I consider myself a moderate liberal; so moderate I've considered registering as Independent (or, in rare moments - generally after a particularly embarrassing PETA ad - Republican). I admire the job that smaller nanny states like Sweden and Denmark do in providing ample service returns on taxpayer money, but I have a harder time keeping faith in big government where our sprawling economy is concerned. I spend disconcerting chunks of time fantasizing about what life would be like if my husband and I got to keep all of our newly minted post-graduate paychecks. If it were merely a matter of value-neutral fiscal conservatism, I'd make a good candidate for the grand old conservative party, but as a quick purview of the nightly news or talk-show circuit reveals, in politics, it's never a matter of value-neutral anything.
Research in the field of political ideology has shown that liberals and conservatives tend to differ in their explanations of social problems. Recent census bureau data reveals that nearly 4 million people joined the ranks of the poor last year. Liberals would likely attribute these numbers to situational factors like the poor economy, seeing the impoverished as victims of unfair circumstances (perhaps even corporate corruption and malfeasance), deserving of public aid. Conservatives would more likely attribute the slide into poverty to character deficits like lack of motivation, or at the very least argue that aid disincentivizes the individual, creating a bevy of unintended consequences and an atmosphere of motivational lack.
The conservative tendency to attribute social ills like poverty, obesity, aids, crime, homelessness, even disaster victimization, to character deficit has been well documented and is known as the ‘ideo-attribution effect.' I can attest from my days of teaching college freshmen that this fundamental cleavage in attributional orientation is one of the most intractable forces in reaching consensus on political and social debates, even with that otherwise malleable age group. In real-world terms, moral values and politics are deeply intertwined, and ideo-attribution plays a huge role in where we allocate our hearts and minds (as well as our dollars and votes). Examining the motivations behind moral reasoning (that of others and ourselves) can help us better understand the political process and hopefully bypass the endless rounds of the reason-starved liberal/conservative impasse that has consumed political life in recent memory.
Until recently, it was widely believed that the ideo-attribution affect (attributing outcomes to character rather than circumstance) was ‘a conservative thing.' Some researchers even dubbed conservative thinking and reasoning styles more cognitively rigid and inflexible. To get a more robust picture of why liberals and conservatives often arrive at different conclusions about social ills and misconduct, researchers Scott Morgan, Elizabeth Mullen and Linda Skitka set out to test whether the ideo-attributional affect could apply to liberals if the context was changed.
The researchers used three different contexts and manipulated them to highlight values with varying degrees of salience to liberals and conservatives to see how they would react. The first scenario asked liberal and conservative participants to evaluate a situation where marines had accidentally killed innocent civilians. As predicted, the marines scenario primed security and patriotism values, leading conservatives to conclude that circumstance (rather than faulty character) accounted for the killing of the civilians. The liberals, generally more concerned with egalitarianism, multiculturalism and humanitarian concerns, were more likely to find fault with the soldiers' character. The second scenario was exactly the same, but replaced marines with Halliburton employees. It was predicted that the Halliburton employees would not prime conservative security and patriotism concerns, and indeed findings revealed that conservatives did not make the same situational attribution for the Halliburton employees. Finally, the researchers tested a domestic scenario in which police officers shot and killed a cougar loose in a neighborhood (as opposed to using a more humane, eco-friendly tranquilizer gun). Here again, the conservatives, more likely to value authority figures and security concerns, did not find fault with the police and blamed situational factors (confusion, danger to residents) for the incidents whereas liberals, more motivated to value environmental concerns, blamed the police officers and discounted situational factors.
The study showed that people of both parties are motivated by salient core concerns and tend to make assessments that are consistent with their values --authority, security, patriotism, self-reliance among others for conservatives, and humanitarianism, environmentalism and tolerance for liberals. We respond to the world with basic moral intuitions and then set about rationalizing our intuitions after the fact. Others do the same - just with different moral intuitions. We shouldn't be so surprised when our well-honed reasoning opposing the death penalty because of the sanctity of human life fails to convince a hard-core right-to-lifer using the same reasoning to oppose abortion.
Another study by Eric Uhlmann, David Pizarro, David Tannenbaum and Peter Ditto broke down this motivated use of moral principles even further, looking at deontological versus consequentialist moral reasoning. Deontological reasoning applies to larger principles (something is inherently right or wrong, such as the murder of innocents) while consequentialist moral reasoning holds that things are right or wrong to the extent that they maximize good outcomes. What if pushing one innocent in front of a trolley would prevent a whole group of people further down the track from being killed? It is a tricky area of moral reasoning that routinely plays out in everyday political scenarios. The most obvious instance is civilian deaths during wartime. Due to salient conservative core values of security and patriotism, ‘collateral damage' tends to be more widely accepted as a necessary evil by conservatives than liberals.
"The Motivated Use of Moral Principles" paper placed a racial twist on traditional trolley morality studies (yes there's a whole subfield of trolleyology in the morality research world) by naming the sacrificial trolley-lamb either Tyrone Peyton (who dies to save the London Philharmonic) or Chip Ellsworth III (who dies to save the Harlem Jazz Orchestra). The authors found that liberals, who generally have a harder time accepting social and racial inequality than conservatives, were less willing to throw the black man in front of the trolley to save several white people, making them more "deontological" moral reasoners in these cases, and more "utilitarian" reasoners in the opposite condition.
In both papers, we see people taking whatever moral reasoning "route" leads to their ideologically-predetermined preferred outcome. This suggests that left or right, liberal or conservative, our values not only dictate what conclusion endpoint we'd like to end up at, but what kinds of mental processes we take in order to end up there. This sounds like the kind of bias we're quick to note in our opponents, but never see in ourselves. Politicians will keep pushing the moral buttons of the party faithful as long as it garners votes (regardless of how legislatable the issues involved may be). Perhaps the evolving social and moral self-knowledge provided by these findings can help us be better ‘consumers' of political ideology and campaigns, and bridge greater understanding between the parties.
