Further to my “Litmus Test” post a few weeks back….

It looks like I’m either very perceptive-slash-intelligent or somebody has been reading my posts and using them for inspiration. Since it’s obvious that nobody is reading these posts it can only mean that I’m a pretty sharp guy.

It turns out that scientists have actually been studying things I’ve been describing. Gut reactions and political leanings are in fact linked at a core level.

Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece for the New York Times entitled “Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal” in which he details findings of social scientists. Briefly stated:

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

Kristof indicates a website dedicated to the study of such matters, www.yourmorals.org. Once you register with the site, you can participate in many different surveys that help you understand where you are positioned on the conservative/liberal spectrum.

The survey reminded me of a right brain/left brain test I once took to determine my personal brain mix. Many of the questions seemed completely unrelated to the subject at hand. For example, “Do you get nauseous when reading in a moving car?” Apparently this is in some way related to right- or left-brain preponderance. Don’t ask me how. In a similar manner, the YourMorals surveys focus on MORAL matters rather than political positions. So the questions do not treat hot political topics but rather your emotional responses to certain situations.

Anyway, the graph in this post is my result to the first survey, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was interested to learn that I am ultra conservative when it comes to harm/care and fairness/reciprocity but a standard liberal on the ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity scales.

The website explains the scales in the following way:

The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well (the first two foundations – harm and fairness). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (the last three foundations). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place a higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations.

This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family, basic building blocks of society. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.

Kristof concludes his article this way:

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions. Gay rights were probably advanced largely by the public’s growing awareness of friends and family members who were gay.

A corollary is that the most potent way to win over opponents is to accept that they have legitimate concerns, for that triggers an instinct to reciprocate.

Based on my scores I don’t have fairness qualms but I do have an anti-authority streak. I think that’s a pretty accurate description of my personal morality and goes a long way in explaining my personal politics. For some things I’m strongly conservative, for others I’m a liberal.

I invite you to learn more about the foundations of your own personal politics by participating in the surveys. You might learn something important and interesting about yourself, just like I did. I now have a much clearer understanding of what makes me a Reluctant Democrat. Turns out I’m a rebellious ultra conservative.

Does that make me a fascist?