Liberals vs Conservatives

According to Feinberg & Willer (2013, p. 2), ‘liberals and conservatives possess different moral profiles regarding the five moral foundations.’ More specifically, ‘care and fairness are generally negatively, and loyalty, authority, and sanctity, generally positively related to conservative political orientation’ (Kivikangas, Fernández-Castilla, Järvelä, Ravaja, & Lönnqvist, 2021, p. 77). Is this true?

By the end of this section you should understand the evidence for this claim as well as some objections to it.

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Notes

In this section we aim to understand and evaluate the third key claim in the argument that cultural differences in moral psychology matter for political conflict over climate change:

‘liberals and conservatives possess different moral profiles regarding the five moral foundations’ (Feinberg & Willer, 2013, p. 2).

What evidence supports this claim?

van Leeuwen & Park (2009) used the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ-1) to find evidence for this claim with a sample of Dutch students both when political affinity was tested using an explicit question and when it was tested using an implicit measure. And Graham, Haidt, & Nosek (2009) found comparable results with a sample from the USA.

On the basis of a careful meta-analysis of evidence, Kivikangas et al. (2021) conclude that, with some important exceptions noted below,

‘care and fairness are generally negatively, and loyalty, authority, and sanctity, generally positively related to conservative political orientation’ (p. 77).

Further, this result appears broadly robust across different ways of analysing data and different forms of the questionnaire used (Kivikangas et al., 2021, p. 83).

Objection from Cultural Differences

In New Zealand, Davies, Sibley, & Liu (2014, p. 434) found that ‘[a]lthough Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity showed significant negative correlations with conservatism, these relationships were weak, indicating that these foundations are not related to ideology. [...] the individualizing foundation results are surprising, and different to those found by Graham et al. (2011).’

Davis et al. (2016, p. e29) found evidence from two independent samples that

‘the binding moral foundations would show a weaker relationship with political conservatism in Black people than in White people.’

They conclude that

‘some of the current items may conflate moral foundations with other constructs such as religiosity or racial identity’ (Davis et al., 2016, p. e29).

This conclusion is supported by (Kivikangas et al., 2021)’s meta-analysis:

‘In the representative samples, arguably giving us the least biased estimates for the general population, and its subset of Black respondents, all associations between moral foundations and political orientation were close to zero’ (p. 84).

These findings combined with the (related) failures to find evidence that the Moral Foundations Questionnaire exhibits scalar invariance (see Operationalising Moral Foundations Theory) indicate that we should be cautious in drawing conclusions about cultural differences.

Reply to Objections

The research considered so far uses the original version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (now called MFQ-1).

Atari et al. (2023) developed the new version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, MFQ-2. They report that ‘care is associated with liberal ideology, [while] loyalty, authority, and purity are associated with conservative ideology’ (p. 1171). This is roughly what van Leeuwen & Park (2009) found. They also report that ‘liberals are more concerned with equality and conservatives are more concerned with proportionality’ (p. 1171).

Appendix: Liberal vs Conservative (Emilie’s question)

This section is not part of the spoken lecture.

How can we be sure that the dutch 'liberal' is the same as the 'liberal' the moral psychologists are talking about (possibly US^[1]) in the study by van Leeuwen & Park (2009)?

I am unsure what the answer is, but my current understanding is that although we canot be sure, there does seem to be something to the one-dimensional opposition in lots of places.

It’s important that the claim is about socially liberal vs socially conservative. (If we were talking about economic views, the picture would be much more complex.^[2])

The moral psychologists do take themselves to be talking about a dimension that is found across the world. For example:

'Whereas in the US, the political divide is between “liberals” and “conservatives” (or Democrats and Republicans), both the substance of political divides and the terms used to describe them vary across cultural contexts (Malka et al., 2014). However, research suggests that the liberal–conservative divide on social issues in particular manifests in similar ways across cultures (e.g., Feinberg, Wehling, Chung, Saslow, & Melvær Paulin, 2019; Graham et al., 2011)' (Feinberg & Willer, 2019, p. footnote 1).

Do the references they cite here support these assertions?

As far as I can tell, Graham et al. (2011) depend on the assumption that the socially liberal-socially conservative distinction works in roughly the same way across many countries; in this sense it may provide indirect evidence (if this assumption was false, they shouldn’t have been able to get significant results). Feinberg, Wehling, Chung, Saslow, & Paulin (2020, p. Study 4a) compares earlier findings from a US sample of participants with studies of people in Austria, France and Germany. Again, this seems to depend on the assumption that (in their words) ‘the same conservative-liberal divisions found in the United States are common in countries across the world’ (Feinberg et al., 2020, p. 790) and so provides at most indirect evidence for it.

Those authors do cite Bornschier (2010) in support of this assumption. This is a study which covers multiple countries with relevantly different histories (but not the US). I don’t fully understand this research (yet), but my sense is that it provides one method to identify how robust the idea of a divide between socially liberal and socially conservative is. It also has some very clear figures.

Appendix: Objection from a Competing Theory

This section is not part of the spoken lecture.

A competing view is offered by Gray, Young, & Waytz (2012) and developed in later publications by these authors. I do not recommend studying this view, nor do I not include it in the lecture. My own sense is that their view is not well supported (as always, I am happy to learn otherwise from you). I include it in these notes because you may encounter responses to this view if you read some of the literature on Moral Foundations Theory.

Gray et al. (2012) propose that ‘all morality is understood through the lens of harm.’ This leads them to the hypothesis that ‘harm is central in moral cognition across moral diversity for both liberals and conservatives’ (Schein & Gray, 2015, p. 1158). They offer evidence which, they claim, is ‘more consistent with a common dyadic template than with a specific number of distinct moral mechanisms that are differentially expressed across liberals and conservatives’ (Schein & Gray, 2015, p. 1158).

Note that this requires working with a particularly broad conception of harm:

‘loyalty, purity, industriousness, and social order [...] are best understood as “transformations” or “intermediaries” of harm, values whose violation leads to perceptions of concrete harm’ (Schein & Gray, 2018).

My guess is that this is more likely to capture how some people think in abstract terms (but see Crone & Laham (2015) for counter evidence) than to capture the psychological structure of ethical abilities.

Glossary

References

Endnotes