YourMorals.Org Moral Psychology Blog

Separating Pro-Peace from Anti-War Attitudes using Moral Psychology Measures

January 28th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

I’m off to SPSP 2010 and will be presenting the below poster at the morality and justice pre-conference. It’s based on a scale I found measuring separate war and peace attitudes (Vander Linden et. al, 2008) at the main political psychology conference 2 years ago. The concept is pretty simple…I found scales that predicted pro-war and pro-peace attitudes, controlling for political ideology and the opposite construct. For example, there are many reasons to be pro-peace….one could think war is a bad thing or one could be echoing one’s political party’s point of view. Theoretically, by controlling for war attitudes and ideology, we get a picture of the kind of person who uniquely likes peace.

Like this Mother Theresa quote:

I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be there.

There is something powerful about being “for” things rather than “against” things that other people believe in. The opposition that the later strategy creates might just lead to the very same kinds of conflict that anti-war protestors seek to avoid.

Click Here for the poster

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in moral psychology, peace, political psychology, war, War and Peace, yourmorals.org | 1 Comment »
Tags: moral psychology, peace, political psychology, war, War and Peace, yourmorals.org

Methland by Nick Reding: Moral Maximizing and the Drug War

January 15th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

I just finished Methland, by Nick Reding, an in-depth portrait of the fall and hopeful rise of a small American town, Oelwein, Iowa, and a few individuals touched by the meth epidemic there. What makes the book most powerful are the portraits that Reding is able to draw of the town having spent 4 years getting to know both the drug dealers, drug users, enforcement officers, medical staff, and politicians. As a social psychologist, I swim in data, which has the benefit of objectivity, but which lacks a great deal of the nuance that defines the book. Hearing the stories of people who used meth to be able to work longer at jobs which paid less and less seems far more convincing than studies looking at “the role of drug expectancies as important operations involved in the development of substance use patterns.”

While there are brave souls who try to save Oelwein in the book, one can’t help but feel that there are larger forces that cannot be fought, that are transforming rural America. Profit motives entice both poor rural Americans and poor Mexicans to take enormous risks to produce and sell meth. Several times in the book, enforcement agents succeed at having drug laws enforced only to see drug use take a different turn to new forms of production, distribution, and use. The best that people appear to be able to do is to minimize the associated harm.

The book ties the drug trade to a similarly intractable problem, immigration. Mexican drug cartels “employ a miniscule percentage of the illegal immigrants in this country,” but the integration of immigrant workers into American life makes it impossible to find that needle in the haystack (p.159). Big agriculture firms place ads for workers in Mexican border cities and lobby congress for access to this labor. Consumers demand cheap food and enforcing immigration laws would cripple the agricultural system. The city prosecutor doesn’t enforce immigration laws as it seems like forcing someone “through the gate which is left perpetually and invitingly open” (p.171).

The psychological variable that this makes me want to study, but for which I cannot find much previous research, is the willingness to accept moral imperfection. Perhaps it could be termed moral maximizing? If anybody knows of previous research on this, I would love to hear about it. It seems to me that there are some cases where we are morally opposed to something, but trying to force that thing not to exist does more harm than good. I think drugs are bad, but I think the drug war causes more harm than good and there is little we can do to stop people in a free society. We just don’t have that level of control. I think there is some injustice in illegal immigration towards those who wait to apply legally, and I lament the drain of workers from the countries of origin. But we just don’t have that level of control over the border either. Sometimes we just have to accept moral imperfection.

There is lots of research on consequentialism vs. deontological thinking, which is often framed as the willingness to do a bad thing in order to prevent a worse thing. I think moral maximizing is different in that it is simple willingness to accept a bad thing. If you can’t accept injustice, you may find yourself causing more harm than good in trying to change what cannot be changed in some cases.

What kind of people are moral maximizers? I took Barry Schwartz’s maximizer-satisficer scale and changed the questions so that they referred to maximizing in the moral realm. I then gave the survey to visitors at yourmorals.org. Questions are listed at the end of this post. The differences aren’t large, but it looks like both extreme liberals and extreme conservatives have this tendency. As a liberal, I might tend to think of instances where extreme conservatives make things worse by failing to accept injustice (e.g. invading Iraq to avenge 9/11)…but it would seem likely that extreme liberals are likely to do similar things in some cases. For example, communists like the Khmer Rouge killed a lot of people ostensibly in the name of social justice. Perhaps we should be wary of extremely morally motivated people (what I call hypermoralism) from both sides of the political aisle.

Moral Maximizing Questions (alpha=.752):

When deciding on an action in a moral decision, I compare my action to the best possible action.

In choosing a moral action, one should never settle for a morally imperfect action.

One should never settle on a moral outcome that is less than the best.

I often fantasize about living in a better, more just world.

I have the highest moral standards for myself in making any decision.

No matter how satisfied I am with a decision, it’s only right for me to consider if it was the most moral decision.

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Tags: drug laws, drug war, hypermoralism, moral maximizing, yourmorals.org

How to translate the MFQ

January 1st, 2010 by Jonathan Haidt

Thank you for your interest in translating the Moral Foundations Questionnaire into your language. Here is some advice on how to do it well to produce a useful and reliable instrument.

1. Translating individual words for abstract concepts is difficult. Each word may have many shades of meaning, and the shades often differ across languages. We recommend that you first do some open-ended exploration of the key terms that will play a role in your translation. For example, “right,” “wrong,” “respect” “authority,” and “purity.” Also, some items may have a different meaning due to your local or national context. For example, being proud of your country’s history may have a very different meaning in countries with morally troubled histories.

2. Don’t just translate — explore! Investigate your local moral domain. Are there any common moral concerns in your country that are not well-represented by our current list of five moral foundations? Are there any unique local virtues or moral concepts? This is an excellent time for you to think about flaws or gaps in moral foundations theory, or for you to investigate the unique ways in which your society has constructed virtues and values on top of the universally available moral foundations. (Please see below for a suggested questionnaire you can use to explore the moral domain in your language.)

3. Once you have collected some open ended data and noted some potential problem areas, you can create your translation. We urge you to check your translation with at least three other bilingual speakers. Words often have slightly different connotations to different people; the odds are that there will be a few words of phrases that others would render differently. Try to work out differences by consensus.

4. Once you have a verified translation, you should ask another bilingual speaker to create a back-translation — to translate your version back into English. Please examine the back-translation to be sure that it is equivalent in meaning to the original MFQ. If it is not, then see if adjustments are needed. When you have a successful back-translation, please send it to us, along with your translation of the MFQ.

5. We’ll post your translation at MoralFoundations.org, and we’ll give you credit for it. But please note that we might modify it in the future, based on feedback from other speakers of your language. Please don’t be offended: MFT is a collaborative enterprise, and we think the research gets better when all parts are exposed to constant critique. Our view is that nobody owns the translation itself — it is given for free to the research community. (Certainly, nobody should make any kind of financial profit from it.) However, we hope that you, as the initial translator, will get some research and publication benefits from it. If you conduct research in your country, we’d be glad to help you turn that research into a manuscript by providing our data from many other countries for comparison, so that you can examine mean differences, and differences in internal structure via factor analysis. You might also consider setting up a web-based data collection site, either at YourMorals.org or on your own site. We can help you with that, just contact us.

————————————————-
Recommended open-ended items, to explore the moral domain and moral vocabulary before beginning your translation. Please translate these questions, add your own, and create a questionnaire. Try to give it out to at least 20 native speakers, from different social classes and sub-cultural or regional backgrounds

1. In _______ [your country], what are the main words used to talk about good and bad actions, or good and bad people? What kinds of words are used in gossip, to praise or condemn people?

2. Think about how morality in ______is different from what you know of the United States. What virtues or values do you think are more important in ______? Which ones are more important in the USA?

3. What are the virtues or values that you most want your children to have?

4. What is the last especially “morally bad” thing that someone you know did?

5. What is the last especially “morally good” thing that someone you know did?

6. When you think about the following words, what other words come to mind as synonyms? What ideas or events come to mind, if any?
a. right
b. wrong
c. suffer
d. respect for authority
e. purity
f. betray
g. traditions
h. disgusting
i. loyalty
j. compassion
k. virtue
l. morality
m. chastity

[Please add comments if you can think of ways to improve the translation process, or the exploratory questionnaire!]

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Tags: mfq, translation

Does gratitude promote a sense of fairness and equality?

December 13th, 2009 by Ravi Iyer

Gratitude has been theorized to be a moral emotion, yet it has largely been studied for it’s hedonic benefits rather than it’s effect on moral reasoning. I had done some previous analyses on our data at yourmorals.org where scores on the Gratitude quotient scale were positively related to most all measures of moral reasoning. By itself, this isn’t particularly interesting as there are so many possible interpretations of this. People who have nice things happen to them may feel grateful and also be nice people. Nicer, more moral people may do good things in life and may receive benefits for them, for which they are grateful. The numerous interpretations make any conclusion difficult.

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

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What are the basic foundations of morality?

November 13th, 2009 by Ravi Iyer

A few years ago, I was fortunate to catch a talk by Jon Haidt at the Gallup Positive Psychology Summit where he gave a wonderful talk about moral foundation theory, which seeks to determine the fundamental systems of morality. I sought to use his scale in my work and using that scale eventually grew into our current collaboration (along with Jesse Graham, Pete Ditto, and Sena Koleva) of yourmorals.org, where the main instrument used in moral foundation theory, the moral foundations questionnaire, is available.

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

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J Street vs. The Weekly Standard: Is it possible to be pro-peace and pro-Israel?

October 16th, 2009 by Ravi Iyer

A group called J Street has recently sought to question the wisdom of military action by the Israeli government. Their influence is supposed to be a counterbalance to the traditionally hawk-ish Israel lobby embodied by AIPAC. Many lobbying groups which oppose military action by Israel identify with the groups that Israel has conflicting interests with or inherently believe that war is a terrible thing. J Street is unique in that it is pro-peace AND is pro-Israel, taking the stance that the best way to support Israel is by taking a pro-peace stance. In taking this stand, they are questioning one of the most powerful implicit arguments for military action….that support for military action is related to being patriotic. As a result, groups like the Weekly Standard have been questioning just how pro-Israel J Street really is.

Is it possible to be both pro-peace and pro-Israel? What part of this is simply the moral confabulation of believing that your side (liberal or conservative) is correct and that the other side MUST be unpatriotic? Sometimes we might dislike the opposing viewpoint so much that we question not just their wisdom, but their motives.

To help answer this question, I analyzed some of our data from yourmorals.org to see how identification with one’s country (measured using questions like “How much do you identify with (that is, feel a part of, feel love toward, have concern for)…people in my country?”) is related to attitudes toward peace (measured using questions like “Peace brings out the best qualities in a society.”) and attitudes toward war (measured using questions like “War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict.”). It is worth noting that attitudes toward war and attitudes toward peace are not necessarily the same thing. They are highly correlated (r=-.68) in our sample, but the correlation is not perfect (-1 or 1 would be a perfect correlation).

At first glance, it seems that being pro-peace might be incompatible with identifying with one’s country. Consider the below 2 graphs. Attitudes toward peace aren’t really related to patriotism. Attitudes toward war are related to patriotism in that people who identify with their country more seem to be slightly more likely to be more sympathetic to the need for conflict.

Given that the distinction between pro-peace and anti-war is difficult, it is unsurprising that from the simple relationships, people are suspicious of people who are both pro-peace and patriotic. However, these relationships are not large and there are many confounding variables, the most obvious of which are your political leanings. Much research in political psychology concerns our motivated reasoning to support our political party’s position on any given issue. If we look within each political party, the relationship between being pro-peace and pro-country changes as shown in the below two graphs.

The confusing purple lines above are self-identified libertarians. Let’s deal with them later.

The main result if we look at everybody else is that we see that identification with one’s country is actually associated with being pro-peace WITHIN each political group. In contrast, in the first set of graphs, being pro-war was associated with identification with one’s country when collapsing across all political groups. The results suggest that identification with country is independently associated with being pro-peace if we control for being liberal, conservative, or libertarian. If we control for the variance associated with political ideology, it is not patriotic to be anti-war or pro-war. It IS patriotic to be pro-peace….and the reason people who are pro-peace are characterized as not being patriotic is because the doves and the hawks reside on opposite sides of the partisan divide. This partisan divide also predicts identification with country (conservativism correlates .29 with identification with country). But if we take out the variance due to ideology, peace is indeed patriotic.

Put in the context of the political issue of the day, there is nothing so abnormal about being pro-peace and pro-Israel, but it is unsurprising that critics of J Street are unable to disentangle their partisan leanings from their opinions about the group given the simple pattern of what we see in society. It is worth noting though that questioning the motives rather than the wisdom of the opposing position is not something that is limited to conservative groups like the Weekly Standard. J Street characterizes the Weekly Standard’s actions as “thuggish smear tactics”, “swift boat” moves, and “unhinged” which is surely a caricature of their true motivations. My advice to J Street would be to avoid such confrontational language as it only exacerbates the partisan divide and makes it more unlikely that others might actually see resonance in their pro-peace, pro-Israel stance.

There is one group for whom being pro-peace is more diagnostic, libertarians. Libertarians make up 10-15% of the population according to recent surveys and 7% of our sample, but it is worth speculating about why group identification is so diagnostic of war and peace attitudes for this group. Using Moral Foundations Theory, war and peace attitudes are predicted by both the ingroup/loyalty foundation and the harm/care foundation. Similarly, patriotism and identification with one’s country is a blend of concern about loyalty to one’s group and care for those group members. Libertarians score lower on the moral foundations questionnaire on both the ingroup and harm foundations. My hypothesis would be that for libertarians, identification with country is more a function of group loyalty rather than care for other group members (see Ayn Rand’s virtue of selfishness). Indeed, the correlation between Moral Foundations Questionnaire-Ingroup scores and Identification with Country scores are higher for libertarians than for every other group (r=.56 for libertarians, .37 for conservatives and .38 for liberals). I would speculate that the fact that libertarian patriotism is more loyalty than care based is the reason why libertarian patriotism is more highly related to pro-war/anti-peace attitudes. More on libertarians to come as I’m working on a paper on libertarian psychology.

– Ravi Iyer

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Tags: libertarians, moral confabulation, moral confabulation in the news, moral psychology, news commentary, political psychology, War and Peace, yourmorals.org

The values of people who are “Spiritual, but not Religious”

September 30th, 2009 by Ravi Iyer

Some people in psychology have a theory that everyone wants to study themselves. I don’t really have a religious category that fits. I grew up going occasionally to a protestant church and I occasionally go to a new-age church in Los Angeles. If I had to pick a category, I might pick “Spiritual, but not Religious” and I successfully convinced my collaborators at YourMorals.org to keep it as a distinctive category of religion. After all, what is more interesting to study than ourselves.

According to this book, “Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America” by Robert Fuller, perhaps 20% of Americans might fall in this category. In our YourMorals.org dataset, 9.4% used this category. For comparison, 24.7% picked Atheist and all the Christian denominations combined make up ~15%. From personal experience as a Californian, I could also see people who fit Fuller’s description as wanting a more open, exploratory, personal religious experience picking Buddhism (1.5%) or Unitarian-Universalist (1.8%). Obviously, our sample is skewed because we reach a largely educated liberal audience. However, according to Fuller, that is exactly the type of audience that is “unchurched”, so I think it likely that we reach a fair portion of unchurched America.

What separates those who are “Spiritual, but not religious” from those who are “Atheist”? or those who are “churched”? Below is a comparison of scores on the Schwartz Values Scale.

What patterns jump out?

Spiritual, but not Religious means something VERY different from Atheism. Atheists seem to be markedly lower on conformity, benevolence, and universalism and higher on hedonism. The pattern is somewhat like that of libertarians.
In contrast, people who are spiritual, but not religious are more similar to other religious people than atheists…EXCEPT the biggest difference is that the spiritual, but not religious value universalism. Perhaps this universalism is the common thread which keeps these people away from organized religion, some of which can be seen as exclusionary.
There is also a pattern of movement towards openness to change values (stimulation, hedonism, and self-direction) and away from conservation values (tradition, conformity) for the spiritual, but not religious, compared to “all others”.
As I suspected, Unitarian Universalists and those who are Spiritual, but not Religious have a lot in common and most differences fall within the margin of error.
Buddhists also have a lot in common with this group, except that they are lower in valuing power and achievement.

The results converge with the census of the Burning Man community where 72% feel that spirituality is important or very important, while over 80% go to no religious services in a month. Universalism, benevolence, and self-direction are the top 3 values in their survey, just as in ours (spirituality is not an official Schwartz value).

– Ravi Iyer

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Robustness of Liberal-Conservative Moral Foundations Questionnaire Differences

September 18th, 2009 by Ravi Iyer

All social science research faces questions about the external validity of the results. Much social psychology research is done on students and so the natural question is whether those findings generalize to non-student populations. Even representative surveys of the population face questions about validity due to the assumptions which go into what representative means. Since all measurement is imperfect, one of the main ways to determine the robustness of a finding is to examine many measurements and look for overall patterns. FiveThirtyEight.com did this during the 2008 presidential election and became a national sensation.

The central finding of Moral Foundations theory to date is the split between what liberals and conservatives report caring about. Specifically, Liberals care more exclusively about issues concerning harm and fairness, while conservatives also care about issues surrounding obeying rightful authority, being loyal to one’s ingroup, and avoiding “unnatural” violations of one’s purity.

How can we tell if this finding is robust? All web servers keep track of referring traffic and so we can analyze the data we collect at yourmorals.org by the source of the traffic. If the pattern holds among people who read the New York Times, people who come from conservative blogs (a minority, but there are some), people who read the Houston Chronicle, people who find the site by typing ‘morality quiz’ into a search engine, and people who read Libertarian magazines….then it is likely that the pattern is somewhat robust. Of course, these patterns are all among internet samples, so it would be fair to say that if this pattern of liberal-conservative differences holds among all these groups, then it is fairly robust amongst the type of people who use the internet to read about news or politics.

Below are graphs across many of these groups. You’ll see the same pattern where as you move from liberal to conservative, the exclusivity of concern about issues of harm and fairness gets less and less.

– Ravi Iyer

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Tags: moral psychology, political psychology, yourmorals.org

Moderates and Liberals take their time in answering Moral Psychology questions

September 14th, 2009 by Ravi Iyer

There is evidence that liberals have more desire for cognitive complexity compared to conservatives, which can either be framed as a virtue like intelligence or a vice like flip-flopping depending on where you stand (see Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski,and Sulloway 2003). There is also evidence suggesting that extremists on both sides are the least cognitively complex.

I thought I’d examine the time elapsed in taking the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on YourMorals.org and the results are pretty much what you’d expect. Time spent on the questionnaire is lower on the extremes of political liberalism and conservativism. However, liberals did take more time on the page compared to conservatives.Below is a graph of the median time spent on the page by political orientation. The last 3 bars are for libertarians, people who don’t know or are apolitical (strangely, they take the most time on the page…maybe they just have trouble making decisions), and people who are ‘other’.

Of course, it’s up to the reader to determine whether you buy the idea that time elapsed in answering questions about morality is correlated with considering the questions more deeply, which indicates more coginitive complexity in the moral realm. Liberals do score higher on moral relativism measures, which could be thought of as a type of cognitive complexity.

Posted in liberals, PoliPsych.com | No Comments »
Tags: political psychology, yourmorals.org

Feeling positive towards others makes you happier….unless you’re a Libertarian

September 9th, 2009 by Ravi Iyer

Some of the group that run yourmorals.org are considering writing a paper focusing on Libertarians and so I’ve been looking at the data for triends. One consistent pattern we have found is that Libertarians (unsuprisingly) are more self rather than other oriented. They aren’t just extreme conservatives, but are qualitatively different. They seem to moralize less and are more self vs. other oriented on scales like the Schwartz Values Scale.One hypothesis about this would be that Libertarians are less positively affected by other people. Happiness research consistently shows that relationships are very important for people’s happiness….This is true for both liberals and conservatives. But is this the case for Libertarians?Consider the following 2 graphs. The first one shows the relationship between a measure of depression symptoms (BSI – eg. “feeling blue” in the past 7 days) and a measure of abstract feelings toward others (Feeling Towards Others Scale by Belinda Campos at UC-Irvine, eg. “For me, happiness comes from performing acts of kindness for others.”).

….and here is a graph with a similar pattern replacing depression symptoms with Ed Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale.

The interesting pattern is that feeling close to abstract other people (not explicitly friends or family, for whom the pattern is different) is positively related to life satisfaction and negatively related to depressive symptoms for everyone, liberal or conservative, except libertarians.There are of course caveats to this result (as there are in any research). Our sample is limited to people who visit our website, who tend to be well educated internet users, so this may only be true for those kinds of people. Still, this result seems to converge with other evidence, both in our data and in society, that libertarians are more self than other oriented (eg. Ayn Rand’s book, the Virtue of Selfishness). If positive affect motivates many people to be other oriented, then the fact that libertarians lack the other-orientation->positive emotion relationship would help explain their lack of other orientation.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in libertarians, PoliPsych.com | No Comments »
Tags: political psychology, positive psychology, yourmorals.org

YourMorals Blog

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Robustness of Liberal-Conservative Moral Foundations Questionnaire Differences

Moderates and Liberals take their time in answering Moral Psychology questions

Feeling positive towards others makes you happier….unless you’re a Libertarian

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