“Everyone viewed themselves as though they were at the top of the scale,” says Ben Tappin, a graduate student in psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an author of the study. The study went on to say that this makes people’s self-inflated morality more irrational than their bumped-up views of their intelligence, or friendliness. In the latter two realms, there was more variability—one person might think they were a little smarter than average, another might think they were a genius, another might think they were a little below average. [...]
Moral superiority and moral tribalism were on full display in the recent U.S. presidential election. Who someone was going to vote for was often cast as a moral decision. Donald Trump did his best to make Hillary Clinton seem like an immoral choice, repeatedly calling her a liar and “Crooked Hillary.” The Democrats called Trump out on his many lies, but also demonized the people planning to vote for him, as in Clinton’s famous dismissal of them as a “basket of deplorables.” Many times, Clinton’s message seemed to be not only “if you’re not with us, you’re against us,” but “if you’re not with us, you’re a bad person.” Michelle Obama, in a powerful speech that was as much arguing against Trump as it was arguing for Clinton, summed up the campaign: “This isn’t about politics,” she said. “It’s about basic human decency. It’s about right and wrong.” [...]
Haidt’s work identifies six different moral metrics—liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, care, and purity. Different groups and cultures prefer to emphasize these domains to different degrees. For example, people in Eastern countries tend to emphasize purity and loyalty more than people in Western countries. People who live in countries where there has historically been higher prevalence of disease also place a higher value on purity, as well as loyalty and authority. In the United States, liberals tend to focus mostly on care, fairness, and liberty, while conservatives generally emphasize all six domains. Other research shows that people rate the moral values a group holds as the most important characteristic affecting whether they’re proud to be a member of the group, or more likely to distance themselves from it. [...]
For many issues, moral divides are also political divides. In the U.S., liberals and conservatives are equally morally convicted about most issues Skitka and her colleagues have looked at, including same-sex marriage, welfare, capital punishment, surveillance, social security, and taxes. (That’s not to say they feel the same way, just that they feel the same amount of moral conviction about these issues, on average.) There are a few issues that liberals feel more moral conviction about—climate change, the environment, health care, education, income inequality, and gender inequality—and a few that conservatives feel more moral conviction about—immigration, gun control, abortion, states’ rights, physician-assisted suicide, the federal deficit, and the federal budget.
No comments:
Post a Comment