Five Public Opinions

YourMorals.org is a website produced by a group of social psychologists researching the interplay between morality and politics. In their own words:

Our goal was to create a site that would be useful and interesting to users, particularly ethics classes and seminars, and that would also allow us to test a variety of theories about moral psychology. One of our main goals is to foster understanding across the political spectrum. Almost everyone cares about morality, and we want to understand –and to help others understand — the many different ways that people care.

This is a laudable project, although all it tells us essentially is that which we should already know: that conservatives and progressives not only can have different ideas about right and wrong on at least some moral questions, but will also differ on what morality itself is all about. (Progressives emphasise the harm principle; for conservatives, emotion and disgust are also important.) Still, the culture wars can only benefit by the promotion of a more widespread understanding of where the opposition is coming from.

YourMorals.org is not a single test but rather a series of tests, with more tests being added to and subtracted from the list in accordance with the needs of the researchers. You have to register with an email address in order to take the tests, but I think this kind of research is worth supporting.

Also worth a read is an Edge article by one of the researchers, Jonathan Haidt. In “What Makes People Vote Republican?” Haidt argues that Republicans have been successful because they have a better grasp of the “full specrum of American moral concerns,” and if the Democrats wish to replicate that success they should look for ways to appeal to those concerns—ingroup/loyalty, purity/sanctity and authority/respect (the three Durkheimian foundations, as Haidt puts it).

HT: The Barefoot Bum.