Why So Many Americans Don't Want Social Justice and Don't Trust Scientists

Jonathan Haidt. PhD
2013 Boyarsky Lecture in Law, Medicine & Ethics



This lecture focuses on Moral Foundations Theory and its application to politics, polarization, science, and inequality.

When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims

Laura Niemi and Liane Young
Pers Soc Psychol Bull June 23, 2016

Abstract

Why do victims sometimes receive sympathy for their suffering and at other times scorn and blame? Here we show a powerful role for moral values in attitudes toward victims. We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity). Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated (Studies 1-4); increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators (Studies 2-3). Patterns persisted controlling for politics, just world beliefs, and right-wing authoritarianism. Experimentally manipulating linguistic focus off of victims and onto perpetrators reduced victim blame. Both binding values and focus modulated victim blame through victim responsibility attributions. Findings indicate the important role of ideology in attitudes toward victims via effects on responsibility attribution.

The article is here.

The Immoral Landscape? Scientists Are Associated with Violations of Morality

Rutjens BT, Heine SJ
(2016)  PLoS ONE 11(4): e0152798.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0152798

Abstract

Do people think that scientists are bad people? Although surveys find that science is a highly respected profession, a growing discourse has emerged regarding how science is often judged negatively. We report ten studies (N = 2328) that investigated morality judgments of scientists and compared those with judgments of various control groups, including atheists. A persistent intuitive association between scientists and disturbing immoral conduct emerged for violations of the binding moral foundations, particularly when this pertained to violations of purity. However, there was no association in the context of the individualizing moral foundations related to fairness and care. Other evidence found that scientists were perceived as similar to others in their concerns with the individualizing moral foundations of fairness and care, yet as departing for all of the binding foundations of loyalty, authority, and purity. Furthermore, participants stereotyped scientists particularly as robot-like and lacking emotions, as well as valuing knowledge over morality and being potentially dangerous. The observed intuitive immorality associations are partially due to these explicit stereotypes but do not correlate with any perceived atheism. We conclude that scientists are perceived not as inherently immoral, but as capable of immoral conduct.

The article is here.

Are moral foundations heritable? Probably

by Jonathan Haidt
The Righteous Mind Blog
Originally posted April 11, 2016

Are moral foundation scores heritable? A new paper by Kevin Smith et al. has tested moral foundations theory in a sample of Australian twins and found that moral foundations are neither heritable nor stable over time. The authors summarized MFT fairly, and they used a research design that is appropriate for the questions they asked, but with one major flaw: They improvised an ultra-short measure of moral foundations (around 2008) that was so poor that they essentially have no measure of moral foundations at time 1. Then at time 2 (around 2010) they used a better measure, the MFQ20. As I show below, nothing can be concluded about heritability or stability from their data.

The blog post is here.

Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as a Theory of Political Ideology

Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford, John R. Hibbing, Nicholas G. Martin, Peter K. Hatemi
American Journal of Political Science. 
doi:10.1111/ajps.12255

Abstract

Originally developed to explain cultural variation in moral judgments, moral foundations theory (MFT) has become widely adopted as a theory of political ideology. MFT posits that political attitudes are rooted in instinctual evaluations generated by innate psychological modules evolved to solve social dilemmas. If this is correct, moral foundations must be relatively stable dispositional traits, changes in moral foundations should systematically predict consequent changes in political orientations, and, at least in part, moral foundations must be heritable. We test these hypotheses and find substantial variability in individual-level moral foundations across time, and little evidence that these changes account for changes in political attitudes. We also find little evidence that moral foundations are heritable. These findings raise questions about the future of MFT as a theory of ideology.

The article is here.

Moral foundations and political attitudes: The moderating role of political sophistication

By Patrizia Milesi
The International Journal of Psychology
Originally published February 26, 2015

Abstract

Political attitudes can be associated with moral concerns. This research investigated whether people's level of political sophistication moderates this association. Based on the Moral Foundations Theory, this article examined whether political sophistication moderates the extent to which reliance on moral foundations, as categories of moral concerns, predicts judgements about policy positions. With this aim, two studies examined four policy positions shown by previous research to be best predicted by the endorsement of Sanctity, that is, the category of moral concerns focused on the preservation of physical and spiritual purity. The results showed that reliance on Sanctity predicted political sophisticates' judgements, as opposed to those of unsophisticates, on policy positions dealing with equal rights for same-sex and unmarried couples and with euthanasia. Political sophistication also interacted with Fairness endorsement, which includes moral concerns for equal treatment of everybody and reciprocity, in predicting judgements about equal rights for unmarried couples, and interacted with reliance on Authority, which includes moral concerns for obedience and respect for traditional authorities, in predicting opposition to stem cell research. Those findings suggest that, at least for these particular issues, endorsement of moral foundations can be associated with political attitudes more strongly among sophisticates than unsophisticates.

The entire article is here.

Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism

By Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, S. Koleva, M. Motyl,  R. Iyera, S. P. Wojcikd, & P. H. Ditto
in press, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology

Abstract: 

Where does morality come from? Why are moral judgments often so similar across cultures, yet sometimes so variable? Is morality one thing, or many? Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) was created to answer these questions. In this chapter we describe the origins, assumptions, and current conceptualization of the theory, and detail the empirical findings that MFT has made possible, both within social psychology and beyond. Looking toward the future, we embrace several critiques of the theory, and specify five criteria for determining what should be considered a foundation of human morality. Finally, we suggest a variety of future directions for MFT and for moral psychology. 

Here is an excerpt:

But what if, in some cultures, even the most advanced moral thinkers value groups, institutions, traditions, and gods? What should we say about local rules for how to be a good group member, or how to worship? If these rules are not closely linked to concerns about justice or care, then should we distinguish them from true moral rules, as Turiel did when he labeled such rules as “social conventions?” Shweder (1990) argued that the cognitive-developmental tradition was studying only a subset of moral concerns, the ones that are most highly elaborated in secular Western societies. Shweder argued for a much more extensive form of pluralism based on his research in Bhubaneswar, India (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997). He proposed that around the world, people talk in one or more of three moral languages: the ethic of autonomy (relying on concepts such as harm, rights, and justice, which protect autonomous individuals), the ethic of community (relying on concepts such as duty, respect, and loyalty, which preserve institutions and social order), and the ethic of divinity (relying on concepts such as purity, sanctity, and sin, which protect the divinity inherent in each person against the degradation of hedonistic selfishness.) 

The entire piece is here.