Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia has chosen a rather interesting human behavior to study–morality. I find the evolutionary approach Haidt takes to the question very comfortable. In a nutshell, Haidt sees morality as an evolved cultural phenomenon that allows us to live in large groups.
According to Haidt, morality falls into five categories: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. In an interesting application of his work, Haidt further proposes that American political liberals base their moral reasoning on the first two alone (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity), whereas American conservatives use all five. Consequently, discussions about morality (e.g. who should get married) can become heated indeed.
You can take Haidt’s morality tests here, and compare your results to others who have also taken the test (although this is hardly likely to be a representative sample of humanity). You can also read a draft copy of a paper in press that further explains the conservative/liberal differences proposed by Haidt and his colleague Jesse Graham here.
I still find it nearly impossible (and not particularly productive) to put people into neat little boxes labeled conservative or liberal. I would also like to see Haidt and his colleagues explore each of the five moral domains in greater depth. Based on personal observations, the conservatives and liberals I know all care a lot about fairness, but define what that means very differently. Affirmative action is a just compensation for past discrimination to some, but a very unfair use of reverse discrimination to others.
How did I do on the test? Can you guess?
2 Comments
ka_yu · May 23, 2007 at 6:49 pm
this was interesting i scored similar to what a liberal would get, i was very high in harm (3.0) and fairness (3.25)
loyalty was my least (1.5) and authority (2.5) and purity (2.75) were close
and i think generally liberals due tend to look at harm and fairness more than loyalty, authority, and purity. concervatives are more into keeping traditions, similar to loyalty and their idea of purity, when we were in the “good ol’ days”.
LaurenBabek · May 25, 2007 at 3:37 pm
I scored 3.3 in harm, 4.1 in fairness, 2.0 in loyalty, 3.1 in authority, and 2.0 in purity… so I DEFINITELY scored similar to what a liberal would score, and I agree that I am probably more liberal in my viewpoints than conservative. As the above comment states, I also agree that conservatives stereotypically seem stuck on preserving tradtions whereas liberals tend to be more open to new ideas, so this idea of liberals scoring higher in the harm and fairness categories accurately reflects their stereotype as well, in my opinion.
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