On balance, Republicans, and Democrats
- Friday, September 12 2008 @ 03:56 PM CST
- Contributed by: filbert
- Views: 2,101
Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia:
Now, remember when reading this that this is a liberal, trying to understand why people vote Republican.
It would seem to me what Prof. Haidt is saying is that strongly conservative people actually consider more aspects of a political decision than do strongly liberal people, who focus primarily on issues of harm and of fairness. This has the ring of truth to me.
In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.Emphasis mine.
Now, remember when reading this that this is a liberal, trying to understand why people vote Republican.
It would seem to me what Prof. Haidt is saying is that strongly conservative people actually consider more aspects of a political decision than do strongly liberal people, who focus primarily on issues of harm and of fairness. This has the ring of truth to me.