What makes a liberal? Why are people conservative?

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Permalink Reply by Fang1944 on July 23, 2010 at 9:33am

For those too lazy to click on a link:

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Permalink Reply by Charles Lane on July 23, 2010 at 10:40am

Here is a copy and paste for you to delve into on this subject...
"Morality is not just about how we treat each other, as most liberals think," he argues. "It is also about binding groups together and supporting essential institutions."

With all that in mind, Haidt identified five foundational moral impulses. As succinctly defined by Northwestern University's McAdams, they are:

• Harm/care. It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.

• Fairness/reciprocity. Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.

• In-group loyalty. People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.

• Authority/respect. People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.

• Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

Haidt's research reveals that liberals feel strongly about the first two dimensions -- preventing harm and ensuring fairness -- but often feel little, or even feel negatively, about the other three. Conservatives, on the other hand, are drawn to loyalty, authority and purity, which liberals tend to think of as backward or outdated. People on the right acknowledge the importance of harm prevention and fairness but not with quite the same energy or passion as those on the left.


Libertarian essayist Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute -- one of many self-reflective political thinkers who are intrigued by Haidt's hypothesis -- puts it this way: "While the five foundations are universal, cultures build upon each to varying degrees. Imagine five adjustable slides on a stereo equalizer that can be turned up or down to produce different balances of sound. An equalizer preset like 'Show Tunes' will turn down the bass and 'Hip Hop' will turn it up, but neither turns it off.

"Similarly, societies modulate the dimension of moral emotions differently, creating a distinctive cultural profile of moral feeling, judgment and justification. If you're a sharia devotee ready to stone adulterers and slaughter infidels, you have purity and in-group pushed up to 11. PETA members, who vibrate to the pain of other species, have turned in-group way down and harm way up."


McAdams was first exposed to these ideas about three years ago, when he heard Haidt speak at a conference. Around that same time, he was analyzing information he had compiled from interviews with 150 highly religious middle-aged Americans -- men and women from across the political spectrum who had described in detail the ways they find meaning in their lives. Realizing this was an excellent test case for Haidt's theories, McAdams started comparing the comments of self-described liberals and conservatives.

Sure enough, "Conservatives spoke in moving terms about respecting authority and order," he found. "Liberals invested just as much emotion in describing their commitment to justice and equality. Liberals feel authority is a minor-league moral issue; for us, the major leaguers are harm and fairness."

It's hard to play ball when you can't agree who deserves to be a big leaguer.

Of Haidt's five moral realms, the one that causes the most friction between cosmopolitan liberals and traditionalist conservatives is purity/sanctity. To a 21st-century secular liberal, the concept barely registers. Haidt notes it was part of the Western vocabulary as recently as the Victorian era but lost its force in the early 20th century when modern rules of proper hygiene were codified. With the physical properties of contamination understood, the moral symbolism of impurity no longer carried much weight.

But the impulse remains lodged in our psyches, turning up in both obvious and surprising ways. You can hear strong echoes of it when the pope rails against materialism, insisting we have been put on Earth to serve a loftier purpose than shopping until we drop. It can also be found in the nondenominational spiritual belief that we all contain within us a piece of the divine. (Although it's sometimes used in a tongue-in-cheek way in our society, the phrase "my body is a temple" is reflective of the purity/sanctity impulse.)

"The question is: Do you see the world as simply matter?" Haidt asks. "If so, people can do whatever they want, as long as they don't hurt other people. Or do you see more dimensions to life? Do you want to live in a higher, nobler way than simply the pursuit of pleasure? That often requires not acting on your impulses, making sacrifices for others. It implies a reverence -- which is a nonrational feeling -- towards human life."

Consider two letters to the editor in a recent issue of the Ventura (Calif.) Breeze. The weekly newspaper has been chronicling a controversy about a 19th-century cemetery that gradually fell into disrepair and, since the early 1960s, has been used as a dog park. Some descendents of the people buried there are demanding that it be restored as a proper burial place.

"Why is there even a debate?" wrote one angry resident. He referred to the park as "this holy ground" and admonished city officials: "Your values and judgment need some serious realignment." But a second reader looked at the controversy from a more practical perspective, noting that public funds are limited in these tough economic times. Besides, he added, "the park is full of life now, and I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but life is for the living."

Both arguments are rooted in firm moral beliefs. It's just that for the first correspondent, purity/sanctity is paramount, while for the second it's of minimal importance.

Not surprisingly, Haidt's data suggests purity/sanctity is the moral foundation that best predicts an individual's attitude toward abortion. It also helps explain opposition to gay marriage. "If you think society is made up of individuals, and each individual has the right to do what he or she wants if they aren't hurting anybody, it's unfathomable why anyone would oppose gay marriage," he says. "Liberals assume opponents must be homophobic.

"I know feelings of disgust do play into it. When you're disgusted by something, you tend to come up with reasons why it's wrong. But cultural conservatives, with their strong emphasis on social order, don't see marriage primarily as an expression of one individual's desire for another. They see the family as the foundation of society, and they fear that foundation is dissolving."
Haidt doesn't want religious fundamentalists dictating public policy to ensure it lines up with their specific moral code. Even if you perceive purity as a major-league issue, it doesn't have to be on steroids. But he argues it is important that liberals recognize the strength that impulse retains with cultural conservatives and respect it rather than dismissing it as primitive.

"I see liberalism and conservatism as opposing principles that work well when in balance," he says, noting that authority needs to be both upheld (as conservatives insist) and challenged (as liberals maintain). "It's a basic design principle: You get better responsiveness if you have two systems pushing against each other. As individuals, we are very bad at finding the flaws in our own arguments. We all have a distorted perception of reality."

Spend some time reading Haidt, and chances are you'll begin to view day-to-day political arguments through a less-polarized lens. Should the Guantanamo Bay prison be closed? Of course, say liberals, whose harm/fairness receptors are acute. Not so fast, argue conservatives, whose finely attuned sense of in-group loyalty points to a proactive attitude toward outside threats.

Why any given individual grows up to become a conservative or a liberal is unclear. Haidt, like most contemporary social scientists, points to a combination of genes and environment -- not one's family of origin so much as the neighborhood and society whose values you absorbed. (Current research suggests that peers may actually have a stronger impact than parents in this regard.)

In his quest to "help people overcome morally motivated misunderstandings," Haidt has set up a couple of Web sites, www.civilpolitics.org and www.yourmorals.org. At the latter, you can take a quiz that will locate you on his moral map. For fun, you can also answer the questions you think the way your political opposite would respond. Haidt had both liberals and conservatives do just that in the laboratory, and the results are sobering for those on the left: Conservatives understood them a lot better than they understood conservatives.







"Liberals tend to have a very optimistic view of human nature," he says. "They tend to be uncomfortable about punishment -- of their own children, of criminals, anyone. I do believe that if liberals ran the whole world, it would fall apart. But if conservatives ran the whole world, it would be so restrictive and uncreative that it would be rather unpleasant, too."

The concept of authority resonates so weakly in liberals that "it makes it difficult for liberal organizations to function," Haidt says. (Will Rogers was right on target when he proclaimed, "I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat.") On the other hand, he notes, the Republicans' tendency to blindly follow their leader proved disastrous over the past eight years.

"Look how horribly the GOP had to screw up to alienate many conservatives," muses Dallas Morning News columnist and BeliefNet blogger Rod Dreher, an Orthodox Christian, unorthodox conservative and Haidt fan. "In the end, the GOP, the conservative movement and the nation would have been better served had we on the right not been so yellow-dog loyal. But as Haidt shows, it's in our nature."

Like Wilkinson, Dreher doesn't fit cleanly into the left-right spectrum; he reports that taking Haidt's test (showing he scored high on certain liberal values but also on some conservative ones) helped him understand why. He's appreciative of that insight and admiring of the way the psychologist is able to set aside the inherent prejudice we all share in favor of our own moral outlook. "It's hard for any of us to get outside our own heads and perform acts of empathy with people we don't much like," he notes.







In higher education, as in so many other fields, the best way to negotiate a pay raise is to get a competing offer. Not infrequently, an academic will entertain an offer from an institution he or she isn't really interested in joining, specifically so he can get a salary offer, take it back to his current employer and demand it be matched.

Haidt found himself in just that situation a few years back. But as he explained to Proffitt, his department chair, he was uncomfortable with the notion of lying to gain leverage.

"He told me, 'I know that if I was offered the position, I could get a big raise here. But I study ethics! I can't do that! That would be wrong!' He felt he wouldn't be playing fair with the people from the other university, who were putting out money and effort to recruit him."

"That game is played by a lot of people, but Jon would not," Proffitt says. "He elected not to do that on purely ethical grounds. That decision cost him at least $30,000 a year."

But was he guided by the harm/care instinct? Or fairness/reciprocity? Or did the conservative value of in-group loyalty, which tends to lie dormant in liberals such as Haidt, emerge under these unusual circumstances and convince him to be true to his school?

The most likely answer is "all of the above." The point is Haidt realized the wrongness of that behavior in his gut and acted on instinct.

In making such decisions, he is setting a rigorous moral example for his son, Max, who turns 3 in July. Haidt would be pleased if, by the time Max gets to secondary school, the study of ethics is part of the curriculum. "If I had my way, moral psychology would be a mandatory part of high-school civics classes, and civics classes would be a mandatory part of all Americans' education," he says. "Understanding there are multiple perspectives on the good society, all of which are morally motivated, would go a long way toward helping us interact in a civil manner."

Shweder cheers him on in that crusade. "I think this is terribly important," he says. "People are not going to converge on their judgments of what's good or bad, or right and wrong. Diversity is inherent in our species. And in a globalized world, we're going to be bumping into each other a lot."

Whether they're addressing the U.S. Congress or U.N. General Assembly, Haidt has astute advice for policy advocates: Frame your argument to appeal to as many points as possible on the moral spectrum. He believes President Obama did just that in his inaugural address, which utilized "a broad array of virtue words, including 'courage,' 'loyalty,' 'patriotism' and 'duty,' to reach out and reassure conservatives."

Haidt notes that the environmental movement was started by liberals, who were presumably driven by the harm/care impulse. But conservative Evangelical Christians are increasingly taking up the cause, propelled by the urge to respect authority. "They're driven by the idea that God gave man dominion over the Earth, and keeping the planet healthy is our sacred responsibility," he notes. "If we simply rape, pillage, destroy and consume, we're abusing the power given to us by God.

"The climate crisis and the economic crisis are interesting, because neither has a human enemy. These are not crises that turn us against an out-group, so they're not really designed to bring us together, but they can be used for that. I hope and think we are ready, demographically and historically, for a less polarized era."

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Permalink Reply by Action Jeans on October 1, 2010 at 11:27pm

Yeah, we've tried to teach him how to do things like linking sources but it seems to elude him. If we ever manage to get him housebroken we might take another crack at it.

I linked to it later in this thread, but I'll go ahead and link to the source here and edit it into the OP for easy reference.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/morals-authority-3775/

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Permalink Reply by can i change this later? on July 23, 2010 at 10:51am

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Religious Zeal After Goal Frustration

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Permalink Reply by Brono921 on July 23, 2010 at 5:47pm

Any of you dipshit socialists know where I can find a descent re-education camp?

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Permalink Reply by Action Jeans on July 23, 2010 at 7:11pm

I see you chose the second option. Can you sense my shock and disbelief?

If you don't have anything to contribute to the discussion, piss off out of my thread.

Also, I think you meant "decent", not "descent". Re-education wouldn't be such a bad idea for you. I suggest starting with elementary school.

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Permalink Reply by Fang1944 on July 23, 2010 at 8:02pm

I don't think this interesting lecturer says anything to explain the hostility, the gun fetishism, the eagerness to believe outlandish lies, the thinly concealed racism or the anti-intellectualism.

Or the inability to spell ordinary words.

But I can remember when conservatives weren't like that. Of course, I can also remember when Saturday Night Live was funny.

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Permalink Reply by Action Jeans on July 23, 2010 at 8:18pm

The first guy does, though. The hostility, fierce defense of the second amendment and racial boundaries are covered by "in group loyalty". As for believing lies and anti-intellectualism, I think a lot of that can be explained by conservative politicians that capitalize on the "authority/respect" part of moral psychology.

I think all five aspects of this guy's theory are really admirable and useful qualities for people to possess. Things just get out of hand when unscrupulous people take advantage of those qualities to push people towards extremes. That's how we get radicals on both sides of the spectrum.

However, when tempered by reason and balanced by healthy debate from thoughtful opposition, I think we could all be more useful, productive citizens by keeping all of these moral factors in mind. Both while forming our own opinions and when trying to understand those of others.

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Permalink Reply by Hillbilly on July 23, 2010 at 9:00pm

The professor offers nothing more than assertions. There are more than "two kinds of people" (racist much?) and we can't be quantified then put on a chart.

Does anyone here think they are unique?

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Permalink Reply by Action Jeans on July 24, 2010 at 2:09am

I didn't hear him say anything about race.

When he talked about types of people, he meant people who are mainly motivated by achievement vs those who are motivated by avoidance.

I'd imagine there's extremes of each type, as well as people who are varying degrees of either or both. I don't think that concept should threaten anyone's notion of individuality.

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Permalink Reply by Hillbilly on July 24, 2010 at 12:40pm

When he talked about types of people, he meant people who are mainly motivated by achievement vs those who are motivated by avoidance.

I understood what he said. My point is that there are more than two kinds of people and the axis of "motivated by achievement vs those who are motivated by avoidance" is not even important. What he does is called entertainment. Look at his presentation. He is trying to induce the audience to enjoy themselves. He is not presenting information to be criticized. His information is a tool used to engender himself to the audience and gain a sense of comity.

How can you tell this? It's simple really. Note that "liberals" are classified as those who self report two traits of fairness and (some other one, whatever) but first he asks the audience to classify themselves. His data is nothing more than compliments to the audience. "Q:What are you? A: Liberal Q:Well Liberals are attractive and fair minded. A: Why thank you very much and you have nice hair. Q: You can touch it, if you want A: Nice. Q: Hey I'm going to another bar. Would you like to leave? A: Why yes. Let's go....."

He even throws in a few jokes about Americastan or whatever thus relaxing the audience. (By the way - this is what I think Liberals share, a personal contempt for others). His conclusion is a conclusion that the audience wants to hear, i.e. if we would all just try to understand each other, you'd agree with me.

Here is the kicker that makes the case. Note how conservatives are defined. It's not that they self report MORE of one value or another but that the values they report are statistically close to one another. For a conservative who is inclined to be critical of the performance, he is left un-offended. The speaker doesn't give him reason to object, in fact, again the speaker also pulls the conservative in by showing data that says "you hold things in balance".

He states a classic type 2 error in hypothesis testing which allows people who disagree to be free to self classify. Conservative sit there and say, "Oh I'm not a liberal, therefore I'm of the set where there are no deterministic traits, therefore I don't need to think further." In other words, just because the conclusion is the null hypothesis, doesn't mean that the opposite of the test against the null hypothesis is correct.

His underlying assumption is that we should measure and quantify people and classify them. That is bigotry/racism. (It is also the basis of Marxist Socialism.)

No, sorry but people are individuals. They can't be classified and measured on a scale. Each of use deserves to be respected as something unique and valuable in and of himself.

Oddly enough, that's your original point and your original point I agree with. The UVA Nazi professor, I disagree with.

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Permalink Reply by Action Jeans on July 24, 2010 at 8:09pm

I agree that people are individuals and have many varying traits. Of course it's impossible to classify all people into only two groups. I actually believe the vast majority of people fall somewhere in the middle or even completely beyond traditional labels of "liberal" or "conservative". I, myself, am fiercely politically independent. That's not really the point of this thread.

Sometimes it's necessary to generalize in order to make discussion possible, as any discussion regarding every nuance of every individual would be prohibitively long and complex. For the sake of this discussion, we're talking to some extent about extremes and what it takes to create genuine communication between the two.

There are many, many vocal people who self-identify as either "liberal" or "conservative". While these two groups undoubtedly contain a spectrum of personalities within themselves, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that each group generally have certain traits in common that bind them together.

I think Lakoff really understands framing in a way few people do but I actually really have a problem with how he wraps up with a call for liberals to match conservative framing tit for tat and try to beat them in that game. I think it's counter-productive. Fighting fire with fire just makes a bigger fire.

I'm not trying to put down one side or the other. Just to get a general idea of what makes them tick. Why does one group generally agree on a wide range of disparate issues, while another group generally believes the opposite on the exact same, seemingly scatter-shot talking points?

If these types of things can be understood by each about the other, maybe we can get beyond the framing that pits each side after the other, and frame a discussion that both sides can understand and participate in.

I don't claim to know exactly how that could be done but I think it could be a refreshing change of pace.

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