SDP is continuing a new service: periodic blogs, written by SDP Fellows. In this blog, the third of the series, Pat Leach offers thoughts on Jonathan Haidt's book and implications to moral values and political identity.
=====================================I gave a talk at DAAG this year entitled, "Making Decisions in a Polarized World.” The presentation dealt with the causes of increased polarization of the citizenry these days, and put forward a few ideas on how to deal with this phenomenon when helping groups to make decisions.
One key part of the presentation discussed some of Jonathan Haidt’s work on the value systems of different kinds of people – specifically, Liberals, Libertarians, and Social Conservatives, as defined in North America. I’d like to elaborate a bit on that talk.
Haidt’s research indicates that all groups share six common bases of moral values, each defined by its positive and negative attributes as follows:
Haidt discovered that while all groups root their moral values in all six bases, different groups weight them differently. Libertarians place enormous emphasis on Liberty (not surprisingly), and a fair amount of emphasis on Fairness. The other bases are weighted far more lightly. Liberals focus on Care, with Liberty not far behind, and Fairness just a bit behind that. The other three are weighed lightly. Social Conservatives place roughly equal weightings on all six bases. As such, Conservatives place much more importance on, for instance, Loyalty to one’s country, company, ethnic group, or religious group than do Liberals or Libertarians. (It may be a statement of the obvious, but these categories are a matter of degrees, not absolutes; many people fall in between two of these poles).
In addition, different groups may define some of these bases differently. To a Liberal, Fairness means everyone is given an equal chance; to a Conservative, Fairness means everyone receives in proportion to their contribution. Both are perfectly fine definitions, but they are different. It is important to be aware of this if you’re, say, rolling out a new program at work and trying to get a diverse group to agree on what is "fair.” Similarly, Conservatives and Libertarians tend to define Liberty in terms of freedom from government oppression, while Liberals define it in terms of freedom from oppression from corporations and the wealthy. Conservatives find Sanctity in rituals and traditions that have been handed down from generation to generation; Liberals find it in a walk through a pristine wilderness.
Another observable distinction between Liberals and Conservatives is the degree to which they attribute success or failure to one’s own efforts and ability vs. external factors. Liberals tend to place more emphasis on the circumstances of one’s environment – did you grow up in a stable, middle-class, two-parent household, or in an inner-city housing development, raised by a poor single mother? Conservatives place more emphasis on what you, yourself, did – did you work hard in school, stay out of trouble, and make opportunities for yourself? Shamefully (in my opinion), we are all more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who has fallen on hard times if we share their ethnic background.
How or why people develop different moral matrices is an interesting question, one that Haidt and a number of others have looked into from the perspectives of neuroscience and psychology. It is not just a matter of family environment; I and some of my siblings fall into the Liberal camp, but I have other siblings who are very Conservative.
Psychologists typically use five dimensions to characterize a person’s personality (contrary to what Meyers-Briggs aficionados would have you believe). These are:
Again, these are not either/or; you are not an Extrovert or an Introvert – you have some degree of Extroversion, say, on a scale of 1 to 10. This allows for a much more detailed and nuanced picture to be developed.
Along four of these five dimensions, there are no statistically significant differences between Liberals and Conservatives. The one exception: Openness to new experiences. Novelty, ambiguity, unfamiliar surroundings, alien customs, and change in general induce far more anxiety in Conservatives than they do in Liberals, on average (note those last two italicized words; if you are a Conservative who enjoys new experiences, please do not write angry letters to me). Liberals, on average, feel energized by novel places and exposure to new cultures.
This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Someone who finds the unfamiliar to be unsettling is likely to find comfort in tradition, and to place a lot of value on preserving those traditions. Someone who finds fast-paced change exciting and interesting is unlikely to value authority, or to display much loyalty to a group just because they once were part of it. To Conservatives, large multi-cultural cities with everyone doing their own thing and nothing of permanence are soulless compared to the strong sense of community in a small town. To Liberals, small towns cling sentimentally to the past when they should be looking optimistically toward the future and reveling in the world’s dynamic nature.
To return to the point of the DAAG presentation, it has been shown many times that diversity of thought is a great asset on any team. But if you’re in charge of shepherding that team toward an agreed-upon solution, it helps to be aware of these fundamental differences in moral matrices, and the underlying roots of those differences. A daring, break-all-the-rules approach might seem like just the fresh start you need to a Liberal; to a Conservative, failing to preserve those pieces that have worked in the past may come across as throwing the baby out with the bath water. Our job as facilitators is to help them to find common ground, or at least to understand each other’s positions and recognize them as defendable and ethical.
1 Neuroticism may seem like an odd trait to include with the others here. This essentially describes how suspicious one is of others’ intentions and motives. Richard Nixon had a very high degree of neuroticism; Barak Obama’s is very low.