legislative priorities. While political scientists have reached different conclusions as to the actual impact of the speech, several studies have found substantive effects. Hoffman and Howard’s Addressing the State of the Union (2006) finds that presidents achieve about 40 percent of the policy goals they outline in the SotU. The speech serves as a signal as to the priorities of the administration, but more importantly for my purposes, it gives the president the opportunity to frame the debate in favorable terms. This framing is often done by appealing to basic moral values.

A second and by no means secondary consideration for focusing on this particular speech deals with the ever pressing concern for data availability. The good people at the Policy Agendas Project (http://policyagendas.org/) have generously made their comprehensive datasets available. On the State of the Union addresses, they have coded each statement in the speech as belonging to one of about twenty different policy areas. Combined with the Moral Foundations dictionary available on Jon Haidt’s website (here), moving forward into analysis is a relatively painless process.

One of my key expectations going into this data exercise is that Republicans and Democrats will emphasize different moral foundations. A portion of this variance will be due to their focus on different policies. Political scientists have long known that each of the major parties is seen to “own” a particular set issues of issues in the mind of the voter (e.g., Democrats are trusted more with relation to social welfare programs and Republicans have traditionally been perceived to be better at handling foreign policy issues).* It is also probably true that certain moral appeals are just harder to make (for example, it might be difficult to credibly frame an appeal to increase spending on transportation infrastructure in terms of the authority foundation). To the extent that partisans gravitate to the issues that their parties own and these issues lend themselves to a certain kind of framing, we would expect to see differences in the moral appeals of Republicans and Democrats as a function of the subjects that they talk about. But, I would also expect Republicans and Democrats to differ in terms of their emphasis of moral foundations even after controlling in some sense for the particular policy they choose to focus on.

In future posts, I will look more directly at the way in which the different parties talk about different policy arenas. For this post, I want to just give the broad outlines of the data.

Using the Moral Foundations Dictionary (referenced above), I coded (or rather I had the computer code) each statement for whether or not it included one or more morally charged words. Of the 18,854 statements listed in the Policy Agendas dataset (which includes SotU speeches from 1948 to 2005), 3,378 (just under 18 percent) included one or more of the words associated with the moral foundations.

The table below breaks out the data by issue area. The cell entries are rankings (1-20) for the proportion of statements in that particular issue area that refer to one of the moral foundations. For example, Law/Crime ranks 3rd in the Harm/Care foundation. Statements made concerning law and order were much more likely to use language drawing on concerns for harm and care than those dealing with science and technology (which ranked 19th overall in the Harm/Care foundation). The last two columns present the proportion of statements using any of the words from the moral foundations dictionray and the total number of statements included in the dataset on each topic.

The table is sorted on proportion of statements using moral language. This gives a (very) rough sense for the degree to which presidents choose morally charged rhetoric when speaking on each topic. Health, Civil Rights, Law/Crime, and Labor/Employment issues are much more likely to be spoken about in moral terms than Transportation, Energy, Education, and Science/Technology.

Another way to look at these data is to examine the trends over time.This first figure shows the overall use of moral foundations words (don’t make too much of the exact divisions between the presidents as these were added by hand — in the figures that follow the divisions between the presidents are more precisely delimited).

The figures below show the proportion of statements that included words found in the moral foundations dictionary broken out for each of the five moral foundations separately between the period from 1948 to 2005.

One of the most striking things about these figures, from my point of view, is the lack of clear patterns based on partisanship. For several of the foundations, the secular trend seems to be more significant than the partisan differences (for example, the general increasing use of Ingroup language from the 1960s to the mid-1990s or the rapid decrease in Fairness language from Carter through Clinton).

There are several things that these simple trend lines miss, and in the coming posts I will drill down deeper into the data in an effort to better understand how American presidents use moral rhetoric in pursuit of their policy goals.

* For more on the theory of issue ownership, see John Petrocik’s work: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2111797

Last time, I gave a broad overview of the descriptive representation of the YourMorals dataset. In a nutshell, we discovered that the YourMorals respondents were much more educated, more likely to self-identify as liberal, and more likely to be white than the population.

In this post, I will explore the question of whether the YourMorals respondents are representative of the population after we condition on observable characteristics. Put another way, would we expect two individuals, one randomly chosen from the population and one drawn from the YourMorals data, who share all the same demographic characteristics (age, race, education, political ideology, place of residence) to look the same in terms of their scores on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire?

To conduct this kind of analysis, first we need a benchmark against which to compare the YourMorals data. As I mentioned in my previous post, the gold standard is a randomly drawn sample from the population. Luckily, we have just such a survey. Prior to the 2008 election, Knowledge Networks* fielded a version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire to a representative sample of the U.S. population. This provides a good point of comparison for our (much larger) convenience sample.

The first task is to process the YourMorals data so that it looks more like the general population. I used a basic sample matching technique to match individuals from the YourMorals data and the Knowledge Networks data. This is a crude technique, but effective. Basically for each individual in the Knowledge Networks sample (the “match target”), I found an individual (or individuals) in the YourMorals data that matched the demographic information for the “match target.” These cases then become the comparison group. After the samples have been balanced in terms of observable characteristics, any differences we observe between the two can be ascribed to the compounding factors that we cannot observe.**

The following figures show how the distributions of the matched YourMorals data compares with the distributions in the sample from Knowledge Networks. The dashed lines show the distribution for Knowledge Networks, the solid lines represent the YourMorals data.

The distributions of the foundations in the two data sources look very similar for the Fairness/Reciprocity foundation, but for all of the others, there are significant differences between the YourMorals and the Knowledge Networks respondents.

A little more digging reveals some interesting patterns. Splitting up the sample by ideology yields:

Liberals:

Conservatives:

Two of the foundations seem to stand out in these comparisons. Liberals in the YourMorals data are particularly low on the Purity foundation (when compared against liberals in the Knowledge Networks data), and conservatives from the YourMorals sample seem to score lower on the Harm foundation. In both cases, YourMorals liberals seem more like population liberals on the first two foundations (Harm and Fairness), and the conservatives in the sample seem more like population conservatives on the last two foundations (Authority and Purity). No matter how the data is cut, the YourMorals sample seems to score lower on the Ingroup foundation.

The comparisons between the general population sample and the convenience sample in this post raise some significant questions about the possibility of using the self-selected respondents in the YourMorals sample to make inferences about the population. These problems in the data are particularly evident in the Ingroup foundation, the purity foundation (for liberals), and the harm foundation (for conservatives).

As was the case with demographics, all is not lost. One last look at the data shows that again the foundations are more or less proportionally correct. Liberals score higher in on the Harm and Fairness foundations in relation to their scores on the other three, and conservatives show more or less equal scores across each of the foundations. The bar chart below shows the average scores of the foundations broken out by survey source (KN and YM for Knowledge Networks and YourMorals respectively) and ideology:

Next time, I’ll discuss how we might correct for some of these demographic and attitudinal biases in the data.

*For the uninitiated, Knowledge Networks is a survey research firm that has gone to great lengths to put together a panel of internet users that is nationally representative. They have recruited a large panel of individuals to take internet surveys. These individuals were generally contacted by telephone, and in cases where the respondent did not have internet access, Knowledge Networks provided access. See this link for more information.

**For a quick primer on the theory behind sample matching see this Wikipedia entry.  I am using exact matching on categories of age, race, education, ideology, and state of residence.

As such, I decided to put a simple gratitude manipulation where participants were asked to write about something they were grateful for, before the moral foundations questionnaire.  I attempted to test the effects of gratitude on moral reasoning by running an experiment where participants were asked to write about 5 things they were grateful for, 5 hassles from their life, or 5 neutral events.  Below are the results of ~1500 participants.  Generally, it seems gratitude makes people more morally liberal and when I examined the standard liberal/conservative moral split (Harm & Fairness minus Authority, Ingroup, & Purity), there was a marginally significant relationship (p=.06) between being in the gratitude condition and having a greater liberal split.  The effect sizes are obviously small, but those in the gratitude condition appear to endorse the fairness foundation (p<.01) more and the authority foundation less (p<.05).

I’m not sure how to interpret this result.  It may just be random error.  To explore the result further, I looked at the individual fairness questions.

The fact that the gratitude manipulation has a fairly homogenous effect at the question level is promising.  Fairness can be thought of in many different ways.  It can be thought of as a concern for equality or for people not getting what they deserve.  The “RICH” and “TREATED” questions appear to show the biggest effect and they are most indicative of a concern for equality (see question text below).  I could imagine a theoretical argument for this link as being grateful and satisfied with a situation allows one the luxury of being generous and worrying about equal treatment.  There is research indicating that being grateful motivates prosocial behavior (also see this article).

Here is a list of fairness questions:

TREATED – Whether or not some people were treated differently than others

UNFAIRLY – Whether or not someone acted unfairly

RIGHTS – Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights

FAIRLY – When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone is treated fairly.

JUSTICE – Justice is the most important requirement for a society.

RICH – I think it’s morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing.

Still, I’m not 100% convinced of these results given the small effect sizes and will likely have to do more studies to confirm if this effect is replicable or is just an effect of noisy data.  Another way to look at the reliability of these effects is to examine whether these effects are consistent across groups.  It does appear that the effect is consistent across groups for increasing fairness.

The robustness of this effect less consistent for the Authority foundation, though it is perhaps worth considering why grateful libertarians may endorse authority less.  Perhaps the only reason for libertarians to value authority is out of a sense of insecurity.  For example, the libertarian party does espouse the idea that the only role of government is to provide security for property rights.  If that security is provided, perhaps libertarians see no need for any authority?

I’m not sure if I have enough evidence for a paper.  All research is somewhere between a zero and 1 in terms of it’s conclusiveness and these results may be too preliminary to reach the somewhat arbitrary standard of paper-hood.  I could clearly strengthen these results with a regression analyses of our large correlational dataset that confirms these patterns.  I’ll have to get feedback from more objective parties.

- Ravi Iyer

The moral foundations questionnaire measures 5 foundations.  The below descriptions are taken from the moral foundations theory webpage.

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundaiton underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

According to Jon Haidt, ”Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.”

Perhaps one of the most compelling parts of the theory is that it invites people to try and posit a 6th foundation.  There was even a prize offered by Jon to those who succeeded and a number of possible candidates are listed here.

How can we determine what is or is not a foundation?  Some of the criteria are listed on the above webpage.  Borrowing from a recent lecture I attended on approaches to develop foundations of ‘personality’, I would list the below criteria as important.

• Factor analysis/Conceptual Distinction – Factor analysis is the most common way that people empirically determine distinct constructs.  The idea is that if two constructs are distinct, questions about these constructs should inter-correlate to form a separate factor from questions about a separate construct.  So if questions about Harm load on a separate factor versus questions about Fairness, we can conclude they are separate constructs.  I would argue that this is a necessary, but not sufficient test of any new foundation.  It is possible to ask questions with enough specificity that anything can be a separate factor.  Five questions about harm using a knife will likely load on a separate factor versus five questions about harm by drowning, yet does that mean they are separate foundations.  Furthermore, work on moral confabulation and moral intuition leads many researchers to believe that individuals are fundamentally naive about what drives their moral reasoning.  As such, direct questions may not be able to illuminate all possible moral systems.
• Cluster analysis – One of the most important applications of moral foundations theory is that it successfully describes the differences between liberals and conservatives in a fairly robust manner.  Some personality scale developers take the notion that if a question successfully differentiates classes of people, it’s a good question.  This is true for the moral foundation questionnaire to a point, but more work could certainly be done.  5 foundations should conceivably posit 5 classes of people (individuals who value each foundation over the other four) and the co-occurrence of many of these foundations is evidence that some current foundations may share a moral system or that these clusters have yet to be identified.
• Evolutionary explanation – One of the most important aspects of moral foundation theory is that it contains a plausible evolutionary explanation of all systems.  Evolutionary evidence should include both cross-cultural universality and a coherent evolutionary explanation.  The current foundations are well described in terms of their evolutionary roots, having grown out of anthropological field work, and future foundation candidates should be equally well described in terms of evolutionary theory and equally universal cross-culturally.
• Beyond Self Interest – I often think that people who are in front of me in traffic are jerks.  Why don’t they just get out of the way?  If you catch me on a particularly bad day, I may even consider them to be immoral people.  But is ‘getting out of my way’ a moral system?  Human beings are notoriously clever at moralizing their self-interest and any candidate foundation needs to go beyond self interest.  The relevant question would be whether I would judge the other people to be at fault from the perspective of a neutral third party.  Given that I don’t routinely chastise drivers for being in the way of other drivers, I would say that my beliefs in this example are not the result of a moral system, but rather my personal self-interest.
• Beyond Harm –  There are lots of different ways to harm another person.  Some would argue that Harm is too broad a moral category, but as long as Harm is included as a moral foundation, any subsequent candidate foundation will necessarily be forced to answer the question “Is this reducible to harm?”.  The question which would need to empirically be asked is whether individuals would judge an act to be wrong even if nobody were harmed.  This may seem like an easy test, but consider the case of liberty, which is an often brought up criticism of moral foundation theory as something that has been left out.  Most people would think that it is wrong for someone to deprive somebody else of their freedom.  It’s conceptually distinct from physical harm, potentially describes a class of people (libertarians), has an evolutionary explanation (the need for groups to encourage explorers?), and is not just self-interest as I care about other people’s liberty, not just my own.  However, would I care about somebody else’s liberty if they didn’t want to be free?  It’s a difficult question as I think the intuitive reaction is to assume that the person doesn’t know any better and really would be better off being free.  But what if I was absolutely convinced that they enjoyed captivity…or what if I thought that they actually benefited from captivity.  Should they be free?  It’s a more complex question than one initially might think and shows some of the complexity of developing foundations.  Ideally, we should be able to find cases where any foundation is generally used, even in cases where the use of that foundation causes harm.

With that in mind, I would offer these potential modifications of our initial foundations.

• Fairness is a notoriously ambiguous word and can mean many things to many people.  Current questions focus too much on fairness as equality, which is possibly motivated concern for the harm experienced by those who experience less equal outcomes.  In order to separate it further from harm, I would focus this foundation more on the principle of equity, where people get what they deserve.  Equity is motivationally tied to the desire for productivity and so this foundation would then possibly encompass ideas of property rights, sloth and waste, which have been missing from the current taxonomy.
• Concerns about liberty, equality and rights would be moved to the Harm foundation.  All of these constructs are things which could relate to the harm caused to another individual, whether it is the psychological harm due to being controlled, the emotional harm due to receiving an unequal share, or the harm to self-esteem when one does not feel like one has any rights.
• Ingroup and authority foundations have tended to predict similar things and co-occur in individuals such that one might doubt the independence of these two factors.  As they are currently measured, respecting authority and being loyal could both be considered subsets of a system that might be labelled “being a good group member”.  Some items which measure authority concern the desire for things to stay the same and a resistance to change, which has been shown to be indicative of conservative thought.  Changing authority to this conception and labeling it ‘conservation’ while allowing ingroup loyalty to encompass other aspects of being a good group member might improve the discriminant validity of the authority and ingroup foundations.
• Many of the other candidate foundations that have been proposed deal with truth, wisdom, honesty, and authenticity.  Telling the truth is a moral principle which might survive all of the above tests as it is conceptually distinct, describes a class of people (see The Dignity of Working Men), has an evolutionary explanation (trustworthiness), and is observed when it is contradictory to self-interest and causes harm to others.  In conceptualizing this foundation, I might consider including things like simplicity, directness, and being a stand-up guy.  This might explain why conservatives have a disdain for liberal academics who are too complex to be trusted and lack practical intelligence that is indicative of being a ’stand-up’ guy.

These are merely hypotheses and opinions, so take them for what it’s worth.  It is also important to note that the fact that it is possible to refine a theory doesn’t reduce the importance or contribution of the theory.  In fact, the fact that I (and many others) posted about refining it means that this theory has had a significant impact on public discourse and is worthy of refining.

- Ravi Iyer