{"id":16998,"date":"2016-06-03T15:51:09","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T19:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16998"},"modified":"2016-06-04T13:31:03","modified_gmt":"2016-06-04T17:31:03","slug":"an-alternative-to-moral-foundations-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16998","title":{"rendered":"an alternative to Moral Foundations Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory<\/a> is one of the most influential current approaches to moral psychology and it exemplifies certain assumptions that are pervasive in psychology more generally. I have been working lately with 18 friends and colleagues to “map” their moral views in a very different way, driven by different assumptions. As part of this small pilot project, I gave the 18 participants Haidt et al’s, Moral Foundations Questionnaire<\/a>. Although\u00a0my sample is\u00a0small and non-representative, I am interested in\u00a0the contrasting\u00a0results that the two methods yield.<\/p>\n

Haidt’s underlying assumptions are that people form judgments about moral issues, but these are often gut\u00a0reactions. The reasons<\/em> that people give for their judgments are post-hoc rationalizations (Haidt 2012, pp. 27-51; Swidler 2001, pp. 147-8; Thiele 2006). \u201cIndividuals are often unable to access the causes of their moral judgments\u201d (Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer, Koleva, & Ditto 2011, p. 368). Hence moral psychologists are most interested in unobserved mental phenomena that can explain our observable statements and actions.<\/p>\n

Haidt et al ask their research subjects multiple-choice questions about moral topics.\u00a0Once they have collected responses from many subjects, they use factor analysis to find latent variables that can explain the variance in the answers. (Latent variables have been \u201cso useful \u2026 that they pervade \u2026 psychology and the social sciences\u201d [Bollen, 2002, p. 606]). The variables that are thereby revealed are treated as real psychological phenomena, even though the research subjects may not be aware of them. Haidt and colleagues consider whether each factor names\u00a0a\u00a0psychological instinct or emotion that 1) would have value for\u00a0evolving\u00a0homo sapiens,<\/em>\u00a0so that our ancestors would have developed an inborn tendency to embrace it, and 2) are found in many cultures around the world. Now bearing names like \u201ccare\u201d and \u201cfairness,\u201d these factors become candidates for moral \u201cfoundations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because Haidt\u2019s method generates a small number of factors, he concludes that people can be classified into large moral groups (such as American liberals and conservatives) whose shared premises determine their opinions about concrete matters like abortion and smoking. \u201cEach matrix provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview\u201d (Haidt 2012, p. 107). In this respect, Haidt\u2019s Moral Foundations theory bears a striking similarity to Rawls\u2019 notion of a \u201ccomprehensive doctrine\u201d that \u201corganizes and characterizes recognized values to that they are compatible with each other and express an intelligible view of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast, I have followed these steps:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I recruited people I knew. These relationships, although various, probably influenced the results. I don’t entirely see that as a limitation.<\/li>\n
  2. I asked each participant\u00a0to answer three open-ended questions: “Please briefly state principles that you aspire to live by.” “Please briefly state truths about life or the world that you believe and that relate to your important choices in life.” “Please briefly state methods that you believe are\u00a0important and valid for making moral or ethical decisions.”<\/li>\n
  3. I interviewed them, one at time.\u00a0I began by showing each respondent her\u00a0own responses to the\u00a0the survey, distributed randomly as\u00a0dots on a plane. I asked them to link ideas that seemed closely related. When they made links, I asked them to explain the connections, which often (not always) took\u00a0the form of reasons<\/em>: “I believe this because of that.” As we talked, I encouraged them to add ideas that had come up during\u00a0their explanations. I also gently asked whether some of their ideas implied others yet unstated; but I encouraged them to resist my\u00a0suggestions, and often they did. The result was a network map for each participant with a mean of\u00a020.7 ideas, almost all of which they had chosen\u00a0to connect together, rather than leaving ideas isolated.<\/li>\n
  4. We jointly moved the nodes of these networks around so that they clustered in meaningful ways. Often the clusters would be about topics\u00a0like intimate relationships, views of social justice, or limitations and constraints.<\/li>\n
  5. I put all their network maps on one plane and encouraged them to link to each others’ ideas if they saw\u00a0connections. That process continues right now, but the total number of links proposed\u00a0by my 18 participants has now reached 1,283.<\/li>\n
  6. I have loosely classified their ideas\u00a0under 30 headings (Autonomy, Authenticity\/ integrity\/purpose, Balance\/tradeoffs, Everyone\u2019s different but everyone contributes, Community, Context, Creativity\/making meaning, Deliberative values, Difficulty of being good, Don\u2019t hurt others, Emotion, Family, Fairness\/equity, Flexibility, God, Intrinsic value of life, Justice, Life is limited, Maturity\/experience, Modesty, No God, Optimism, Peace\/stability, Rationality\/critical thinking, Serve\/help others, Relationships, Skepticism\/human cognitive limitations, Striving, Tradition, Virtues). Note that some of these categories resemble Moral Foundations, but several do not. The ones that don’t tend to be more “meta”–about how<\/em> to form moral opinions.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    My assumptions are that people can say interesting and meaningful things in response to open-ended questions about\u00a0moral philosophy; that much is lost if you try to categorize these ideas\u00a0too quickly, because the subtleties matter; and that a person not only has separate beliefs but also explicit reasons<\/em> that connect these beliefs into larger structures.<\/p>\n

    Since I also gave participants\u00a0the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, I am able to say some things about the group from that perspective.\u00a0This graph shows the group means and the range for their scores on the five Moral Foundations scales. For comparison, the\u00a0average responses of\u00a0politically moderate Americans are 20.2, 20.5, 16.0, 16.5, and 12.6. That means that my\u00a0group is more concerned about\u00a0harm\/care and fairness\/reciprocity than most Americans, and not far from\u00a0average on other Foundations. But there is also a lot of\u00a0diversity within the group.\u00a0Two of my respondents scored 5 out of 35 on the purity scale, and two scored 20 or higher. The range was likewise from 6 to 28 on the\u00a0in-group\/loyalty scale.<\/p>\n

    \"MoralFoundations\"<\/p>\n

    You might think that this diversity would somehow be reflected in the respondents’ maps of their own explicit moral ideas and connections. But I see no particular relationships. For instance, one of the people who\u00a0rated purity considerations as important–a self-described liberal Catholic–produced a map that clustered around virtues of moral curiosity and openness, friendship and love, and a central cluster about justice in\u00a0institutions. She volunteered no thoughts about purity at all.<\/p>\n

    This respondent scored 20 on the purity scale. A different person (self described as an atheist liberal) scored 9\u00a0on that scale. But they chose to connect their respective networks through shared ideas about humility, deliberation, and justice.<\/p>\n

    The whole group did not divide\u00a0into clusters with distinct worldviews but overlapped a great deal. To preserve privacy, I show an intentionally tiny picture of the current group’s map that reveals its general shape. There are no signs of separate blocs, even though respondents did vary a lot on some of the “Foundations” scales.<\/p>\n

    \"moralmap\"<\/p>\n

    A single-word node that appears in\u00a0five different people’s\u00a0networks is “humility.” It also ranks fourth out 375\u00a0ideas in closeness and betweenness centrality (two different measures of importance in a network).\u00a0It is an example of a unifying idea for this group.<\/p>\n

    Many of the ideas that people\u00a0proposed have to do with deliberative\u00a0values: interacting with other people, learning from them, forming relationships, and trying to improve yourself in relation to\u00a0others. Those are not really options on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. They are\u00a0important virtues if we hold\u00a0explicit moral ideas and reasons and can improve them. They are not important virtues, however, if we are driven by unrecognized\u00a0latent factors.<\/p>\n

    One way to compare the two methods would be to ask which one is better able to predict human behavior. That is an\u00a0empirical question, but a complex one because many different kinds of behavior might be treated as outcomes. In any case, it’s not the only way to compare the two methods. They also have different\u00a0purposes<\/em>. Moral Foundations is descriptive and perhaps diagnostic–helping us to understand why we disagree. The method that I am developing is more therapeutic,\u00a0in the original sense<\/a>:\u00a0designed to help\u00a0us\u00a0to reflect on our\u00a0own ideas with other people we know, so that we\u00a0can improve.<\/p>\n

    [References:\u00a0Bollen, Kenneth A. 2002. Latent Variables in Psychology and the Social Sciences. Annual Review of Psychology<\/em>, vol. 53, 605-634;\u00a0Graham, Jesse, Nosek, Brian A., Haidt, Jonathan, Iyer, Ravi, Koleva. Spassena, & Ditto, Peter H. 2011. Mapping the Moral Domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology<\/em>, 101:2;\u00a0Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. <\/strong><\/em>New York: Vintage;\u00a0Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters<\/em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press;\u00a0Thiele, Leslie Paul. 2006. The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative<\/em> Cambridge University Press.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory is one of the most influential current approaches to moral psychology and it exemplifies certain assumptions that are pervasive in psychology more generally. I have been working lately with 18 friends and colleagues to “map” their moral views in a very different way, driven by different assumptions. As part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17015,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-moral-network-mapping","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16998"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17021,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16998\/revisions\/17021"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}