[ExI] Be nice to leftists

Sat May 24 15:05:08 UTC 2014

Professor Haidt has made it to this list a number of times in the past.

A look at libertarian morality

   - [image: Print]<http://www.scienceonreligion.org/index.php/news-research/research-updates/555-a-look-at-libertarian-morality?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=>
   - [image: Email]<http://www.scienceonreligion.org/index.php/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&template=ja_purity_ii_sor&link=8b104ac2d32a9b1dfa5b2eaeac0d2e5029a8eb76>

Published on 29 June 2013  Written by Connor Wood Hits: 105

[image: Libertarian Porupine]You know your libertarian friend? The one who
votes Republican but scoffs at “family values,” who posts Ron Paul quotes
on Facebook and thinks taxes are a form of theft? Well, thanks to some new
research, we now know more about him (or her). The results are both
unsurprising and shocking. Obviously, libertarians prize personal liberty
and freedom above just about everything, but they don’t value the tight,
bonded relationships that people throughout history have depended on for
survival. This means that libertarianism isn’t just a political stance –
it’s a new way of looking at human social life.

University of Southern California psychologist Ravi Iyer teamed up with
University of Virginia colleague Jonathan Haidt (now at NYU) and several
other colleagues to see how libertarians compared with ordinary liberals
and conservatives in a massive online sample. Haidt is well-known for
formulatingmoral foundations theory <http://www.moralfoundations.org/>,
which claims that human morality can be understood as drawing on five basic
instincts: harm avoidance, fairness, respect for authority, ingroup
loyalty, and purity. Previous findings published by Haidt and his doctoral
student Jesse Graham (who also contributed to this research) had shown
that conservatives
tended to emphasize all five of
these<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19379034> foundations
equally, while liberals mostly ignored authority, ingroup loyalty, and
purity, while strongly emphasizing harm avoidance and fairness.

This pattern of moral profiles, which has been replicated across different
cultures and nations, suggests that conservatives actually *feel* moral
emotions differently than liberals, and vice-versa. But, of course, not all
conservatives and liberals are the same. Libertarians are often lumped in
with conservatives in contemporary American politics, but they tend not to
share several of the traits of traditional conservatives – particularly
respect for tradition and authority. Iyer and the other researchers run a
well-known survey website, YourMorals.org,
<http://www.yourmorals.org/index.php>and they
decided to use this online platform to see whether these differences
actually showed up in surveys measuring personality type, moral opinions,
and similar characteristics.

Crunching data from over 150,000 visitors who took online surveys at
YourMorals.org between 2007 and 2011, Iyer and the other researchers found
that libertarians<http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366>
did,
indeed, have a unique personality profile that distinguished them from both
conservatives and liberals. As you might expect, libertarians rated
themselves as economically conservative, but socially liberal. But perhaps
more surprisingly, libertarians showed a moral profile that was distinctly
their own: like liberals, they didn’t place much importance on the moral
dimensions of authority, ingroup loyalty, or purity. But like
conservatives, they didn’t emphasize the “liberal” dimensions of harm
avoidance and fairness, either. This meant that, compared with liberals and
conservatives, they actually seemed to feel fewer moral emotions, period.

                                     [image: Ravi quote]

Or did they? A new, sixth moral dimension, “liberty,” was tested on a small
subset of the site’s total visitors,  and it seemed to garner the lion’s
share of libertarian interest. Compared with both liberals and
conservatives, libertarians more strongly endorsed the moral importance of
both economic and lifestyle liberty. The authors interpreted this result to
mean that libertarians actually felt a weight of *moral* concern when it
came to being left alone to do what they wanted, or to decide how to use
their own economic resources.

No surprise, right? They’re called “libertarians,” after all. But remember:
this emphasis on personal liberty seemed to come at the expense of other
types of moral concern, such as fairness, respect for authority, or concern
about harm to others. Libertarian morality not only showed an empirically
different profile than that of liberals or conservatives, but it emphasized
liberty and individual autonomy to an extraordinary extent.

Another interesting finding had to do with personality. The so-called Big
Five personality
inventory<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits>
breaks
down personality into five distinct tendencies: openness to new experience,
agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism.
Historically, many researchers have used the Big Five to look at the
difference between conservatives and liberals. Generally, the most common
finding is that liberals are much more open to new
experiences<http://blog.steffanantonas.com/the-real-difference-between-liberals-and-conservatives.htm>
than
conservatives, while conservatives tend more toward conscientiousness and,
in some studies, agreeableness. (Some researchers also think that
conservatives may be less neurotic than liberals, and Iyer's findings
mildly support this view.)

[image: Libertarians less connected graph]In this study, Iyer and his
colleagues found that libertarians again had their own unique personality
profile. Like liberals, libertarians were significantly more open to new
experiences than conservatives. And along with conservatives, they reported
less neurosis than librals. But they were significantly *less* agreeable,
conscientious, and extraverted than both conservatives and liberals. This
finding stood up to multiple statistical analyses, leaving the authors to
conclude that libertarians seemed to have a recognizable personality style:
one that was highly open to new experiences and stimulus, emotionally
steady, and not quite as motivated by getting along with others.

Finally, libertarians seemed to enjoy *thinking* more than either liberals
or conservatives. In a test of empathic versus systemizing tendencies,
libertarians were the only group that scored higher in systemizing than in
empathizing. In this context, empathizing refers to interest in other
people, while systemizing refers to fascination with inanimate or abstract
objects. Thus, libertarians showed themselves to be highly stimulated, not
by other people, but by *things* and *ideas. *(See the graph to the right
on libertarians' patterns of social connection.) This finding dovetailed
with libertarians’ results on the Different Types of Love scale, which
showed that libertarians reported feeling less love than liberals or
conservatives toward different groups, including friends, romantic
partners, and humanity in general. Meanwhile, they also reported higher
need for cognition, or motivation to engage in thinking and problem-solving.

Iyer’s findings paint a fascinating, if sometimes challenging, portrait of
libertarians in today’s complex political landscape. Like liberals,
libertarians are hungry for novel experiences and often dismissive of
tradition, authority, and concerns about purity or sacredness. They’re also
not as conscientious, detail-oriented, or agreeable as conservatives, and
they’re much more stimulated by intellectual and abstract challenges (they
performed better or tests of analytic thinking, too). In some ways,
libertarians almost seem *more* liberal than liberals – further away from
the warm confines of tradition, more on the edge of established cultural
boundaries. In the past, human social arrangements were almost always
tight, emotionally weighty, and powered by shared ritual, value, and
religious tradition. If culture is a laboratory, libertarians are cooking
up quite an innovative, and unprecedented, experiment indeed.

James

On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 10:40 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com
> wrote:

> For me, it's about morality, the larger question.
>
> Few books that are called 'seminal' truly are, but this one is:
>
> The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt (social psychologist).  In a sense,
> he takes morality and does a factor analysis of it, coming up with these
> categories:
>
> Care (uncompassion to Ben), Fairness, Loyalty, Sanctity, and Authority.
>
> People on the right use all of these fairly equally, but liberals treat
> Care and Fairness as major factors and the others as rather minor or even
> unimportant (or actually bad, such as the libertarians' attitude towards
> authority).
>
> Easily read by any college grad, this book will expand your understanding
> of morality - guaranteed.  bill w
>
>
> On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 1:22 AM, Ben Goertzel <ben at goertzel.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Rafal,
>>
>> On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 12:48 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki
>> <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Some time ago I posted here about what my understanding of "leftism" -
>> that
>> > it is a current manifestation of the age-old human obsession with
>> status. A
>> > leftist is a status-obsessed (i.e. envious) hypocrite, predictably
>> attracted
>> > to the hierarchies of government bureaucracy, academia and mainstream
>> > journalism.
>>
>> I don't normally read this list but this caught my eye for some reason..
>>
>> I guess I qualify as a "leftist" if I have to be projected onto the
>> left/right axis.  Certainly I'm 100x more leftist than rightist...
>>
>> I hate bureaucracy; I quit academia because I got sick of the
>> bureacracy and the status-seeking BS; and I don't care for mainstream
>> media much either...
>>
>> However, I come from many generations of leftists, even plenty of
>> Marxists among my grandparents etc. (though my parents abandoned any
>> form of strict Marxism in the late 70s on observing the reality of the
>> Soviet Union, they remain fairly leftist...)
>>
>> To me leftism is about compassion and fairness more than anything
>> else.   It's about believing the social contract should, normatively,
>> include a responsibility for society to provide everyone some minimal
>> level of help and opportunity.   It's about feeling it's morally wrong
>> for a small elite, with power and wealth that is mainly inherited, to
>> control nearly everything and take most of the goodies for themselves.
>>
>> Anyway I have a low estimate of the ultimate value to be gotten from
>> in-depth discussion of politics on this list.  I just wanted to
>> briefly speak out against your caricature of leftist politics...
>>
>> If anyone on the list is interested in some thoughtful writing in the
>> leftist direction I'd suggest
>>
>> -- George Lakoff's various writings on the topic, e.g. Moral Politics
>>
>> -- Piketty's recent master work "Capital in the 21st Century" (which
>> is flawed in ignoring exponential technological acceleration, but is
>> an excellent, thoroughly data-driven summary of the economics of the
>> last few hundred years.  Turns out the data is way more supportive of
>> leftist than rightist thinking...)
>>
>> Rafal, it goes w/o saying I have great respect for your scientific
>> work and your general stature as a creative, proactive human being.
>> But I can't agree w/ your view on leftism.  IMO in a world without
>> leftist activiism throughout the 20th century, but with other
>> political factors roughly the same, the Western nations would now be
>> far more extremely owned by small egocentric elites, and science and
>> tech progress would be much less than they have been, as well as total
>> human happiness being much lower.   (Of course, I can also envision
>> other systems of gov't far better than anything current left or right
>> politicos imagine.  But that's a different story.) .... Similarly,
>> going forward toward Singularity, if we subtracted leftist
>> thinking/attitudes and left other sociopolitical factors roughly the
>> same, we'd end up with a pre-Singularity period in which small selfish
>> elites simply owned everything and manipulated the Singularity path
>> for their own personal good.  This would lead to all sorts of dangers
>> and problems beyond the intrinsic moral aspects of uncompassion and
>> unfairness...
>>
>> -- Ben G
>>
>>
>> ;)
>> Ben
>> _______________________________________________
>> extropy-chat mailing list
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140524/e4519c49/attachment.html>