Anomalies & Outliers: Field Notes on a Human Tribe

I have been troubled, deeply troubled, by the effort in the social sciences to explain the differences between statistical conservatives and statistical liberals as innate, genetic, essential and irremediable differences where, frankly, conservatives are all manner of unpleasant things. It feels partisan. Where conservatives are every bad thing in personality and in government and where every bad thing in personality and in government are conservative. (From here on out, I will use capitalized Conservatives and Liberals to mean statistical conservatives and statistical liberals: imaginary, though currently considered measurable, people.)

There are also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power, steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism, such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro (see J. Martin, Scully, & Levitt, 1990). It is reasonable to suggest that some of these historical figures may be considered politically conservative, at least in the context of the systems they defended. (4)

(4) The clearest example seems to be Stalin, who secretly admired Hitler and identified with several right-wing causes (including anti-Semitism). In the Soviet context, Stalin was almost certainly to the right of his political rivals, most notably Trotsky. In terms of his psychological makeup as well, Stalin appears to have had much in common with right-wing extremists (see, e.g., Birt, 1993; Bullock, 1993; Robins & Post, 1997).  

(Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, Psychological Bulletin, 2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, p. 343)

It is a fact that there were Stalinist supporters among Liberals on the Left and not among Conservatives in the US, and this assigning Stalin to the Conservatives seems self-serving and ideologically dangerous. (There were absolutely anti-Stalinists on the Left. Just as I am opposed to Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, and dislike that they get so much attention. But I can’t deny that they are an example of the sort of error that crops up in religion and religiosity.) Ideological groups need to admit the weaknesses of their ideologies, where they can go astray, be aware of their historical errors, not deny them. It feels groupish (on the part of liberal academics) to try to shunt Stalin onto Conservatism. It feels wrong, in part because of my sense that this casting of the Conservative personality as weak, less evolved and immoral is going to lead to unintentional consequences. It also feels wrong because my experience has been just the opposite: that conservatives and liberals, while they have their cultural differences, are, as people, entirely the same in any meaningful way. And, frankly, it just doesn’t seem Fair or Just.

David Berreby’s Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (2005 version) has articulated for me why I feel uneasy about it, and why I should feel uneasy about it. (And also reinforced my previously-existing tendency to use italicized words for emphasis nearly constantly.) I read it because Jonathan Haidt mentioned in his blog entry Advice for Democrats and Republicans (in a note at the end of the entry) that he “got the idea that it can be healthy to have multiple competing divisions and identities from an excellent book on our tribal psychology: Us and Them, by David Berreby.”

Interestingly, what I took away from Berreby’s book was that the human tendency to separate one another into “human kinds” was universal and, when stigma is attached to it, extremely hazardous for the stigmatized group and for human peace as a whole.

“And the rest is so-called junk DNA (a label that may fade as biologists establish how important that ‘junk’ is).” David Berreby, p. 292, Us and Them.

I put the quote here not because it is all that pertinent. It isn’t really, but to try to illustrate just how cool David Berreby is. See the October 2012 issue of Scientific American “What was once known as junk DNA turns out to hold hidden treasures, says computational biologist Ewan Birney.” Cool.

Berreby’s above comment, prescient though may be, is pretty much just an aside in a book almost more full of meaningful asides than totally-made-a-point conclusions. One of my first notes to myself on this book was “dense and meandering.” That combination of meandering density slowed my usual break-neck reading speed to a crawl, and forced me to absorb his various ideas slowly and carefully. I was also slowed to a complete halt when I realized that part of his meanderings include the assertion that science is not (nor should it be, in fact cannot be considered to be) about seeking or expecting to find Truth. Sigh. Talk about taking the fun out of science (at least for me). He includes some interesting anecdotes about scientific paradigms that seemed to be working, seemed to be usefully predicting phenomena, that later turned out to be sort of phantasms. One example he gives is the theory of disease being caused by ‘miasmas.’

I actually found his hypothesis on science and truth dispiriting enough to set the book aside, at ~90% read, for ten days. It also didn’t help that he described “hobbyists and cranks” attending an HBES conference, which, though I have not attended, is the group I would essentially qualify for if I did, and that description felt even more dispiriting. But, eventually, my spirits rallied, my intense need for cognition (however cranky and hobbyish) reasserted itself, and I decided that even if truth is substantially transitory or even ethereal in the world of science, and a sense of the Truth of science can lead to hubristic clinging to what will later be determined to be entirely false constructs, nonetheless, science still seems to offer the best hope of thinking about the reality we all share in a mutually meaningful way actually worth sharing. I have also decided that this insight could be seen as a source of mild encouragement, that despite working against several high scientific tides, my sense that they have some of their essentials absolutely wrong may be absolutely, though only provisionally, right. Huzzah!

The problem Berreby highlights is the ease with which human beings array themselves and others into differing “human kinds” and that, essentially, wherever science has looked for human kinds, it has found them. 

One of the problems I have seen in the social science explication of Conservatives and Liberals is the use of self-report forms that do not prove the point they are taken to prove. It is my sense they feel valid and reliable to the scientists because the results satisfy their own felt sense of the world. They believe their results because they know what they are discovering is true. For instance, scores on the scale for the Openness to Experience personality dimension of the Big Five Personality framework is considered to be a meaningful measure of conservatism and liberalism. Here is Chris Mooney’s description of the Openness to Experience scale, which he has shortened to Openness.

“In the study, Openness predicted not only social liberalism but also economic liberalism, and did so strongly in both cases. The same went for Conscientiousness—it predicted both types of conservatism, albeit not quite as strongly. The authors therefore concluded by suggesting that what they called “ideological constraint”—the strange but regular observation that liberals and conservatives hold matching views across social and economic realms—could be rooted in personality, and thus psychology.” Mooney, The Republican Brain, p. 96

I can actually accept that the measure might identify that at a statistical level. Statistically, self-identified Liberals might score higher on the Openness scale. But then Mooney takes it further:

“Openness will lead you to support new and difficult policies, and innovations (change), in both economic and social domains. In both realms, it will also make you more able to understand and sympathize with the views of those different from yourself (equality)—whether they’re poorer than you, or of a different race, gender or sexual persuasion. Closedness will lead to the opposite.” Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain, p. 96.

I have already taken a stab at why I disagree with those broad conclusions here, where I suggest changing the “Openness to Experience” scale to the “Liberalism” scale. (Others, actually in the field, have apparently suggested the “Intellectualism” scale.) Or perhaps it should be called the “W.E.I.R.D.ness scale.”

But it isn’t just Mooney. Here is Scott McGreal on The Politics of Dreaming. He lays out the case in his opening paragraph.

Those who identify as politically liberal tend to recall their dreams more frequently than those who identify as conservative. Additionally, conservatives tend to report more mundane dream content, whereas liberals have more bizarre dreams. Better dream recall is associated with higher openness to experience, and liberals tend to be higher in openness to experience than conservatives. The difference in dream recall may be due to differences in openness between liberals and conservatives. These findings seem to suggest that liberals may differ from conservatives not only in their social values, but may be more imaginative than conservatives.

Okay, but then he says:

There was very substantial overlap between liberals and conservatives in their dream recall patterns though, indicating that this was not a large difference.  

So the assertion that Liberals tend to recall their dreams more frequently is really based on “not a large difference.” Later, he mentions:

Although there is considerable overlap, liberals seem to have a richer scope of dream experiences that is more likely to include fantastic elements and be less grounded in mundane reality.

Okay, so he has built on a “not large difference” from “substantial overlap” and added “considerable overlap.” All right. He mentions the dream theory Bulkeley is working with, which I found helpful:

Bulkeley interpreted these findings in line with the “continuity hypothesis” of dreaming. This hypothesis proposes that people tend to dream about whatever is most important and emotionally salient in their lives.

Okay. So, mundane things are proposed to be “most important and emotionally salient” in the lives of self-identified Conservatives. I’m quoting at length, emphases mine:

A study on dream recall and big five personality traits found that higher openness to experience was associated with more dream recall (Watson, 2003). Openness to experience is a personality trait associated with the breadth and richness of a person’s inner life as well as their preference for variety and novelty versus sameness. This study had the advantage of using a daily diary method of assessing dream recall rather than asking a general question about dream recall as in the studies by Bulkeley. Political liberalism is moderately associated with openness to experience, so the greater dream recall of liberals may be due to their greater openness to experience. This would also fit in with the continuity hypothesis. People high on openness to experience tend to have a greater variety of inner experiences in waking life than more closed individuals, and their dreams therefore follow a similar pattern.

Openness is usually considered in terms of a number of component facets, including openness to ideas, values, feelings, aesthetics, actions, and fantasy. The facet most relevant to political orientation, and on which liberals and conservatives differ most strongly, is openness to values, which explicitly relates to a person’s attitudes to authority and tradition. Conservatism is associated with a preference for the familiar, and conservatives tend to value conformity and traditionalism.Liberalism is associated with greater comfort with change and innovation, and liberals are more likely to question authority and the value of tradition.

“Liberalism is associated with greater comfort with change and innovation,” and “Openness” is all about liberal values of being open to ideas, values, feelings, aesthetics, actions and fantasy. Nonetheless, despite being almost entirely an elucidation of liberal values, “liberalism is moderately associated with openness to experience.” (Remember that Mooney said Liberals and Openness were “strongly” associated. But that is not what McGreal says here.) McGreal continues:

The findings about the differences in dream content suggest that not only are liberals more open to values but they are more open to fantasy as well. Although measures of the fantasy facet have no apparent ideological content, studies have found that other openness facets including fantasy, are positively associated with liberalism (McCrae & Sutin, 2009). This suggests that liberals not only differ from conservatives in their social attitudes but they tend to have richer inner experiences generally. This might make it easier for them to envision a new and better kind of society they would like to strive for.  

It is important, to me, to note that all these self-described libs and cons in the dream study were not, as far as I could tell from McGreal, given the Big Five Personality instrument. We don’t know, actually, how they would shake out. We know that “liberalism is moderately associated with openness to experience” {moderately} “so the greater dream recall” {which has a large overlap, not a large difference} “may be due to their [Liberals’] greater openness to experience.” Moderate association to a not large difference to a moderate association. Tautological nightmare.

And let’s be clear. The Big Five Personality instrument does not actually measure a person’s openness to other values; it is a self-report instrument. What it will end up capturing is whether or not someone values being open to other values, but not whether or not they are actually successful at doing so.

And all of that is supposed to suggest that liberals have richer inner experiences and are more open to fantasy. Unless that inner experience is a spiritual one. If one believes, as statistically more liberals than conservatives do, that religion and religiosity are based upon fantasy, then we would have a conundrum. It’s silly. It’s all statistical logic-hopping, basic nominal-error essentialism. 

In his book, The Republican Brain, Mooney writes:

“You may have noticed from the percentages presented above that while personality traits strongly predict political outlooks, there’s still plenty of statistical wiggle room. The data leave more than enough space for there to be plenty of open conservatives and closed liberals—it’s just that they’ll be a minority overall.” P. 67

Still, despite such a statement (that I suspect many if not all of the scientists Mooney cites would support), treating people statistically and probabilistically can be devastatingly dehumanizing. I have been in the trenches. The Evangelical Christians I have been embedded with for the last year have been no more dogmatic or authoritarian than the Liberal religious I have previously been embedded with. Mooney might say I am denying reality, but I am simply reporting my experience. {I don’t tend to use reference to my life among Conservative Friends as much as my experiences as an observer among Evangelical and Liberal Friends because Conservative Friends are a minute and peculiar perspective in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) statistically equal to nil, being even more minute and inconsequential nationally. Our perspective is just not a part of the conversation.)

The problem is that when we start looking for human kinds, we find them, and once we find them, we start to assess ourselves in relation to them, and we inevitably find ourselves to be the superior group.

“The more aspects of life that Americans can describe in terms of blue states and red states, the more those categories will be meaningful human kinds.” Berreby, Us and Them, P. 74

As Dan Kahan has pointed out in his studies of the science of science communication, the vast majority of scientific findings are not in contention. Similarly, I assert, red state and blue state people are, in essentials, much more similar than they are different, but by highlighting and (I believe) somewhat amplifying the differences, we have created new human kinds, which may have consequences we have not have intended. 

Consider this excerpt from Dodd et al’s “The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences” from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B, Biological Sciences.”

After all, it is far easier to tolerate differences if they are acknowledged to be in part biologically based (consider the debate over homosexuality where those acknowledging a biological source are typically more tolerant than those maintaining sexual preference is entirely environmentally determined). Rather than believing those with political views opposing ours are lazily uninformed or willfully obtuse, political tolerance could be enhanced and cultural conflict diminished if it is widely recognized that at least part of our political differences spring from physiological and cognitive variations that lead people to experience the world in fundamentally different ways and therefore to believe that distinct political policies are appropriate.

It is a terrible misapprehension to believe that describing biological differences between two human kinds in conflict will persuade the two sides that all is well. But this is the popular line. “Psychological insights might tone down the bitter feuding between Democrats and Republicans,” offers Emily Laber-Warren for an article in the Scientific American called “Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives: Psychological insights might tone down the bitter feuding between Democrats and Republicans” that highlighted a number of studies showing various differences between those who are more conservative and those who are more liberal, but opened with Dodd et al’s study. It is nice to imagine that science will fix this mess we are in, but I am convinced, rather than fixing it, it is making it worse.

Dodd et al’s analogy for why understanding these differences will lead to improved relations is extremely problematic, as the biological basis of homosexuality, in my experience, is only convincing to those who are already fine with homosexuality. In fact, claiming biological difference has regularly been part of larger dehumanizing processes that leads one side (or both sides) to conclude that there is innate superiority in one form of biological difference over the other. It increases conflict and antagonism. It does not decrease it. 

Proving my point, I turn now to the “Notes & Theories: Dispatches from the Science Desk” blog at The Guardian online. On 01/31/2012, Carol Jahme wrote an blog entry outlining the Dodd study extracted above, in a blog entry entitled: “Socialists and conservatives may be born not made.” With the subtitle: “What hope is there of rational debate if our political affiliations are biologically determined?”

In conclusion, Jahme offers:

The research team hope that a greater social tolerance will emerge from public acceptance that our political outlook is in part biologically determined. Because if our individual cognitive and physiological systems mean we experience the world in fundamentally different ways, this helps to explain why people support different political parties when facing the same social problems.

But this research also suggests that when David Cameron and his ministers sit in the House of Commons and look over at the faces of the opposition they are more likely to experience a sense of threat and disgust than their political rivals do when looking back at them. It is going to be far harder for conservatives to bury the hatchet and cooperate for the good of the country than it is for the exasperated socialists on the other side of the chamber.

What these sorts of studies should come with is a warning label: this is what we found, even though we know it will increase division and may cause epidemic outbreaks of schadenfreude.

What highlighting innate difference will do is drive us further apart into separate camps seeking to indulge the very real human need to feel their group is the better, more right, more true, superior good guys. Conservatives will not do this more than liberals. Each will just do it differently, and one way liberals are doing it today is through the social science research into the different human kinds they call Conservatives and Liberals.

The science (Tafjel and his Social Identity Theory, Sherif’s Inter-group Conflict and Cooperation: The Robber’s Cave Experiment, Kurzban et al’s Can Race Be Eraced: Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization.) shows that this explicating of group differences is not the way to reduce partisanship and rancor; it is, instead, precisely the way to increase it.

Mooney dismisses these sorts of concerns. “This may sound a little Kumbaya—but I am serious in my view that our politics would be vastly more healthy if we acknowledged our strengths and weaknesses, and showed one another some deference in our respective areas of strength.”The Republican Brain, P. 268

“The point is that conservatism and liberalism alike represents core parts of human nature, and each has many virtues and benefits. That’s why the notion that studying the psychology, neuroscience, or even the genetics of left-right differences will lead to a ‘new eugenics’ is so silly and misinformed. Why would you want to try to breed away character traits that are so vital and beneficial, and such a central part of who we are?” Mooney,The Republican Brain, p. 269

Because wherever we see a human kind, we see either an Us, an Other or a Them, where Us is good and Them is bad. Here I part from Berreby and the science I have read. I think it is important to understand that sometimes there are Others, those who are neither Us nor Them, but a relatively neutral or even preferred Other: a recognized human kind not seen as rivals but as allies or potential allies. Liberals have an embrace of the Other, which I will discuss later, but that is distinct from the idea that they may be more open to embracing Them. Them is outside the moral circle of Us: the ones we see as Them are our rivals; they are morally and essentially wrong. Them is not Ethiopians, for a statistical liberal, Them is Conservatives. And Mooney is mistaken to dismiss concerns about a new eugenics, because it appears to me it is already being put forward elsewhere. Take a look at Unfit for the Future: The urgent need for moral enhancement, by Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson, first published in Philosophy Now Issue 91, July/Aug 2012. 

Biomedical means of moral enhancement may turn out to be no more effective than traditional means of moral education or social reform, but they should not be rejected out of hand. Advances are already being made in this area. However, it is too early to predict how, or even if, any moral bioenhancement scheme will be achieved. Our ambition is not to launch a definitive and detailed solution to climate change or other mega-problems. Perhaps there is no realistic solution. Our ambition at this point is simply to put moral enhancement in general, and moral bioenhancement in particular, on the table. Last century we spent vast amounts of resources increasing our ability to cause great harm. It would be sad if, in this century, we reject opportunities to increase our capacity to create benefits, or at least to prevent such harm.

So I have watched with growing dismay the proliferation of invalid but believable theories of innate difference between Conservatives and Liberals. They perfectly, too perfectly, match the liberal moral viewpoint of itself and its innate superiority, and so these results are found to be not only reasonable but, in the end, obvious to people interested in “explaining” the awful recalcitrance and pathological backwardness of conservative moral viewpoints. They look for difference, and the sort of differences they expect, and they find them.

“If I begin with the assumption that blacks and whites are different, and then go looking for measurements that reflect that difference, I will find them. If I being with the assumption that owners of SUVs are different from owners of mini-vans, I will find measurable differences between those two groups too. (In fact, somebody did.) Same with ‘science fiction fans’ and ‘people who don’t like science fiction.’ Human beings have so many points of similarity and of difference that a line can be drawn between any sets of people, at nearly every level of description, from their molecular biology to the political opinions they express.” Berreby, Us and Them, p. 329

COALITIONS HAVE SCALABLE FOCI

When I compare and contrast the Liberal and Evangelical religious groups I have been embedded with, I have seen the Liberals concerned with immigration issues, Darfur, torture, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, torture, workshops on white privilege, and environmental concerns, with several members chose international adoption. In contrast, I have seen the Evangelicals concerned with teaching English to Spanish speakers, running a food pantry, 12-step programs, support for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, missions in New Mexico, Rwanda and Austria (!?!) and a number of members active in foster care and choosing local adoption. It seems to me I have seen a pattern where the liberal groups have had their eyes on the horizon, to broader concerns, while the evangelical groups have kept their eyes closer to home, on their neighbors and neighborhood, to local concerns. Even the missions abroad embed the people in the places of concern, to help as they are able with local issues. Concern for Darfur did not send any of the concerned Liberals I knew to Darfur. They raised money for and sent money to aid organizations.

Now, someone looking for innate difference would see innate difference. I see substantial sameness: a strong desire to help others, a sense of the importance of reaching beyond the boundaries of the church or meetinghouse to make a difference, just with differences in what is evaluated as being important to address. Different cultures. Different values. Not different human kinds, with Liberals more caring and Evangelicals more authoritarian and controlling. Rather, it is my perception that Liberals are more concerned with the downtrodden while Conservatives are more concerned with the broken. That might seem like a subtle distinction. It is, but amplified at the cultural (coalitional) scale, it moves very different mountains.

I am persuaded that we are all, as human beings, coalitional. We are made to adjust allegiances and alliances, and are able to quickly adapt to and then adopt new social and moral perspectives based upon the coalition we are currently identifying with. So those with the liberal moral viewpoint, I propose, have a universalist coalition in mind. Their concern naturally turns to the cares and harms overseas and among strangers: Others. Others are not Them. Others are people who are included in one’s moral circle whom one does not actually know or have any contact with. Their mores, morays and morals are a matter of conjecture, substantially assumed to be in accordance with one’s own, and that they can in some ways be considered more worthy of concern than Us. They are considered victims, facing unfair difficulties in life not of their own doing. 

“Now consider this scenario: The trolley has gotten rolling again, but the individual set to die (by being pushed) is named Tyrone Payton, and the group set to be saved is 100 members of the New York Philharmonic. Or consider this alternative: The person to be pushed is Chip Ellsworth III, and the group saves is 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra. 

When the trolley dilemma was presented in these two implicitly racialized versions to a group of college students by University of California-Irvine psychologist Peter Ditto and his colleagues, Liberals were more willing to sacrifice an (apparently) white guy to save 100 black people than to sacrifice an (apparently) black guy to save 100 white people. That’s even though they’d previously told interviewers that race should not be a factor in deciding whether it would be permissible to harm one individual to promote the welfare of many. Liberals were flat out  more biased, and more intellectually inconsistent, in this version of the trolley dilemma. Their motivated reasoning was worse than that of conservatives, at least when you set the problem up in this way.” Mooney, The Republican Brain, P. 78

One preferred Other is worth more than 100 of Us. (As a corollary, they found that Conservatives were more willing to sacrifice 100 Iraqi civilians for one American soldier.)

But for some reason, when one has one’s level of concern at that (I’ll call it) universalist level, one is less liable to bring to bear as much concern for closer difficulties. Local food pantry versus aid for Darfur. Climate change rather than 12-step programs.

And beyond being coalitional, I believe our Us and Them is scalable, can have a differing focus. We can be concerned about our family, city, state, nation, other nations, all of humanity. But we will tend to give a few primacy unless and until some event awakens our concern. Both Mooney and Haidt shared stories of adjusted moral coalitional thinking immediately after the 9/11 attacks. 

“This phenomenon [that ‘fear makes liberals more conservative, and even authoritarian’] accounts nicely for the ‘liberal hawks,’ like Christopher Hitchens, who wanted to attack Iraq in the early 2000s. It also explains why some of these hawks later recoiled in horror at what they had done. (I should know: I was a liberal hawk who awoke from the trance, and even felt a need to do intellectual penance for it afterwards.)” Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain, p. 107

In his book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt mentions that after 9/11 he felt the irresistible urge to place an American flag sticker on his car. He assuaged his sense of violating the standards of his liberal coalition by placing a UN flag on the other side. Mooney believes this is explained by an increase in fear, and mentions increased activity in the amygdala. I disagree. I think that 9/11 and the threat it was perceived to be to America and Americans awakened the slumbering nation-scale coalition within them. The moral mapping for this scale of coalition is there, available as necessary, just unused until it is perceived as necessary. Mooney gets “hawkish.” Haidt feels a need to show more muscular bonding with his country. It fades as the sense of threat passes not because of reduced fear but because of a sense of reduced threat: that level of coalition is fine. America will be fine. Time to move on to the real issues and problems, like climate change.

It is not that liberals and conservatives have different moral foundations. It is that they are living the differing moral maps required for the coalitions they identify with, strongly highlighted in their differing conception of the importance of their coalitions as different levels of the scale. Everyone will “turn into” what we call a conservative when a certain level of the scale of coalition is evoked. And also when placed under a cognitive load, we may change our evaluation of the situation, seeking preservation of moral (which are mental) resources for the coalition most important to our continuing survival. If conservatives are more concerned with the mundane, statistically, it is not something liberals are incapable of becoming concerned with: it is a matter of deciding, via culture and values, where to place one’s cares and concerns, one’s personal material and mental resources. It is not about innate difference, but different experiences, cultures, lifestyles, hopes, dreams and that ineluctable thing sometimes called Fate.

Climate change, by its nature, is a scale of concern at the international level and not easily made relevant to conservatives and the scales of their concerns. But the sense that they must change their scale, and become concerned about the same things as liberals, is wrong on a number of counts, including we actually do want these people taking care of what they care about, and concerning themselves with the things that concern them.

I am generalizing, and everyone will have available coalitions at all levels of focus. Evangelicals can go into missions. Liberals can volunteer at food pantries. There is undoubtedly much statistical overlap. But where their group places their focus, what concerns they feel are important and which are not, will focus the individual’s concern as well. What to value, what to put effort toward, what is worth fighting for. But of course, even this sort of proposed analysis is susceptible to the argument that the liberal international focus is the morally superior level of the scale, but what is actually more true is that societies need coalitions with concerns at all levels of the scale. Some will concern themselves with their family, their neighborhood, their city, their state. No one can really attend to all these levels of coalition. Choosing a focus means a person will necessarily neglect other levels of the scale, to some degree or other. The parent who is more attentive to their work coalitions than family concerns. The governor who concerns himself with the needs of his state over national or international concerns. The liberal who disdains local ways of being coalitional and avoids overt and muscular group bonding experiences like sports, religious rituals, and even flag flying.

“Morality is for us ‘good people,’ however we define ‘good,’ and anyone who seems good must be at least a possible member of our kind. Which has been lucky for the human race; we can accept strangers with strange ways if they seem morally sound. Yet the logic also works in the other direction: out there, we feel, are people we cannot ever welcome. It’s not their accents or their taste in music; it’s our sense that their morals aren’t acceptable.” Berreby, Us and Them, p. 188

And any difference, even just concern at the “wrong” level of coalition will bring groupish condemnation. Liberals are unpatriotic. Conservatives are selfish. Us and Them. Right and Wrong.

MORAL FOUNDATION THEORY’S CARE/HARM FOUNDATION

So, I propose, local-focus coalitions engage more easily in rituals and rites meant to improve bonds among members (that may also be shared nationally or internationally). Other-focus coalitions don’t have as much of a sense that focusing on the local group is important, and so rather than using muscular bonding practices, they prefer information-sharing and well-explicated reasoning to bind members.

Under Moral Foundation Theory, liberals engage more energetically the Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, and Liberty/Oppression foundations, while not much engaging the “binding” moral foundations of Sanctity/Purity, Authority/Disrespect, and Loyalty/Disloyalty. Haidt argues that, primarily, when constructing their moral viewpoint, Liberals are most concerned about Caring. To be fair, Haidt et al contend that Liberals and Conservatives are equally concerned about Care/Harm, but that since Liberals don’t have these other moral foundations, they paint every moral dilemma with, predominantly, that paint brush.

One problem with this conception for me is that when I present it to Liberal groups, I don’t get an, “Oh, Conservatives do Care.” I get, “See, Conservatives don’t really Care.”

Because the essential problem is that morality is all about deciding what to care about and what not to care about. Liberals are more concerned about caring about Others, anyone who is outside of the standard local-focus coalitions. Local-focus coalitions care first for their members, a no-no for Liberals, and about protecting and preserving the coalition. It seems to me that Moral Foundation theory defines the Care/Harm foundation in a way that privileges Other care terms, while reserving local care terms (family, nation) for Loyalty. In fact the dictionary (it is designed to work with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program, but I use it to try to get a look under the hood of the theory) I looked at replaced the Loyalty label with In-group, a definition (with its weight on family and patriotism) that would offer statistical support for the sense that Liberals don’t have an Us and Them, though that is not remotely accurate.

Care Foundation

(HarmVirtue) safe, peace*, compassion*, empath*, sympath*, care, caring, protect*, shield, shelter, amity, secur*, benefit*, defen*, guard*, preserve

(HarmVice) harm*, suffer*, war, wars, warl*, warring, fight*, violen*, hurt*, kill, kills, killer*, killed, killing, endanger*, cruel*, brutal*, abuse* damag* ruin*, ravage, detriment*, crush*, attack*, annihilate*, destroy, stomp, abandon*, spurn, impaur, exploit, exploits, exploited, exploiting, wound*

Loyalty Foundation

(IngroupVirtue) together, nation*, homeland*, family, families, familial, group, loyal*, patriot*, communal, commune*, communit*, communis*, comrad*, cadre, collectiv*, joint, unison, unite*, fellow*, guild, solidarity, devot*, member, cliqu*, cohort, ally, insider

(IngroupVice) foreign*, enem*, betray*, treason*, traitor*, treacher*, disloyal*, individual*, apostasy, apostate, deserted, deserter*, deserting, deceiv*, jilt*, imposter, miscreant, spy, sequester, renegade, terroris*, immigra*

Additional words I would like to see in Care/Harm include: aid, assist, repair, console, heal.

Loyalty, or In-group, might better be captured with words like moral (our in-group is always moral, the out-group always immoral), trust, trustworthy, good (our in-group is always good, the out-group always bad). The Moral Foundations Theory dictionary has moral and good under general morality, not available to parse in-group/out-group considerations. Religious disloyalty is captured under the Sanctity foundation (heresy, blasphemy) and a little under the Loyalty foundation (apostate). Disloyalty to country is captured under Loyalty (deserter, traitor). But where is disloyalty to ideology? Where is captured the ideological traitor? On the left, those terms would seems to be things like racist, homophobe, capitalist, sexist, which are not captured in this system. I have talked at length about my problems with this foundation previously.

I think Chris Hedges illustrates my point that liberals have in-group loyalty concerns and boundary-keepers in his bizarrely inaccurate characterization of Haidt’s work in his “book review” and character assassination found here. Wikipedia even dignifies it as a critique of Haidt and Moral Foundation Theory under Haidt’s entry (while making no mention of Churchland and Suhler’s actual critique), but what I really see is the work of someone trying to render Haidt’s work as liberal treason. And part of my support for that thesis is that after reading Hedges’ piece, I’ve had Liberal Friends inform me that they not only don’t need to read Haidt, but in fact refuse to do so. (I heard similar things about Charles Murray.) They considered Hedges’ opinion definitive, and my protestations of the inaccuracy of the piece fell on deaf ears.

I know what thee is thinking: So where might the trolley dilemma fit in here?

It would predict, accurately according to Kurzban et al, that conservatives would be loyal to their nation over another nation, but it neither explains why nor predicts that Liberals would choose to preserve one (presumably) black man over 100 (presumably) white people. That choice is a particular moral choice, as particular as loyalty to family or country. It is a form of chivalry almost, a word which includes “a readiness to help the weak” according to my dictionary. A preference to help the weak over the strong, to aid the underdog. I assert that liberals don’t care more, they just care differently about different things, and they don’t have fewer or no in-group/out-group concerns, they just phrase those concerns very differently.

But the reality is that being concerned about Others is a luxury, a mental, emotional and monetary resource luxury. When our national coalition is under no obvious threat, and in fact when America seems the bully, American nationalism is a repugnant form of coalitionism to the statistical liberal. When liberals call for widening our national coalition of the acceptable members to formerly repugnant outcasts, conservatives become defensive of the national coalition, its definition and form, a coalition they more regularly feel active membership in. Their flag waving appears unpalatable until one’s defensiveness of one’s own country kicks in. Then one waves the flag.

All groups try to force people to join their coalition—whether it is the gay couple trying to use protests to convince a baker he is wrong to not bake a wedding cake for them or the abortion protesters at a clinic. A great deal of the time we can’t actually tell what team one or another particular person is on.

One problem with my traditional manner of dress is that I cannot change my team jersey. That is, perhaps, somewhat by design: I am helped to uphold the standards and rules of my religious coalition above and beyond whatever other coalitions may seek my allegiance and obedience. Plain dress doesn’t scale all that easily: people can feel pretty automatically that I am not part of their coalition, no matter how many other coalitions we may be able to ally via, my overt and particular religiosity makes it harder for me to even appear to slide between coalitions. I believe for many I am a neutral or positive Other: definitely not an Us, but an ally or a potential ally. People can and will believe all sorts of wonderful things about me. Conversely, for others I am clearly and automatically a Them. It is also strongly symbolic: I can be a symbol of a pacific and irenic view of Amish life, or I can be a symbol of Christian dogmatism and totalitarian-authoritarian lifestyles. And as a symbol, I am considerably more vulnerable than when seen as a person. According to Berreby, when we turn people into symbols, we find it easier to treat them inhumanely. 

GROUPISHNESS

I haven’t had a great deal of luck finding an official definition of groupishness. It seems to be a “we know it when we see it” sort of thing, and what we see most easily is how other groups are ridiculously groupish and how ridiculous the rules and social constraints of other coalitions are and how our own coalition only has rules and social constraints that make sense. Groupishness is about excluding the wrong people from the coalition, and in fact punishing them if necessary, to keep them at bay, to drive them away or force them to change to acceptable parameters. It is also about policing the interior boundaries, determining what constitutes proper sociality for members and what is improper, and punishing this disloyal behavior. The groupishness of other groups will be denigrated and condemned.

I do wonder if what Liberals condemn broadly as groupishness, and which Haidt feels free to characterize as Conservatives being “more groupish” is just a group that engages in more “muscular” bonding. Because of their concern for Others, Liberals sometimes exonerate themselves of the sin of Usness. Groupishness. But while they have values of being open to all sorts of things, they have a defined Them in Conservatives, a definition social scientists continue to refine, make more salient, and build into a concretely separate human kind: more fearful, authoritarian, less caring about the disadvantaged (preferred Others). Sigh. They describe as character flaws what are actually cultural (coalitional) differences.

I am convinced that we all share the same “moral structures” and that we employ them in socially-constructed ways that differ depending on what coalition we are engaged with, what group we are identifying with, where on the scale from individual to all of humanity our group identity is embedded in. At any particular moment, we are capable of shifting our moral matrix to adjust for the coalition we are working within, and making our moral judgments and behaviors fit (as well as we are able) the sociality that coalition requires of us. We all have the same moral operating system. We simply run different programs within that system, taking advantage of different subroutines in different ways, but in no way actually running on different operating systems, either within ourselves or one from another.

“Now, suppose I want you to dislike Lerians and never get close enough to a Lerian to see him as part of any of your human kinds. One of my best strategies would be to convince you that Lerians are morally wrong.

“This turns out to not be difficult. We’re prepared to connect moral values with our way of eating or talking or worshipping already, because that is how in the first place we learned morality—the rules our parents gave us for what we do. And no moral system makes sense without judgments that some people, by their actions, aren’t acceptable.” Berreby, Us and Them, p 191-192

I think what Haidt is inadvertently doing with his Moral Foundation Theory is confirming people’s sense that the other side flat out is morally wrong.

 “Getting you to feel that my cause is morally right, then, is a matter of getting you to feel that you belong to the same kind as the people (or animals, or grasslands, or sculptures) that I want to help. Not because you’re similar on the surface (though similarity helps) but because, underneath appearances, you and those others are all a part of the community of the ethical.

 “We are all children of one God, I might say. We are all parents, I might say, from Beijing to Boston, wanting the best for our children. We are all united in our great cause, I could say. All these forms of rhetoric invite you to imagine strangers as if they were the same moral kind of person you are. These are the words that tell you those other people are held, as you are, within an entity: a thing with those Campbellian traits that tickle the groupish half of the human-kind faculty. If we are all children of god, then we share proximity to one another and a common fate. If we are all parents, we share both common fate and similarity. And if we are united in a cause, we have a common fate, internal communication, and a boundary defining who we are against those who are not with us. Never mind that you’ve never met your fellow members in Cambodia. They’re with you.” Berreby, Us and Them, P. 197-198

Liberals and Conservatives as biologically-based entities ignores that, as David Berreby says, “Each of us places himself in whatever human kind feels relevant to the needs of the moment.” (P. 212) The complication comes in when a group becomes stigmatized.

“You and your friends and even your enemies can be many kinds of person in the course of a day. In contrast, stigmatized people, when the rhetoric works, are always and only one kind of person—the bad kind.” Berreby, Us and Them, p. 231-232.

They need to understand that different life conditions can create different concerns. A shared sense of concerns may result in coalitioning and in the setting of certain values in certain ways, in responding to moral issues with certain responses, whole moral viewpoints will arise, whole cultural cognitions of risk. But those concerns can change when life conditions change, and that is what is innate.

“A while back I mentioned a distinct, physically real human kind: people who according to medicine a century ago, had abnormally large thymus glands. [And so they irradiated them to shrink them.] As we saw, they turned out to have normal innards. The doctors were misled because their examples of the human body came almost exclusively from the ranks of stigmatized people. And stigmatized people, because they are stigmatized, have smaller immune-system glands and larger stress-related glands. By the time better categories came along, thousands of unnecessary cases of thyroid cancer had been created by useless radiation treatments based on the older beliefs.

“The nature of human kinds is all there, in that story. The way these categories change over time, even though we feel they are eternal. The way they have real consequences, even if we later learn they were not a good match with reality. The way they cause physical [p. 331] changes in people, like those shrunken glands. That leads us to put cart before horse, and imagine the physical change caused the category, instead of the other way around. And, finally, the way mistaken, unjust, senseless, and cruel human-kind judgments will be included in textbooks and lectures and endorsed by smart, confident, educated people.” Berreby, Us and Them, pp. 330-331.

Berreby outlines (on p. 324) some interesting questions he thinks science should tackle. Why is it that humans have the capacity (the internal codes) to:

1. “get in sync with other people” (“’in the same boat’ capacity”)
2. “Believe that other people are part of Us even if we have never met them (essentialism)”
3. “Organize ourselves around any reliable distinctive sign”
4. “Tendency to think people’s behavior stems from what we perceive them to be, not what they perceive to be happening (attribution error)”
5. “See other people as not-human”

Berreby offers, “In our day-to-day talk we sound as if all these codes are the same, but they aren’t.” In the West, we over-emphasize the individual, as if social context makes no difference, but it makes all the differences in the world.

“I think these four issues—how does the ever-changing mind relate to unchanging institutions? How can people be seen as only tokens of their human kinds? How many different, separate processes make up kind sight? And how should we understand human kinds as causes and explanations?—will turn out to be the crucial ones for research on problems of war and peace, tolerance and prejudice.

Berreby, Us and Them, p. 325