Note: This post is a reworking of an earlier post, “Why Political Differences are More about Priorities than Values”.
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The notion that political differences boil down to differences in values gained steam with the publication of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. According to Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, political identity is based primarily on the relative strength of five core moral intuitions: Protection from Harm, Loyalty, Sanctity/Purity, Respect for Authority, and Fairness. Relying mostly on Haidt’s Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), numerous studies have found that Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians tend to favor different moral intuitions, on average . That is, the MFQ reveals group differences only - and rather modest ones at that. You can’t actually predict an individual’s politics simply by giving them the MFQ.
But there’s a lot more to political differences than values or moral intuitions. For one thing, people have different understandings of how the world works: what is and what leads to what. And our intuitions are not independent of how we interpret situations. That is, how we feel about things requires some understanding of “what the hell is going on here”. In other words, emotion requires appraisal and appraisal includes a take on the causal dynamics of whatever we’re reacting to. The same holds for values and moral intuitions, which are infused with emotion (a point Haidt stressed with his “Elephant and Rider” metaphor). Put another way: emotions and values are part of a cognitive team that includes appraisal of the situation at hand, embedded in a wider understanding of how the world works in general.
Action is forward-looking, a self-correcting movement towards fulfillment of desires and goals, guided by probabilistic calculations of what’s going to happen as the act unfolds. Such calculations are informed by our understanding of constraints and causal relations. For example, scarcity is a constraint. By scarcity, I mean limited resources and opportunities to achieve what we want. Resources include time, money, labor, skills, knowledge, materials, the goodwill of others, and so on. Opportunities have to do with the availability of what we desire, such as mates and status markers. To appreciate scarcity is to understand that you can’t have everything you want. An appreciation of scarcity forces people to prioritize their goals and find ways to stretch their resources. .
Some people have a greater appreciation of scarcity than others. They want their leaders and decision-makers to be mindful of budgets and trade-offs and to prioritize goals, action plans and spending accordingly. They instinctively mistrust politicians who promise lots of goodies at little cost.
Those who dismiss the concept of scarcity often embrace an attitude of “if there’s a will, there’s a way”. Americans are steeped in this way of thinking: You can do it! Don’t let the doubters hold you back! A useful mindset in some circumstances, but disastrous in others.
References:
Gigerenzer, G. (2008). Moral intuition: Fast and frugal heuristics? In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology—Vol. 2. The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity (pp. 1–26). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 9–11. ISBN 978-0-307-37790-6.
Iyer R, Koleva S, Graham J, Ditto P, Haidt J (2012) Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLoS ONE 7(8): e42366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366
Pearl, J. (2018) The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. Basic Books, New York.
Philip M. Fernbach, Christina Kan, John G. Lynch, Jr., Squeezed: Coping with Constraint through Efficiency and Prioritization, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 41, Issue 5, 1 February 2015, Pages 1204–1227, https://doi.org/10.1086/679118