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Why is Warren Buffett liberal on the estate tax? A Review of The Snowball.

November 17th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

I read Warren Buffett’s authorized biography recently and the fact that I finished the book (which isn’t short) is a testament to the writing of the book and to the uniqueness of Buffett himself.  I now understand why people continue to flock to Omaha for Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings, where Buffett gives his opinion on the market.  His ideas on the economy have stood the test of time and his focus on the intrinsic worth of a company (rather than the momentary worth that impulsive stock trader’s give a company) has proven effective.  The book’s name, The Snowball, is named for the fact that Buffett understood the power of compounding rates of return from a very young age and began building his “snowball” of money early on, increasing his capital so that he could take advantage of opportunities to come.  From a psychological perspective, one might say that he was extremely good at delaying gratification, which has been linked to better outcomes in life and intelligence.  Some of us bought things with our money to enjoy, while Buffet invested that money, a decision which obviously has worked well for him.

From a political psychology perspective, one fact about Warren Buffett is particularly interesting.  He has a liberal position, obviously contrary to his self-interest, on the estate tax.  From p.596 of my edition of his book:

He liked to compare his tax rate to his secretary’s, pointing out how
unjust it was that she paid a higher tax rate on her income than he
did, just because most of his income came from investing.  Having
already angered all the plutocrats and would-be plutocrats, but with
his credibility at a peak in other quarters, Buffett vowed to carry on
the fight against repeal of the estate tax, and would spin on this
subject for years.

Not only is this position contrary to his self-interest, but from the book, one might infer that he is low on openness to experience and high on conscientiousness, two traits which have been found to be central to ideological preferences, with Buffett’s pattern being opposite to most liberals.  As an example, Buffet is described as unable to eat foreign foods, preferring plain hamburgers, consistent with low openness to experience scores (e.g. liberals are more adventurous eaters).  He is famously conscientious in terms of his business dealings.  Below is yourmorals data relating these personality traits to ideology, replicating the study linked above.

Big Five Traits of Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians

From reading the book, my answer to the above question would be that Buffett is also very high on empathic concern, which might logically be related to agreeableness in the above graph, where you might notice that liberals score a bit higher.  Answers to questions like “I would describe myself as a pretty soft hearted person” correlate highly (r=.5) with agreeableness scores and with liberal identification (r=-.2, 1-7 lib-con).  Buffett is not a social person in the book, but he does care about the people around him a great deal, a realization that appears to ever more salient as he gets older and mortality is a more salient concern.  Perhaps it is this empathic concern that leads him to be more liberal on tax policy, while other wealthy individuals actively fight the estate tax.  Some research indicates that the primacy of ensuring economic growth versus caring for others, both noble goals that sometimes conflict, is central to notions of distributive justice.  Buffett may have fewer productivity goals compared to other CEOs, as his investing has the feel of a game that he loves, rather than a job.

Finally, I’d like to share one last tangientially related quote from the final pages of the book, which I found especially wise, more wise than his investment advice actually.  I do recommend the whole book.

People ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to
go to work for whom they admire the most,  It’s crazy to take little
in-between jobs just because they look good on your resume.  That’s
like saving sex for your old age.  Do what you love and work for whom
you admire the most, and you’ve given yourself the best chance in life
you can.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in book reviews, consilience, delaying gratification, differences between republicans and democrats, justice and fairness, openness to experience, political psychology, warren buffet, yourmorals.org | 4 Comments »

Moral Foundations and the 2010 Midterm Elections

November 12th, 2010 by Brad

Several weeks ago, I ran a series of posts wherein I discussed a possible way of gleaning information from the YourMorals database that attempts to clean out the selection bias and give us some estimate of the geographic distribution of the moral foundations in the United States. This method tries to correct for some of the biggest problems in a self-selected sample (recently highlighted by Ravi Iyer, here).

One way to check the validity of these measures is to apply them to real world data. The recent 2010 midterm elections provide an excellent opportunity to do this.

The Guardian generously posted a downloadable version of the 2010 midterm election results on their website. For the following analyses, I will use the estimated moral foundation score for each congressional district derived from the YourMorals data.

The first thing to examine is the simple bivariate relationship between the Republican share of the vote in 2010 and each of the moral foundations.* The figure below displays these relationships. On the y-axis we have the percent of the vote won by the Republican candidate, and on the x-axis we have the estimated moral foundation score of the congressional district. In the upper-right corner, I’ve displayed the simple correlation coefficient between the two variables, and the thick red line shows the best linear fit.

This figure looks very similar to one I posted earlier detailing the relationship between the vote for Obama in the 2008 elections and the moral foundations. Indeed given the strong autocorrelation from year to year in election results, this is no real surprise.

The most important changes in election results from year to year tend to be the across-the-board shifts toward one party or the other (for more on this general trend, see Eric McGhee’s cogent analysis at the Monkey Cage).

To what extent can the moral foundations data explain this shift? After some exploration of the raw data, it became clear that the area to focus on was the seats held by Democrats. For the remaining analysis, I’ll restrict the data to the 257 seats that the Democrats held prior to the 2010 elections. For the dependent variable, I will use the difference between the vote for John McCain in 2008 in a particular district and the vote for the Republican House candidate.

Overall, among seats held by the Democratic Party, there was a two-point shift in the vote toward the Republicans. The figure below shows the distribution of this shift over the partisan voting index (PVI) of the district (the PVI is the average deviation of the district from the national presidential vote in the last three elections—for example, a district with a PVI of -10 votes ten points more Democratic on average than the average vote in the country).

Districts that fell on the left side of the figure (those with large negative values of the PVI), were generally safe Democratic seats. Those that are located toward the center and the right, were in more danger. We can see that the shifts were greatest near in these most marginal seats.

To examine the possible explanations of this shift, I looked at how the relationship between the PVI and the shift in the Republican vote in 2010 changed based the moral foundations. I divided all of the districts into two categories for each of the moral foundations. Those that were above the median score on a foundation were labeled as “high” on that particular foundation and the remaining were labeled “low.” The figure below shows the how the relationship between a district’s PVI score and the shift toward the Republican party changed when we break the data down further into these different foundations. The dashed lines show the relationship in districts that scored above the median on a particular foundations, and the solid lines show those that scored below the median.

There are several interesting patterns to note here. First, there did not seem to be any differential effects in the safest Democratic districts. At a PVI of -15, the data show the general shift toward the Republican Party discussed above (about 2 points more Republican). However, as we move toward the right-hand side of the PVI scale, toward the marginal seats and those that actually go for Republicans in their presidential voting, the gap between the high and low scoring foundations is largest. Most interestingly, it is those districts that scored highest on the liberal foundations (Harm and Fairness) that showed the biggest shift toward the Republicans in 2010. None of these relationships hold up in districts held by the Republican Party. It is something unique to the campaign against incumbent Democrats.

Finally, no discussion of the 2010 midterms would be complete without some mention of the Tea Party. The New York Times compiled a list of all of the Tea Party candidates (see here) in the 2010 elections. Of the 129 candidates that the Times identified, 120 of them ran in districts that the Democrats held in 2008. This represents almost 47% of all the races in districts where the Democrats had control in 2008.

What explains the emergence of Tea Party candidates in general elections?** The figure below shows how the probability of seeing a Tea Party challenger increases over the PVI (again, analysis was restricted to only those 257 seats that were held by Democrats in 2008). As we would expect, the probability increases as we move toward the more competitive districts.***

The most powerful relationship was seen in the districts that scored above the median on the Fairness foundation. Districts that scored high on the Fairness foundation and were competitive had a much greater probability of seeing a Tea Party challenger than those others. Smaller relationships were seen for the other foundations. Interestingly, the foundations did not seem to affect how well the Tea Party candidates did once in the race, only their probability of entering.

* In all of these analyses it is important to keep a few things in mind. First, the district level foundation scores were computed based on the entire voting age population of each congressional district. A big part of the story in 2010 was the “enthusiasm gap” between Democrats and Republicans. These analyses do not make adjustments for the differential turnout. Second (and this is somewhat related to the first point), the district level estimates for the moral foundations are aggregate measures. It would be inappropriate to infer individual level behavior from these district level statistics (this is known as the “ecological inference fallacy”).

** It would probably be most appropriate to examine the emergence and success of Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries. If we had a good measure of the moral foundations of Republican primary voters in 2010, this would make a fascinating analysis. However, we only have a measure of the district’s score on the moral foundations as a whole. At present, it is not possible to break this out by party.

*** The plots show predicted probabilities from similarly specified logistic regressions. The regression equation took the form,

Logit(P(Tea Party Challenger) )= a + b(1)*PVI + b(2)*High Foundation + b(3)*PVI*Foundation

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Separating Attitudes Toward War from Attitudes Toward Soldiers on Veteran’s Day

November 11th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

Today is Veteran’s Day and I would like to express my profound thanks for the sacrifices that soldier’s make in service to our nation.  I may not agree with the decision to go to war in some cases or with the utility of war in general, but soldiers do not make those decisions.  Politicians do.  Once they are made, soldiers are the ones who make the sacrifices necessary as a result of those decisions, including the potential ultimate sacrifice, and there is something truly noble and selfless about being willing to risk one’s life for others.  While the decision to go to war can be partisan, supporting the individual people who carry out military policy is usually bipartisan, and today, Obama honored troops in Korea while incoming House Speaker Boehner joined Vice President Biden in a bipartisan show of support at Arlington National Cemetary.

However, some people have trouble separating their attitudes toward war from their attitudes toward soldiers, especially the more liberal among us.  As a liberal myself, I can understand the cognitive dissonance that may arise from the idea of supporting those who carry out policies that we find destructive.  On the conservative end of the spectrum, it may seem dissonant to think that people can oppose a war and still support the people involved in the war.

In our YourMorals.org dataset, attitudes toward our troops do indeed appear highly related to attitudes toward war.

And this no doubt contributes to lower feeling thermometer ratings among liberals in terms of attitudes toward troops, though I should point out in the below graph that the midpoint of the scale is 4, so the range of mean attitudes toward soldiers ranges from neutral (very liberal) to extremely warm (very conservative), with no group being against our troops.  Of course, mean values are to be taken with a grain of salt for our dataset, given its non-representativeness, but here is a similar Gallup finding.

It may be hard to do, but especially on Veteran’s day, I think the civil thing to do for liberals is to attempt to separate their negative attitudes toward specific war decisions from their attitudes toward our nation’s troops, perhaps populating the upper left quadrant of the first graph above where negative attitudes toward war coexist with positive attitudes toward soldiers.   At the same time, perhaps those who support specific war decisions can take liberals at their word, that most of us do support our troops, even if we might have made different decisions about the policies that led to their deployment.

– Ravi Iyer

ps.  If you want to more fully explain liberal-conservative differences in feelings toward soldiers using our dataset (reducing ideology beta to .122, p=.055), you can add differences in identification with country (“How close do you feel to people in your country?”, beta=.215) and authoritarianism (“Our country needs a powerful leader, in order to destroy the radical and immoral currents prevailing in society today.”, beta = .221) to attitudes toward war (“War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict.”, beta = .387) in a regression model.

Posted in civil politics, liberals, political psychology, soldiers, veterans day, war, War and Peace, yourmorals.org | 5 Comments »

Sampling limitations and what you can deduce from YourMorals data

November 3rd, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

A common critique that we get about results using the YourMorals dataset is that our sample is a volunteer sample prone to self-selection bias as all participants have a demonstrated interest in morality research and access to the internet. This clearly does not describe all people, or perhaps even a majority of people. This critique has merit and is important to remember in considering any result that we may report, and as such, I’m making this blog post so that I can link to it to acknowledge such limitations. However, this critique is not unique to our dataset and the problem of generalizing findings from one group to the population at large exists to varying degrees (and in many cases, to greater degrees) in all published research.

All research recruits some part of the population and generalizes findings to others. Nationally representative samples attempt to sample completely at random, achieving greater generalizability, but as a result cannot often go into great depth with people called at random on the phone. At the other end of the spectrum are the many studies conducted on college students, which are a very specific part of the population.  The YourMorals dataset clearly falls somewhere between, in that it’s more diverse in terms of age and life situation than college samples (Mean age is around 35 with a standard deviation of 13 years), but clearly not representative.

The limitations of college samples and representative studies are well known, and inform the types of questions you can ask when sampling each group.  Representative samples are the ONLY group you can reasonably use to ask questions about percentage rates in the population.  For example, if you find that 70% of college students think Jon Stewart is cool, that is unlikely to be the same in pretty much any other group.  However, you might instead look at liberal and conservatives within a college student sample and find that liberals like Jon Stewart while conservatives don’t.  Or that liberal college students preferred Obama to McCain in the 2008 election.  Those results are more likely to generalize since they are not about percentages in the population, but about the relationship between variables.  Height may differ across samples, but taller people are likely better at basketball across samples.  Exceptions exist, but usually that is not the norm.

Experimental research (which we are doing more of) is even more likely to generalize, but the issue of generalizability still remains.  For example, all medical trials are done on volunteer populations, similar to our yourmorals data sample, and it is hoped that random assignment will mean that any result will be due to the treatment being different than the control.  However, it is possible that the treatment will work better than the control, but only in that group.  Logically, that seems unlikely as human physiology is relatively standard, but one could imagine a case where volunteers for a medical study were all people who had similar diets or had certain common genetic traits that interacted with effects.  Again, this is the exception, rather than the rule.  And even if we encounter such exceptions, they are usually informative.

With yourmorals data, we never suggest that we can generalize our mean values to the general population (e.g. if 6% of our users say they are libertarian, it has no real relation to the population).  But we do feel that if we find a pattern in our data (e.g. our libertarians all score lower on measures of disgust), that our evidence for the existence of that general pattern is at least as good as most published research samples using non-representative data for the following reasons:

– Our users are well-educated  and have stable well formed opinions (see David Sears’ article on College sophomores in the laboratory for more information on this).

– Our users are intrinsically motivated volunteers, and research has shown that such volunteers provide better data because they take surveys seriously (see Jon Haidt’s review of a Chang & Krosnick paper that showed this).

– Internet samples compare very well to non-internet samples in terms of data quality (see Gosling et al.)

– The fact that our results replicate a lot of published research (also see our libertarians paper) means that our findings have already replicated in different populations and we replicated our results in representative samples (to be published by Smith, C. & Vaisey, S. – Charitable giving and moral foundations in a nationallyrepresentative sample.)  Empirically, the relationships found in our users’ data are typical of other samples, of the kind that other researchers use.

– Our users come from a variety of sources.  New York Times readers are different than Dallas Morning News readers, search engine users, and people from the UK.  We are able to replicate findings across these different sub-groups in our data.  We also routinely replicate findings within our sample using different measurement methods on different groups.

– Our samples are large and diverse enough that even if our results do not generalize to all individuals, our results likely represent a large number of people.  In such cases, our findings would represent an interesting interaction effect among better educated, internet savvy users.

Still, we readily admit that our users are not ‘average’ and seek to confirm our findings using materially different (uneducated, non-internet users) groups. No research by any single method or group of researchers is definitive and any study is evidence for the existence of something, not conclusive proof.  Our findings are equally in need of replication and confirmation.  Certainly, some studies are more conclusive than others and I feel confident that our findings are at least comparable, in terms of generalizability, with other research that asks similar types of questions.  It is certainly possible that interaction effects with the types of people who are interested in morality exist (which would be interesting in and of itself), but our research is at least as good evidence as most published research in our area, especially given that the vast majority of research using psychological measures is done on non-representative samples of a smaller number of less diverse, less motivated research participants.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in generalizability, representative studies, selection bias, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

Women vs. men – differences on moral psychology measures

October 31st, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

I made a recent post summarizing the differences between liberals and conservatives from our YourMorals dataset, using the effect size differences between groups and sorting the results from those constructs that are most associated with liberals to those constructs most associated with conservatives.  I was asked a followup question as to whether the differences found were indicative of masculine-feminine differences.  Indeed, some have written that the Democratic party has become feminized and that is a prime reason why white males generally vote Republican.

Is this true?  One way to examine this is to compare the table from the previous post with the below chart of moral psychology differences between women and men.  Below are the same constructs, sorted by effect size, with constructs at the top being more associated with men and constructs toward the bottom being more associated with women.  I did the same thing for just liberal women/men and just conservative women/men and found the same result, so I feel fairly confident that these differences between men and women are somewhat robust.

The conclusion?  First, in comparing the previous liberal-conservative differences to the differences here, it is pretty clear that male-female differences are far lower in magnitude than liberal-conservative differences.  The effect sizes are much smaller, meaning that scores of women and men overlap much more than scores of liberals and conservatives.  It is clear that male-female differences cannot account for a great deal of the variance in political attitudes.

Second, there are many constructs associated with being female that are indicative of liberalism (valuing universalism, empathizing) as well as traits indicative of conservativism (higher disgust scores, belief in a just world, and being collectivistic).  Similarly, there are male traits associated with liberalism (individualism, utilitarianism) and conservativism (attitudes toward war, belief in proportionality).

It is still possible that the Democratic party is emphasizing certain traits, like empathy, that are driving away ‘masculine’ voters, at the margins.  Perhaps overly individualistic and utilitarian individuals are actually identifying as libertarian, an overwhelmingly male group, that is characterized by rational and utilitarian  psychological traits.

From a moral psychology perspective, the results are promising for the social intuitionist model that posits that emotional reactivity is the basis for much moral reasoning.  The clearest pattern in the data is that women seem more emotionally reactive and men report being more rational.  Both have their benefits as at either end of that spectrum are manic-depressives and psychopaths.  But this data converges well with previous research indicating that women are, in some instances, more morally and socially conscious.  Perhaps this is evidence for a social intuitionist basis of those previous findings.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in differences between liberals and conservatives, differences between men and women, moral emotions, replications of other studies, unpublished results, utilitarianism, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

Differences between white male liberals and white male conservatives

October 27th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

I was recently forwarded a question about the differences that exist between Democrats and Republicans amongst white men.  The question was framed by the fact that white men appear to be leaving the Democratic party at fairly high rates and it would be useful to pinpoint the variables that lead some white men to desert the Democratic party while others remain.

Individual researchers have individual answers to this question.  David Pizarro might focus on the emotion of disgust. At YourMorals, we’ve focused on moral opinions.  Others might focus on approach-avoidance or on basic physiological differences between liberals and conservatives.  Jon Jost does a wonderful job summarizing the importance of ideology in helping organize our beliefs to satisfy motivational needs, and then focuses on two organizing principles, resistance to change and acceptance of inequality.  All of this research is well done and true, but I think we all suffer (my group included) from an over reliance on our particular perspective.  I believe that Jost is correct in pointing out how ideology allows us to make sense of conflicting beliefs, and I would extend that more explicitly to our feelings, intuitions, and goals.  Having conflicting beliefs or feelings (e.g. I believe in abortion, but it disgusts me) leads to unpleasant dissonance, and ideology represents a narrative that we can use to resolve this dissonance, as relayed by Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann.

From that perspective, there is no one answer to what causes some white men to grativate toward the Republican party and not others.  Rather, it might be useful to look at the bigger picture.

To do this, I created the below table of effect sizes (the mean difference between liberals and conservatives, divided by the standard deviation), using only US white male respondents, sorted from those characteristics that are most characteristic of liberals to those that are more characteristic of conservatives.  We have better data on liberal-conservative identification than party identification, so we have to use this as a proxy, but we will have analyses in the future concerning party identification specifically.

There is too much here to really address in one post.  I did the same thing for women and the pattern is very similar, so it doesn’t appear there are many gender interactions, though maybe someone will point something out.  My main reaction is that it confirms my initial idea that all researchers are finding very real differences, but that no line of research has a monopoly on explaining differences.  There is replication and support for a number of lines of research on ideological differences.  Rather, ideology is a network of ideas, beliefs, and dispositions that encompasses all these findings.

Finding out what made white male liberals vote for McCain might be an even more interesting question, and perhaps I’ll do that analysis next as we do have some of that data.  I did this previously to examine supporters of Obama vs. Clinton within the Democratic party and feel that examining within party psychological (as opposed to demographic) differences is a vast untapped area for political psychologists.  Indeed, if I had to point out one interesting thing in the above graph, it would be the relatively small effect sizes of demographics like age compared to personality variables like neuroticism.  It might make just as much sense for Obama to target the “empathic” vote as it does to target the “youth” vote.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in differences between liberals and conservatives, differences between republicans and democrats, disgust, liberals and conservatives, neuroticism, political psychology, replications of other studies, unpublished results, yourmorals.org | 3 Comments »

A moral profile of Tea Party supporters

October 16th, 2010 by Sean Wojcik

Over the past several months, the Tea Party movement has emerged as a national force in American politics.  Its supporters are often characterized as belonging to one of two distinct groups: either as small-government libertarians, or as the disenfranchised and rebranded base of traditional conservativism.  Although there is a growing body of knowledge on the psychology of both conservatives and libertarians (see Iyer et al.’s libertarianism paper, under review), little is known about the moral and psychological underpinnings of support for the Tea Party.

Here at yourmorals.org, we have begun to address this question.  Over the past few months, we asked over 1400 visitors to indicate the strength of their support for the Tea Party movement.  Of the 9% who scored near the top of our scale, approximately two-thirds had previously identified as conservatives and about one-third had identified as libertarians.

So how do the moral values of these Tea Party supporters compare to conservatives and libertarians?  We found that they indeed showed a mix of both conservative and libertarian moral values.  On the foundations of Harm and Fairness, TP supporters recreated the libertarian pattern that is described in detail by Iyer et al. – that is, they scored even lower than conservatives on both of these foundations.  However, TP supporters showed a heightened sensitivity to the foundations of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity, forming a pattern that is nearly identical to that of conservatives.  The finding that TP supporters are low on Harm and Fairness, and high on Ingroup, Authority, and Purity, clearly distinguishes them from traditional libertarians in the moral domain.  Instead, they appear to endorse a slightly inflated form of traditional conservative moral beliefs.

We also examined how Tea Party supporters scored on several other moral dimensions, which were measured with newer versions of our Moral Foundations Questionnaire.  Again, they looked very similar to conservatives.  That is, they scored low on equality and high on equity (conservative “karma”); they had high scores on retribution and national sovereignty, with low scores on universalism; and they scored high on economic—but not lifestyle—liberty.

We have collected data about our users’ attitudes toward a number of current political issues and events.  So do Tea Party supporters’ scores on the moral dimensions predict specific attitudes about social and political issues?  In short, yes.

  • Their high scores in economic liberty—and their conception of fairness as equity rather than equality—are likely related to their disapproval of bank regulation, their support for offshore drilling, and the perceived unimportance of healthcare reform.

  • Tea Party supporters’ moral sensitivity to national sovereignty and Ingroup is consistent with their negative attitudes toward immigration, even specifically in their support for police verification of immigration status in Arizona, as well as their opposition to the mosque being built near Ground Zero.
  • Their conservative stances on several social issues (e.g., same sex marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion) reflect their low moral valuations of lifestyle liberty, unlike traditional libertarians.

As can be seen in the chart above, TP supporters score nearly identically to conservatives on all of these social issues, and are clearly distinct from true libertarians, who score similarly to liberals.

As might be expected, Tea Party supporters also showed consistently unfavorable views about President Obama.  They were also most likely to believe he was born in another country, and they were the most likely to believe he was a Muslim.  Their scores on these measures were consistently lower than both libertarians and conservatives.

Our investigation into the psychology of support for the Tea Party, like the Tea Party movement itself, is still in its early stages. We are still collecting data on these topics, and these charts are only a sneak peek of our developing findings.  We are currently investigating the potential role of several additional factors in predicting Tea Party support, including attitudes about economic fairness, racial identity, and behavioral participation in the movement.

However, the current data paints a relatively clear picture of how Tea Party supporters compare to other conservatives and libertarians: their values are closely aligned to those of traditional social conservatives, but with an inflated investment in economic freedoms that occasionally resembles libertarianism.  Although the Tea Party movement is anything but a monolithic group with a single identity, the clear moral and psychological underpinnings that predict support for the movement will be a continued topic of investigation here at yourmorals.

Sean Wojcik

Posted in conservatives, difference between democrats and republicans, differences between republicans and democrats, empathy, equality, equity, fairness, health care, health care reform, healthcare, justice and fairness, liberals, liberals and conservatives, libertarians, moral foundations, moral psychology, political ideology, political psychology, purity, Purity/Sanctity/Disgust, social psychology, unpublished results, yourmorals.org | 3 Comments »
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Maximizing is better (for your happiness) in the moral rather than material domain.

October 11th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

Whenever I bring up the concept of maximizing (“never settling for less than the best”), the discussion inevitably evolves into thinking about what domains a given person maximizes in.  For example, I definitely don’t maximize in terms of my clothing choices, but am more of a maximizer in my career choice.  Actually, even within my career choice, I maximize for some characteristics (sense of purpose, geography, autonomy) more than others (stability, income).

Still, even as this distinction has been pointed out in Barry Schwartz’s original book and in subsequent papers, I am not aware of anyone who has attempted to measure maximizing in specific domains (please comment/email me if you know of such research, as I’m guessing that it’s out there).  Here is a quote from a recent paper:

Although content-free items have several advantages, specific examples may be needed to measure domain specific maximizing tendency, i.e., individual maximizing tendency within particular domains such as consumer purchase. Future research needs to address whether there are systematic variations between individuals’ global maximizing tendency and their propensity for maximizing within given decision making domains, based on for example the degree of involvement.

To answer this question, I modified the original maximizer-satisficer scale and gave the resulting questionnaire to both a sample at yourmorals.org and to a sample of USC students.  Below are the reliability coefficients, which won’t mean a lot to many people who read this, but are useful in determining if it really is possible to measure domain specific maximizing, simply by taking the original scale’s questions and tweaking them to be specific to a domain (e.g. instead of “I never settle for 2nd best”, change the question to “In picking a place to live, one should never settle for 2nd best”).  More interesting are the domain specific correlations with the satisfaction with life scale, a measure of “happiness”.

The reliabilities are fair, meaning that the domain specific scales measure the constructs decently, but not extremely well.  Better measures usually have reliabilities around .8.  Still, the domain specific measures are comparable to the original scale’s reliabilities and the test-retest reliability (asking people the same question a month later) also is similar.  I think the fair reliabilities are a result of the fact that maximizing (Nenkov et. al) has since been shown to have multiple dimensions: the search for alternatives, having high standards, and having difficulty making decisions (see this paper).

Beyond reliabilities, I think the best argument for domain specific maximizing is the pragmatic reliability, meaning whether maximizing in different domains predicts different outcomes.  From the correlations above, you can see that maximizing in the material/physical domain (shopping, work, a place to live) has negative consequences for life satisfaction, while maximizing in the moral and political decision making domains does not (bold values are significant, click on the graph to zoom in).  This is consistent across both samples.  In addition, I asked the USC students how much they liked where they live, and the “place to live” subscale had the highest negative relationship (-.33, p<.001) to liking where they lived, followed by shopping (r=-.22) and work (r=-.22).  Maximizing in relationships, political decision making and moral decision making were unrelated.  At the very least, I think this is good evidence that maximizing is at least different in moral/political decision making versus in consumer decision making.  Incidentally, maximizing had a long history in moral philosophy, before it became popular in psychology to think of it in terms of consumption.

One issue with my original scale construction is that I did it before Nenkov’s paper that deconstructed maximizing came out, so I did not evenly pick items across subscales.  To make sure that the findings above aren’t just because of item selection, I ran some analyses for specific matched items that existed in all domain specific scales.

Again, bold values are significant and we see negative correlations only for alternative search questions only in the material domain.  This replicates Nenkov’s finding in that having high standards does not relate to lower life satisfaction, but always searching for alternatives, no matter how satisfied one is, does relate to lower life satisfaction.  However, it appears that this is true only in the material domain (shopping, career, a place to live) and not in moral and political decision making.

Lastly, the case of maximizing in relationships is interesting.  The above data isn’t conclusive, but it converges with another pattern I’ve seen when comparing USC students to our YourMorals.org sample.  Specifically, relationships appear to play a greater role in happiness in the general population rather than in our student samples.  Perhaps loneliness is a bigger issue in the real world than it is within the college campus environment.  Or perhaps paying attention to alternatives in relationships is less adaptive as you get older.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in maximizer, moral maximizing, positive psychology, replications of other studies, unpublished results, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

What is fair for migrant workers? – Stephen Colbert’s testimony to congress

September 24th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

My last post concerned moral maximizing and I believe the issue of migrant labor is one which relates.  As Stephen Colbert uses satire to relate in the below video, the pragmatic reality is that vegetables are not going to be picked by Americans in the United States through the invisible hand of the free market.

Want proof of this reality?  In June, the United Farm Workers union attempted an interesting experiment whereby it offered to train American citizens to replace migrant labor.  Colbert testifies that 16 people took them up on the offer (him included) and press reports indicate that only 7 people took the offer.  Whichever number it is, it seems fairly low.  Still, immigration reform seems unlikely to pass anytime soon as it seems to stimulate conflicting ideas of what is ‘fair’.  Migrant workers are virtually powerless and easily taken advantage of….but they are also breaking the law by coming to this country, and these conflicting considerations are differentially appealing to liberals and conservatives.

The below graph illustrates this differential appeal with data from yourmorals.org.  I asked individuals how ‘wrong’ different situations felt to them.  Some concerned equity (“A person who contributes more to society is not rewarded.), equality (“A bonus is given to a work team for good performance and the money is not divided equally.”), need(“‘A free meal is given to the rich, rather than to the hungry.”), retribution (“A person commits a crime and goes unpunished.”), and procedures (“A negotiation occurs without everyone completely understanding the process.”).  These situations may all be of varying severity, so it is difficult to interpret differences between dimensions, but one can make inferences about liberals and conservatives within dimensions.  Specifically, liberals (in blue below) felt that violations of equality and need (which formed one factor) were more wrong than did conservatives.  Similarly, conservatives (in red below) felt that violations of retributive justice principles were more wrong than did liberals.

Fair policies toward migrant workers depend on what you want to focus on….their lack of equal status, equal opportunity and need (which liberals seem to care about more).  Or their illegal entry into the United States (which conservatives care more about).  Colbert says as much in a rare break of character when responding to questions during the congressional hearing.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in differences between republicans and democrats, fairness, justice and fairness, liberals and conservatives, moral maximizing, news commentary, political psychology, stephen colbert, yourmorals.org | No Comments »

Another perspective on political moderates

September 22nd, 2010 by Brad

After reading Ravi Iyer’s posting on moderates, I thought I might have something to add to the conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in political ideology, political psychology | 3 Comments »
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