Hatemi and his co-authors based their analysis on existing data from more than a thousand participants in the American National Election Studies panel from 2008, as well as from a sample of hundreds of Australians originally polled between 20-in both cases, participants took some version of the moral-foundations questionnaire. As Peter Hatemi, one of the study’s authors and a political-science professor at Pennsylvania State University, puts it: “We will switch our moral compass depending on how it fits with what we believe politically.” In a series of analyses published recently in the American Journal of Political Science, the three researchers found that people’s moral codes don’t cause or predict their political ideology instead, people’s ideology appears to predict their answers on the moral-foundations questionnaire. Recently, however, a separate team of three scientists posed a question that could upend this connection between moral foundations and politics: What if it’s the other way around? What if you cared so much about loyalty and the troops because you first identified as conservative? If loyalty is extremely important to you, the research suggests, you might care deeply about supporting the troops, and therefore you might be more likely to be politically conservative. Political conservatives, meanwhile, tend to be more concerned about group-focused “binding” foundations: loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, and disgust versus purity. The questionnaire presents a series of declarations such as “It bothers me when people think that nothing is sacred in this world” “I think that men and women each have different roles to play in society” “I would say close friends should always take each other’s side first, and ask questions later.” You rank how much each statement describes your actual beliefs, and the test then tells you where you stand on several moral areas, or “foundations.”Īccording to the researchers who invented the quiz, the issues that most concern political liberals tend to fall under the category of “individualizing” moral foundations, which have more to do with personal standards: care versus harm and fairness versus cheating. In recent years, researchers have devised a way to test these sorts of “moral foundations” with a quiz. Among the factors that shape such deep-seated political preferences, a prominent one is believed to be fundamental moral beliefs-how someone thinks a good society should function or a decent person should behave. In fact, a growing number of people instinctively lunge toward one side of the ballot or the other any time an election comes around. Even though the Democratic nominee has not yet been chosen, many Americans already know exactly which party they’ll be voting for next November.
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