Interesting Nicholas Kristof article on how conservatives and liberals don’t just think differently, they feel differently.
Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit?
And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom?
Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.
Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.
Interesting.
For the record, yes and no.
The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality. If you damage your prefrontal cortex, your I.Q. may be unaffected, but you’ll have trouble harrumphing.
One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.
The article also points to YourMorals.org, which has some of the study tests on it to explore one’s basis for morality.
I did “Moral Foundations” test, one of the ones discussed in the article, and found, that, yes, there did seem to be some correlations of the sort described. I scored right alongside Liberals on the Harm and Fairness scales, and was closer to them on Purity than Conservatives. On the other hand, I ranked closer to Conservatives on the Loyalty and Authority rankings (though lower than on the Harm and Fairness scales). Hmmm.
Interesting stuff. I’ll have to do some more of those tests at some point.
No and no. But judging from the results on YourMorals.org, I’m some kind of freak. I think it must be a result of all the academic thinking about morality and ethics that I do as a philosopher. It might explain some of the difficulties I have in my classes when students complain that some of what I chose to do is unfair. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then a lot of knowledge must be really risky!
Interesting tests.