The Largest Study Ever of Libertarian Psychology
We’ve been deluged in recent years with research on the psychology (and brain structure) of liberals and conservatives. But very little is known about libertarians — an extremely important group in American politics that is not at home in either political party.
At YourMorals.org we have now addressed the gap. Unlike most surveys, which force everyone to place themselves on a Left-Right scale, we have always allowed our visitors to choose “libertarian” as an option. Given our unique web platform, where people register and then take multiple surveys, we have amassed what we believe is the largest and most detailed dataset in the world on the personality traits of libertarians (as well as of liberals and conservatives).
In a project led by Ravi Iyer, we analyzed data from nearly twelve thousand self-described libertarians, and compared their responses to those of 21,000 conservatives and 97,000 liberals. The paper was just published last week in PLoS ONE. The findings largely confirm what libertarians have long said about themselves, but they also shed light on why some people and not others end up finding libertarian ideas appealing. Here are three of the major findings:
1) On moral values: Libertarians match liberals in placing a relatively low value on the moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity (e.g., they’re not so concerned about sexual issues and flag burning), but they join conservatives in scoring lower than liberals on the care and fairness foundations (where fairness is mostly equality, not proportionality; e.g., they don’t want a welfare state and heavy handed measures to enforce equality). This is why libertarians can’t be placed on the spectrum from left to right: they have a unique pattern that is in no sense just somewhere in the middle. They really do put liberty above all other values.
2) On reasoning and emotions: Libertarians have the most “masculine” style, liberals the most “feminine.” We used Simon Baron-Cohen’s measures of “empathizing” (on which women tend to score higher) and “systemizing”, which refers to “the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.” Men tend to score higher on this variable. Libertarians score the lowest of the three groups on empathizing, and highest of the three groups on systemizing. (Note that we did this and all other analyses for males and females separately.) On this and other measures, libertarians consistently come out as the most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional. On a very crude problem solving measure related to IQ, they score the highest. Libertarians, more than liberals or conservatives, have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology.
3) On relationships: Libertarians are the most individualistic; they report the weakest ties to other people. They score lowest of the three groups on many traits related to sociability, including extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. They have a morality that matches their sociability – one that emphasizes independence, rather than altruism or patriotism.
In other words: Libertarians, liberals, and conservatives all differ from each on dozens of psychological traits, which help to explain why people – even siblings in the same family — gravitate to different ideological positions as they grow up. Understanding these psychological differences will be crucial for politicians and political movements that want to appeal to libertarians, who are often left out as so much attention is lavished on liberals and conservatives.
Here is the article itself.
Here is a press release on it
And here is Ravi Iyer giving a 12 minute presentation summarizing the article:
Read MoreRape doesn’t lead to pregnancy, in the mind of someone seeking “Moral Coherence”
In my earliest research I discovered that people sometimes invented the facts they needed to back up the moral judgments they had just made. When I asked people about whether it was wrong for a family to eat it’s dog, after the dog was killed by a car, people often said “yes, it’s wrong, because…. um… if you eat dog meat you’ll get sick.” This finding became the First Principle of Moral Psychology in The Righteous Mind: “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” Our gut tells us what’s true on moral questions, and our reasoning then kicks into high gear to justify that intuition.
So when Todd Akin said that “legitimate rape” rarely leads to pregnancy because, um… “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down…” I was both horrified and delighted. Delighted only because it offered such a vivid demonstration of the First Principle in action.
By coincidence, my colleagues at Yourmorals.org, Brittany Liu and Pete Ditto, have just published an article showing how exactly the process works when people invent or inflate facts. Ditto and Liu talk about the need for “moral coherence,” which they describe as “the tendency for people to fit their factual beliefs to their moral world-view, so that what is right morally becomes what is right practically as well.” The apply this perspective to the Akin case in a blog post at the YourMorals blog. Here’s an excerpt:
We suggest that people’s desire for moral coherences initiates a motivated cost-benefit analysis in which the act that feels the best morally becomes that act that also leads to the best consequences. So, if a particular act feels morally wrong, moral coherence processes lead people to try to maximize the costs and minimize the benefits associated with that act. Likewise, if an act feels morally acceptable, people will minimize the costs and maximize the benefits associated with that act. By changing their factual beliefs about the costs and benefits of various actions, people emerge with a coherent moral picture in which their factual beliefs fit perfectly with their moral evaluations.
Applying this logic to the Akin case, strong opponents of abortion, like Akin, argue that abortion is fundamentally immoral and should be prohibited. But what if the pregnancy results from a rape? This creates a problem for a principled moral position on abortion. Isn’t abortion always wrong? But is it right to make a woman live with a baby conceived in from a violent, traumatic act she did not consent to? One way to resolve the conflict is to convince oneself that pregnancies from “legitimate” rapes are exceedingly rare. If this is true, then prohibiting abortion even in the case of rape really has relatively few costs because it occurs so infrequently. Thus, it is easy to see Rep. Akin’s views about rape and pregnancy (views that are held by many other anti-abortion activists as well) as emerging from his struggle to construct a coherent moral position on abortion that refuses to make exceptions for rape and incest.
Pat Moynihan is reported to have once said that we are each entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. Unfortunately, partisans tend to create their own facts, most of which are not so outrageously and obviously wrong as Akin’s. Left and right in America today live in different moral “matrices,” and the search for moral coherence, satisfied by cable news networks, gossip, and the internet, allows us all to live in gated moral communities, each one grounded in its own set of facts.
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How to understand one third of all political arguments
I came across this (tongue in cheek) lament about the hypocrisy of the other side, on Volokh Conspiracy (but it’s floating around the internet):
Why is the other side of the debates I’m on always so hypocritical? They always jump on what my side says, and yet they willfully ignore all the faults on their own side. Let’s be honest about the double standard: The other side gets away with stuff that my side would never get away with. It’s just like the other side to be so deceitful: They’re always looking to score any advantage they can. People like that drive me crazy, and it seems like most of the people on the other side are just like that.
It’s a perfect distillation of the main point of Ch. 4 of The Righteous Mind (and ch. 4 of The Happiness Hypothesis). But blogs being blogs, people then set out to debate it. One commenter offered the perfect summation of what happens in maybe a third of all arguments about things that Obama (or any president) does:
It isn’t just a matter of each side claiming that the other side is hypocritical, and you have to figure out which (or both). The following often happens:
1) Right criticizes Obama for doing X
2) Left (correctly) points out that Bush did X, and Right didn’t care then
3) Right (correctly) points out that Left cared when Bush did X, but don’t now.
Of course, the same happens in reverse with the Left initiating the first complaint. Essentially, both sides are actually admitting hypocrisy, but for some reason they only care that the other side is hypocritical. This is a truly horrible form of discussion, and a neutral observer does not need to think hard to figure out which side is “right,” because both sides are wrong.
Amen. It is indeed striking that the response to the charge of hypocrisy is rarely apology, it’s usually “but, but, but… you do it too.” That’s what you’d expect if we all carry around in our heads a little inner press secretary, or inner lawyer.
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Update: By amazing coincidence, Ramesh Ponnuru published yesterday a much more extensive and deeply insightful version of the “they’re all hypocrites” rant. His (tongue in cheek) rant should be required reading for all citizens. (hat tip to Independent Whig, below)
Update #2: By even more amazing coincidence, A. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times Dispatch, wrote an essay similar to Ponnuru’s the day before his was published. This one’s called “The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win”. (Hat tip to Brian Keegan, below)
Read MoreWhich party owns which words?
I just found a wonderful tool at CapitolWords.org which shows you the frequency with which any word is used in the congressional record since 1996. (Hat tip to Emily Ekins.) You can see which party uses each word more often, and which Senators and Representatives use the word most often. It offers a quick check on the claims I made in The Righteous Mind about how the Left owns Care and Fairness (as Equality), whereas the Right owns the rest of the moral foundations. I’m ignoring the line graphs plotting changes over time (there are hardly any) and I’ll just present the overall pie charts here:
1) THE CARE FOUNDATION
“Care”
“Compassion”
Conclusion: yes, Dems use these words more often.
2) THE FAIRNESS FOUNDATION
“Fairness”
“Justice”
“Equality”
Conclusion: Yes, Dems use these words more, especially “equality.” The words “proportionality” and “equity” rarely occur; there’s no clear word to get at fairness-as-proportionality, which I claim is a concept more valued on the right.
3) THE LIBERTY FOUNDATION
“Liberty”
“Freedom”
Conclusion: Yes, Republicans use these words more. It’s a sign of trouble for the liberal party when liberalism forfeits the word liberty.
4) THE LOYALTY FOUNDATION
“Loyalty”
“Patriotism”
Conclusion: No, contrary to my prediction, Democrats use the words loyalty and patriotism slightly more often than do Republicans.
5) The Authority/subversion Foundation
“Authority”
“Obedience”
Conclusion: No difference on “authority” (which has a great many non-moral uses in a legal and legislative context) but yes on “obedience.”
6) The Sanctity/Degradation Foundation:
“Sanctity”
“purity”
Conclusion: Republicans use these words much more often.
Overall conclusion: This crude measure offers some support for the portrait I painted in chapters 7 and 8 of Righteous Mind: Democrats own the central words of the Care and Fairness foundations, Republicans own the central words of the Liberty and Sanctity foundations. Republicans used one of the two central words of the Authority foundation more than did Democrats, and contrary to my predictions, Democrats used two of the central words of the Loyalty foundations slightly more than did Republicans.
Of course, all of these words are used in many ways, and the next step would be to examine word usage in context. Are Democrats really using the word “authority” in ways that show that they deeply respect authority? For example, the most recent uses in the congressional record on the day I did this analysis are Democrats talking about “a leading authority of Islamic culture” and “Congress has delegated much authority to the D.C. government…” These uses shouldn’t really count. When Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I last did a linguistic analysis of church sermons, we found a similar picture: most of our predictions were supported by raw word counts. But once we analyzed words in context and only counted the cases that truly endorsed a foundation, then all predictions were supported.
[Note: in my original post on Aug 9, I used the word “respect” instead of “obedience,” and it showed a trend toward Democrats. But in response to Anwer’s objection below, I tested out “obedience,” which has fewer non-authority uses, and swapped it in above.]
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Polarization leads to nationalization of elections
Do swing states really swing? Are the presidential campaigns right to focus so much time and money on a small set of swing states?
Brad Jones, a graduate student in political science at U. Wisconsin, has produced some extraordinary graphs in a blog post at CivilPolitics.org, showing that states used to swing widely from election to election, particularly in the decades after WWII. Knowing how a state voted in one presidential election didn’t usually give you a strong basis for predicting its vote in the next few elections. So it would make sense for candidates to pour huge amounts of money into the few states that could plausibly be shifted.
But as political polarization has increased since the 1980s, the states have begun to lose their individual personalities and assume their place in a single ranked list, based (I assume) on the percentage of the population that is liberal or conservative. In other words, if you know how liberal or conservative a state is, you can predict with high accuracy how it’s presidential vote will turn out. As Jones puts it:
politics has become increasingly nationalized as it has polarized. This nationalization would explain the stable rankings and uniform shifts that have characterized recent elections. The shifts in election results are not concentrated among the handful of states that receive endless barrages of campaign advertising. Rather, all of the states have tended to move toward the candidate who ultimately wins the election.
You gotta see the graphs to believe it. One really interesting finding: this same pattern of extreme predictability is not new. Jones shows that it also held during the last period of extreme political polarization, in the late 19th Century. Polarization does weird things to our democracy. It makes one moral fault line become highly stable and salient, rather than having multiple possible fault lines and shifting coalitions, which I think is a healthier situation, less prone to demonization.
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The Righteous Mind in One Cartoon
Here’s all 318 pages of The Righteous Mind condensed into a single cartoon,
by Patricia Kambitsch at http://slowlearning.org
The Working White Working Class Really Is Leaving the Democrats
[See the end of this post for how the debate/discussion has played out… it has been quite civil and productive]
I published an essay in The Guardian two weeks ago offering one reason why most white working class people in the USA vote Republican. Two excerpts:
politics at the national level is more like religion than it is like shopping. It’s more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left….
In focusing so much on the needy, the left often fails to address – and sometimes violates – other moral needs, hopes and concerns. When working-class people vote conservative, as most do in the US, they are not voting against their self-interest; they are voting for their moral interest. They are voting for the party that serves to them a more satisfying moral cuisine.
I had been inspired by a New York Times column by Tom Edsall, on how Obama’s re-election team had largely written off the white working class vote:
In the United States, Ruy Teixeira noted, “the Republican Party has become the party of the white working class,” while in Europe, many working-class voters who had been the core of Social Democratic parties have moved over to far right parties, especially those with anti-immigration platforms.
My essay was strongly condemned by two worthy critics. First, Andrew Gelman said that I had gotten the basic facts wrong. The working class does NOT vote Republican, he said; it votes Democrat, and has for over 70 years. There’s been no change. And it votes for the Left in most (but not all) countries.
I made a careless mistake in not specifying in my excerpt above that I was talking only about the WHITE working class. That’s the subject of the big debate, ever since Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” Of course African Americans and Latinos vote heavily Democratic, and make up much of the working class. But even when we focus only on whites, Gelman says I (and therefore Edsall and Teixeira) still got it wrong.
Second, George Monbiot published a rebuttal in The Guardian, saying that whatever the merits of The Righteous Mind, I had stumbled “stupidly and disastrously” in applying my ideas to politics. He pointed to an analysis by political scientist Larry Bartels that refuted Thomas Frank’s claims about the very existence of a shift away from the Democrats of white working class voters. Bartels’ analysis, like Gelman’s seems to show that there has been essentially no change in the allegiance of the white working class to the Democratic Party in the last 70 years. Rather, Monbiot argues, the working class (in Britain and the US) has become less likely to vote at all, because it sees little difference between the economic programs of the two major parties. It would therefore be foolish for the Democrats or the Labour party to try to appeal to working-class voters by “triangulating” on moral issues when what is needed is a stronger shift to the LEFT, to draw them back to the ballot box by offering them a better deal on economic issues.
But was I really wrong in claiming that the white working class has moved away from the Democrats? It all depends on how you define “working class.” All of the authors in question grant that there is no gold standard. You can use education, income, job classification, self-identification, or some combination of those criteria. They all intercorrelate, but different criteria sometimes lead to different conclusions.
Bartels and Gelman focus on income. They operationalize “white working class” as whites in the bottom third of the national income distribution, for any given year of analysis. Gelman’s very interesting book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State explains the paradox that richer STATES in the USA vote more Democratic, yet within almost all states, richer INDIVIDUALS are more likely to vote Republican. Point taken: there is a robust tendency for people to become more conservative and/or Republican as they get richer (when you hold everything else constant). I had not known this.
Bartels focuses on Thomas Frank’s claim that there has been a “backlash” against the Democrats – Frank claims that the white working class has changed its allegiance in recent years. In chart after chart, based on ANES data from the 1950s through 2004, he shows that there’s been no change, no shift to the right, no abandonment of the Democrats by whites in the bottom third of the income distribution. Once again, there’s no reason for the Democrats to change strategy or reinvent the party because there is no problem to be addressed.
But things look different if you define class based on education. In a paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz, titled “The decline of the white working class and the rise of a mass upper middle class,” the authors note that taking whites in the bottom third of the total national income distribution (not the white distribution, which can’t be computed from ANES data) gives you an odd sample: the majority of them are not working. It’s mostly students, retired people, homemakers, and people who are unemployed or on disability. In 2004, only 39% of white voters in the bottom third were currently employed (compared to 73% of white voters in the middle third of income). So this is a group that is more dependent on government programs. Bartels’ analyses do indeed show that this group is still and has always been reliably Democratic.
Teixeira and Abramowitz argue that education is a better way to identify the working class. (For one thing, it correlates more closely with people’s own descriptions of their class than does current family income). They focus on whites who have not completed a 4 year college degree. (They also look at other ways of slicing the data, including an index of all the major predictors). Using the lack of a college degree as the criterion, they show that the white working class has indeed shifted over to voting for Republican presidents with Nixon (70% in 1972) and never really returned to the Democrats. Clinton drew about as many of them as did his two Republican opponents, but Gore lost them by 17 points, Kerry lost them by 23 points. Obama lost them by 18 points, and the gap seems to be growing. Nate Cohn analyzes several recent Pew and Qunnipiac polls and concludes: “over the last four years, Obama’s already tepid support among white voters without a college degree has collapsed.” (See also this Gallup poll).
I wanted to examine these relationships in more detail, particularly the difference between employed and non-employed whites, so I downloaded the ANES cumulative data file, limited my analysis to whites, and then created 4 groups based on ANES variables vcf0140a (education level = 6 or 7) and vcf0116 (work status = 1):
Group 1 = no college, no job
Group 2 = no college, job
Group 3 = college, no job
Group 4 = college, job
The crux of the debate, therefore, is what has happened to group 2, in comparison to the others. The Democrats have been the party of the working man (and woman) since FDR’s New Deal coalition. So has THEIR allegiance changed in recent decades? The most direct measure for us to look at is ANES question vcf0302: “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?” Look at the red line below, which plots the declining percentage of people in group 1 who said “Democrat” in response to that question.
When you break up the non-college white population by employment status, as Teixeira and Abramowitz suggest, you see what they are saying: Both of the non-college groups slope downward, but group 2 (the red line) goes down more steeply. White people who have a job but no college degree have been leaving the Democratic Party. Are they becoming Republicans, or just getting disengaged, as Monbiot suggested (about the British working class)?
They are moving toward the Republican Party. The red line slopes upwards. That first sharp uptick appears to confirm the reality of the “Reagan Democrats.” And, interestingly, the purple line slopes upward too. That’s group 4, people with a job and a college degree. In other words, the Republicans are increasingly becoming the party of white people who currently hold jobs. This seems like a dangerous situation for the Democrats. Should they do anything to address it? Or are my critics correct that there no problem here, no trend, no loss of the white working class?
Bartels and Gelman are far more skilled at this sort of analysis than am I. Most likely I have missed something. I welcome their corrections, which I’ll post or link to below. Furthermore, Monbiot, Bartels and Gelman are probably all correct when they say that economic concerns played a stronger role in recent electoral shifts than the sorts of moral/cultural issues that I and Thomas Frank were talking about. I should not have suggested that concerns about national greatness and such things were the MAJOR drivers of change. I should have more modestly said: “look, here are some moral misunderstandings that are probably contributing to the ongoing alienation of many white working class voters from left-wing parties in the US and UK.” I thank my critics for pointing out this serious error in my initial essay, and for doing it in a way that displayed passionate disagreement about ideas without personal animosity or insult.
But the bottom line is that I (and Edsall, Teixeira, Abramowitz, and Frank) seem to have been correct in our basic claim that the white working class is leaving the Democratic Party. Or, at least, it depends how you define class, and it depends on several moderator variables, including employment status. (I assume the trends would be even more dramatic if we exclude unionized and public-sector employees.)
I’m not saying the Democrats must or can recapture the working white working class. It’s a shrinking demographic, many winning coalitions are possible, and I know little about electoral strategy. But the Democrats have been trying to figure out what and whom they stand for, and they’ve been trying to find their narrative, for a while now. (See Matt Bai.) If the Democrats want to be the party of the American working man and woman, they should first figure out whether they are in fact losing the working white working class, and if so, why. Moral psychology may offer part of the explanation.
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Responses
6/17/12: Edsall posted a followup column, backing up his earlier column with analyses of exit polls in congressional voting, showing that swings in the white working class vote predict the fortunes of the Democratic party; swings in other groups are much less predictive. So its bad news for the Dems when this group (“canaries in the coal mine”) turns against them.
6/18/12: Larry Bartels responds here, mostly critical, saying that the trend I show here in party ID is mostly due to the South; it’s very weak outside the south and doesn’t show up in presidential voting.
6/19/12: Political scientist Chris Johnston responds here. He does not disagree with Bartels’ quantitative analyses, but he is supportive of my overall argument. He shows that the moral values items on the ANES do predict voting as well or better than does income, and this happens even among Latino voters.
6/19/12: Nate Cohn comments here, agreeing with Bartels overall but noting that the pattern of changes among white working class support for the Democrats is complex–down in rural areas, up in suburbs–and that since 2008 things are way down mostly OUTSIDE the South.
6/20/12: Andy Gelman responds here, trying to reconcile it all: “In short: Republicans continue to do about 20 percentage points better among upper-income voters compared to lower-income, but the compositions of these coalitions have changed over time. As has been noted, low-education white workers have moved toward the Republican party over the past few decades, and at the same time there have been compositional changes so that this group represents a much smaller share of the electorate.” “Lower-class whites (especially in the south) may well be trending Republican, but upper-class whites are even more strongly in the Republican camp, and it’s worth understanding their motivations as well.”
6/25/12: Edsall wrote a followup NYT column covering this whole debate, and drawing in commentary and graphs from Abramowitz supporting my basic claims (which had been based on Abramowitz’s earlier analyses), and expanding the discussion to include occupation-type (i.e., “blue collar” vs. “white collar.”). My only disagreement with Edsall’s column is that he describes the tone of the argument as “furious.” Perhaps there was furious argument in the past, before I stepped into this “minefield” (Bartels’ term). But the discussion and debate that followed my initial Guardian essay has seemed to me to be very civil. Not just in the dueling blog posts, but in the email discussions among me, Gelman, Bartels, Abramowitz, and Edsall. It has not exactly been a warm discussion among friends, but neither has there been any anger or ad-hominem argumentation. It’s just researchers and a journalist trying to hash out the conflicting signals that emerge from multiple datasets to try to figure out a basic factual question: have the Democrats really been losing the white working class, or is it a statistical illusion that has been too heartily embraced by the press? After all this discussion, I think the answer is still yes–at least for the working white working class. (Gelman has convinced me that the poorest slice of the white electorate has not shifted away). But I see now that the issue is more complicated than I thought when I first stepped into the minefield.
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Note #1: The ANES dataset has about 1100 white respondents in each election year (every even year) going back to 1948, but some of the items we need for analysis only begin in 1972, so I start there. The graphs look spiky when you plot every single election, so I grouped elections by decade (e.g, 1980 – 1988), and averaged together the 5 elections in each decade.
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