So I was trained as an experimental social psychologist. I do work on human
judgment decision-making particularly the errors and biases that people show when
they make judgments and really what changed my research was in this hyper
partisan political environment and just looking at that and saying well what's
going on there and what a great example of how people's emotions are affecting
their judgment. How is it that our sort of moral feelings and our moral visions
change the way that we view the world
The theory that we work with its called moral foundation theory. The basic ideas are
five things that people care about. About harming other people particularly weak people.
About fairness. About loyalty to family and things like that.
Authority and tradition the way things used to have been done and purity, so
this notion that there's certain states of being that are pure and these five
concerns across the world you see these in all sorts of different cultures but
different groups differ in how much they weigh each of those different kinds of
factors. Liberals essentially care about two things,
harm and fairness. If it doesn't harm somebody or if it isn't unfair it is
morally ok but political conservatives tend to weight all five of these things as
important so that they care about harm and fairness but they also care about
group loyalty, about authority and tradition and about purity. If you look
at libertarians they're low on everything. So their world view isn't a deeply
moral world view it's more of a pragmatic utilitarian world view and if you
apply that to different political topics you can see where these differences come from.
one of the things that my research group has been interested in is in the
psychology of libertarianism as that's kind of grown into prominence. A chief
concern is government leaves people alone. It sort of accepts lifes
winners and losers in an economic game.
We created a website where people could go and fill out psychological scales but
we had this huge sample of people who claim to be libertarians.
Libertarians are psychologically different. So classic situation is your kid
goes off to school realizes they didn't bring their homework. The libertarian version thinks they will
learn a lesson and never forget their homework again because
they'll be very upset and if you look at their psychology, it kind of fits
really nicely with that they tend to be kind of self oriented. They're lower in
empathy than both liberals and conservatives or they just don't feel
other people's pain in the same way.
You may be better able to accept life's losers the less you suffer
vicariously with them and it's easier to adopt that philosophy and so your moral vision tells
you what would your ideology should be and what the facts are and that's exactly
what we find across all these differences and we're able to compare them on twenty or
thirty different personality types liberals conservatives and libertarians.
Which morals are most important to you? do you think they shape how you vote?
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