Food for thought and further exploration:
Humans observe, predict, act and self-correct, forming dynamic models of the world in the process. All the while feeling, judging and wanting.
Feelings, judgments and desires require an understanding of what’s possible, what’s likely, and how things are connected.
Causal inference: a sense of how something came to be and what may follow.
Just as we make snap judgments, we make snap causal inferences. Neurons work fast.
If rats, hamsters, honeybees and spiders use causal inference to navigate their worlds, why not us?
Causal inference can be automatic or effortful.
Feelings ride on the wave of causal inference.
Feelings ride on the wave of the possible and probable.
It never boils down to different values, because values don’t exist without an understanding of how the world works.
If someone values something more or less than you do, ask them: how does the world change when that value prevails in the wider society? When you get what you want for yourself, others, or the world - what does that look like? Yes, I’m thinking mostly of political differences here.
Lastly, an extended (and somewhat modified) excerpt from a previous post:
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.
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References:
De Houwer, J. (2014). A propositional model of implicit evaluation. Soc. Psychol. Person. Compass 8, 342–353. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12111
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.
Shams, L. and U. R. Beierholm (2010). "Causal inference in perception." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14(9): 425-432. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.07.001