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"Voters who seem to vote against their material self-interest are sometimes said to be voting instead for their values, or for their vision of a good society (Lakoff, 2004; Westen, 2007)." (p.1029)
"We propose a simple hypothesis: Political liberals construct their moral systems primarily upon two psychological foundations—Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity—whereas political conservatives construct moral systems more evenly upon five psychological foundations—the same ones as liberals, plus Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. We call this hypothesis the moral foundations hypothesis, and we present four studies that support it using four different methods." (p.1029)
"Political views are multifaceted, but a single liberal–conservative (or left–right) continuum is a useful approximation that has predictive validity for voting behavior and opinions on a wide range of issues (Jost, 2006)." (p.1029)
"Liberals on average are more open to experience, more inclined to seek out change and novelty both personally and politically (McCrae, 1996). Conservatives, in contrast, have a stronger preference for things that are familiar, stable, and predictable (Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008; McCrae, 1996)." (p.1030)
"When morality is equated with the protection of individuals, the central concerns of conservatives—and of people in many non-Western cultures—fall outside the moral domain. Research in India, Brazil, and the United States, for example, has found that people who are less Westernized treat many issues related to food, sex, clothing, prayer, and gender roles as moral issues (Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987), even when they involve no harm to any person (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993). Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, and Park (1997) proposed that Western elites are unusual in limiting the moral domain to what they called the “ethic of autonomy.” They proposed that morality in most cultures also involves an “ethic of community” (including moral goods such as obedience, duty, interdependence, and the cohesiveness of groups and institutions) and an “ethic of divinity” (including moral goods such as purity, sanctity, and the suppression of humanity’s baser, more carnal instincts).
Haidt (2008) recently suggested an alternative approach to defining morality that does not exclude conservative and non-Western concerns. Rather than specifying the content of a truly moral judgment he specified the functions of moral systems: “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible” (p. 70). Haidt described two common kinds of moral systems—two ways of suppressing selfishness—that correspond roughly to Sowell’s (2002) two visions. Some cultures try to suppress selfishness by protecting individuals directly (often using the legal system) and by teaching individuals to respect the rights of other individuals. This individualizing approach focuses on individuals as the locus of moral value. Other cultures try to suppress selfishness by strengthening groups and institutions and by binding individuals into roles and duties in order to constrain their imperfect natures. This binding approach focuses on the group as the locus of moral value.
The individualizing-binding distinction does not necessarily correspond to a left-wing versus right-wing distinction for all groups and in all societies. The political left has sometimes been associated with socialism and communism, positions that privilege the welfare of the group over the rights of the individual and that have at times severely
limited individual liberty. Conversely, the political right includes libertarians and “laissez-faire” conservatives who prize individual liberty as essential to the functioning of the free market (Boaz, 1997). We therefore do not think of political ideology— or morality—as a strictly one-dimensional spectrum. In fact, we consider it a strength of moral foundations theory that it allows people and ideologies to be characterized along five dimensions." (p.1030)
"Our idea was that moral intuitions derive from innate psychological mechanisms that coevolved with cultural institutions and practices (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). These innate but modifiable mechanisms (Marcus, 2004) provide parents and other socializing agents the moral “foundations” to build on as they teach children their local virtues, vices, and moral practices. (We prefer the term virtuesto values because of its narrower focus on morality and because it more strongly suggests cultural learning and construction.)." (p.1030)
"The widespread human obsession with fairness, reciprocity, and justice fits well with evolutionary writings about reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971). And the widespread human concern about caring, nurturing, and protecting vulnerable individuals from harm fits well with writings about the evolution of empathy (de Waal, 2008) and the attachment system (Bowlby, 1969). These two matches were labeled the Fairness/reciprocity foundation and the Harm/care foundation, respectively. It is noteworthy that these two foundations correspond to the “ethic of justice” studied by Kohlberg (1969) and the “ethic of care” that Gilligan (1982) said was an independent contributor to moral judgment. We refer to these two foundations as the individualizing foundations because they are (we suggest) the source of the intuitions that make the liberal philosophical tradition, with its emphasis on the rights and welfare of individuals, so learnable and so compelling to so many people.
Haidt and Joseph (2004) found, however, that most cultures did not limit their virtues to those that protect individuals. They identified three additional clusters of virtues that corresponded closely to Shweder et al.’s (1997) description of the moral domains that lie beyond the ethics of autonomy. Virtues of loyalty, patriotism, and self-sacrifice for the group, combined with an extreme vigilance for traitors, matched recent work on the evolution of “coalitional psychology” (Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001). Virtues of subordinates (e.g., obedience and respect for authority) paired with virtues of authorities (such as leadership and protection) matched writings on the evolution of hierarchy in primates (de Waal, 1982) and the ways that human hierarchy became more dependent on the consent of subordinates (Boehm, 1999). These two clusters comprise most of Shweder et al.’s “ethic of community.” And lastly, virtues of purity and sanctity that play such a large role in religious laws matched writings on the evolution of disgust and contamination sensitivity (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2000). Practices related to purity and pollution must be understood as serving more than hygienic functions. Such practices also serve social functions, including marking off the group’s cultural boundaries (Soler, 1973/1979) and suppressing the selfishness often associated with humanity’s carnal nature (e.g., lust, hunger, material greed) by cultivating a more spiritual mindset (see Shweder et al.’s, 1997, description of the “ethic of divinity”). We refer to these three foundations (Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity) as the binding foundations, because they are (we suggest) the source of the intuitions that make many conservative and religious moralities, with their emphasis on group-binding loyalty, duty, and self-control, so learnable and so compelling to so many people." (pp.1030-1031)
"If the foundations are innate, then why do people and cultures vary ? Why are there liberals and conservatives ? We take our understanding of innateness from Marcus (2004), who stated that innate “does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.” He uses the metaphor that genes create the first draft of the brain, and experience later edits it. We apply Marcus’s metaphor to moral development by assuming that human beings have the five foundations as part of their evolved first draft, but that, as for nearly all traits, there is heritable variation (Bouchard, 2004; Turkheimer, 2000). Many personality traits related to the foundations have already been shown to be moderately heritable, including harm avoidance (Keller, Coventry, Heath, & Martin, 2005) and right-wing authoritarianism (McCourt, Bouchard, Lykken, Tellegen, & Keyes, 1999). But foundations are not values or virtues. They are the psychological systems that give children feelings and intuitions that make local stories, practices, and moral arguments more or less appealing during the editing process. Returning to our definition of moral systems as “interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms” that function to suppress selfishness, it should now be clear that the foundations are the main “evolved psychological mechanisms” that are part of the “first draft” of the moral mind." (p.1031)
"For our first test of the moral foundations hypothesis we used the most direct method possible: We asked participants to rate how relevant various concerns were to them when making moral judgments. Such a decontextualized method can be appropriate for gauging moral values, as values are said to be abstract and generalized across contexts (Feldman, 2003; Schwartz, 1992). But given the limits of introspection (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) and the intuitive quality of many moral judgments (Haidt, 2001), such a method does not necessarily measure how people actually make moral judgments. As such, reports of moral relevance are best understood as self-theories about moral judgment, and they are likely to be concordant with explicit reasoning during moral arguments." (p.1031)
"Participants first read “When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking ?” They then rated 15 moral relevance items [...] on 6-point scales anchored by the labels never relevant and always relevant. The items were written to be face-valid measures of concerns related to the five foundations, with the proviso that no item could have an obvious relationship to partisan politics. For example, a Fairness item stated “Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights.” By avoiding mention of specific “culture war” topics such as gun rights or gay rights, we minimized the extent to which participants would recognize the items as relevant to political ideology and therefore draw on knowledge of what liberals and conservatives believe to guide their own ratings." (p.1032)
"In all three groups the individualizing foundations were endorsed more strongly by liberals than conservatives, and the binding foundations were endorsed more strongly by conservatives than liberals." (p.1033)
"Further, the observed differences were primarily a function of political identity and did not vary substantially or consistently by gender, age, household income, or education level, suggesting that these effects could be a general description of moral concerns between the political left and right."
"In Study 2, we retained the abstract moral relevance assessments from Study 1 and added more contextualized and concrete items that could more strongly trigger the sorts of moral intuitions that are said to play an important role in moral judgment (Haidt, 2001). We generated four targets of judgment for each foundation: one normative ideal (e.g., “It can never be right to kill a human being” for Harm), one statement about government policy (e.g., “The government should strive to improve the well-being of people in our nation, even if it sometimes happens at the expense of people in other nations” for Ingroup), one hypothetical scenario (e.g., “If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer’s orders, I would obey anyway because that is my duty” for Authority), and one positive virtue (e.g., “Chastity is still an important virtue for teenagers today, even if many don’t think it is” for Purity; see Appendix B). This approach requires participants to make moral judgments about cases that instantiate or violate the abstract principles they rated in response to our “relevance” questions." (pp.1033-1034)
"In Study 3, we adapted Tetlock’s work on sacred values and taboo trade-offs (Tetlock, 2003; Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner, 2000) to make moral judgments more personal and visceral than they had been in Studies 1 and 2. Tetlock et al. (2000, p. 853) defined sacred values as “any value that a moral community explicitly or implicitly treats as possessing infinite or transcendental significance that precludes comparisons, trade-offs, or indeed any other mingling with bounded or secular values.” Participants confronted with choices that involved trading off a sacred value (such as human life) for a profane value (such as money saved by a hospital) showed resistance to the task and feelings of pollution afterwards, as if it were impure even to contemplate the trade-off.
We generated five potential taboo violations for each moral foundation. For example, how much money would someone have to pay you to: Kick a dog in the head (Harm)? Renounce your citizenship (Ingroup) ? Get a blood transfusion from a child molester (Purity) ? We hypothesized that because everyone’s morality relies heavily on the individualizing foundations, neither liberals nor conservatives would be happy to “prostitute” their values by accepting money in exchange for violating them." (p.1036)
"Fairness violations were considered the most taboo overall, with people across the political spectrum choosing responses whose average was closest to 7 (a million dollars). Liberals required slightly more money on average to violate the Harm foundation. However, conservatives required substantially higher amounts to violate the three binding foundations." (p.1037)
-Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek, "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009, Vol. 96, No. 5, 1029 –1046 : https://fbaum.unc.edu/teaching/articles/JPSP-2009-Moral-Foundations.pdf
= innéisme et déterminisme biologique dans le modèle
