Accueil
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0042366
"In this paper, we document libertarian moral psychology, which, as we show, is distinct from both liberal and conservative moralities. We use this unique group to illustrate how psychological dispositions predispose individuals to endorse particular values and choose coherent ideological identifications, consistent with current models of moral intuitionism, ideological choice, and the moralization of preferences.
Beyond the Bipolar View of Political Personality
The “culture war” fought out in American public and political life since the 1980s has often been described in binary terms as a conflict between two visions of morality and moral authority. On the right, the conservative side has insisted that there is an objective moral truth. Traditional institutions are seen as embodying the wisdom of the ages, and therefore closely reflecting this moral truth. On the left, the liberal side has insisted that moral truth is not fixed for all time, but is a work in progress, to be reinterpreted toward the goal of promoting greater well-being for all. Psychologists have been able to measure these differences in moral judgment along with their underlying personality correlates. For example, political conservativism has been found to be associated with greater tolerance of inequality, and lesser tolerance of change, greater conscientiousness, and greater sensitivity to disgust. Political liberals, on the other hand, tend to be more open than conservatives to new experiences and more empathic. This research has been an important first step in understanding the ideology-personality relation, and the psychological organization of political attitudes."
"Libertarian Ideology
Modern libertarians are attitudinally diverse, but all types of libertarianism trace their origins back to the enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th century who argued that states, laws, and governments exist for the benefit of the people. The individual is the unit of value, and the liberty of the individual is the essential precondition for human flourishing. John Locke wrote: “the great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property” ([18] - Para 123). Locke had an expansive notion of property, which included men's “lives, liberties, and estates.” His ideas were later paraphrased into one of the most famous phrases in the Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Libertarianism has historically rejected the idea that the needs of one person impose a moral duty upon others. This is one of the major points on which liberals and libertarians diverged in the 20th century. Libertarianism stayed close to Locke's and Mill's notions of liberty as freedom from interference, which the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later called “negative liberty.” But beginning in the progressive era of the late 19th century, the American left began to adopt European ideas about the conditions and entitlements that people need to make the most of their liberty. Government action came to be seen as essential for ensuring “positive liberty” by providing the social conditions – such as education, health care, and financial security – that give people the freedom to pursue their own happiness.
Seen in this light it becomes clear why American libertarians are sometimes called “classical liberals,” and in Europe, the term liberal is often used in the same way that “classical liberal” is used in the United States. It also becomes clear why libertarian thought is now associated with anti-government and anti-progressive movements. Libertarianism provides an ideological narrative whereby the opposition to high taxes and big government is not just an “economic” position: it is a moral position as well. This narrative provides the basis for principled opposition to a government seen as unfair (because it takes from the productive and gives to the unproductive), tyrannical (because it violates the negative liberty of some people to promote the positive liberty of others), and wasteful (because governments rarely achieve the efficiencies generated by the competition of private firms)."
"Libertarians seem willing to reject both liberal concerns for social justice and conservative concerns for respecting existing social structure when those concerns conflict with their superordinate interest in maintaining individual liberty. The goal of our first study is to confirm these observations by directly surveying a broad range of moral values and concerns, and testing whether self-described libertarians place a higher value on liberty and a lower value on other moral concerns, compared to self-described liberals and conservatives.
But what might explain the libertarian focus on liberty to the exclusion of other moral concerns ? Recent work in moral psychology suggests that moral attitudes arise, at least in part, from low-level “dispositional traits”, emotional reactions, social function, and the moralization of preferences. These moral attitudes have, in turn, been found to be associated with ideological self-identification.
This work suggests that one explanation for the unique moral profile of libertarians is that they feel traditional moral concerns less than do most other people. Tetlock, et al. found that libertarians were less morally outraged by “taboo” moral tradeoffs (e.g., buying and selling body parts for transplantation) than were liberals, conservatives, or socialists. Recent research in moral psychology has emphasized the importance of intuitive and emotional reactions in producing moral judgments that appear, on their face, to be based on principled reasoning. Might libertarians be more tolerant on issues of private consensual behavior than conservatives because they exhibit lower levels of disgust sensitivity ? Might libertarians depart from liberals on social justice issues because they have weaker feelings of empathy ? Indeed, libertarian writers have historically been proud of the rational — rather than emotional — roots of their ideology. The possible exception to this rule, of course, is the vigorous reaction libertarians often have to violations of personal freedom. Libertarians' characteristic pattern of emotional reactions (and lack thereof) may constrain the types of concerns that they moralize, which in turn affects their attraction to libertarian self-identification. We investigate this possibility in Study 2.
Finally, emotional reactions, and the moral principles that derive from them, serve interpersonal functions, such as navigating the social world and forming groups with others. Libertarians may have a dispositional preference for independence, perhaps even for solitude, and therefore less use for moral principles that bind them to others. In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand writes about the importance of maintaining one's individuality within social relationships. Do libertarians identify less with the people in their lives, with groups, and with their nations? Do they derive less enjoyment from the company of others ? This relative preference for individualism may gradually become moralized into a conscious endorsement of liberty as a moral principle, predisposing them to a libertarian self-identification. We investigate these possibilities in Study 3."
"In this paper, we let libertarians speak for themselves. We report the results of 16 surveys in which a total of 11,994 self-identified libertarians participated. We show how self-described libertarians differ from self-described liberals and conservatives not just on their moral beliefs, but on a variety of personality measures that, given previous research on the emotional, and social origins of moral reasoning, help us to understand why libertarians may hold their unique pattern of moral beliefs.
Our goal, however, was not just to describe the moral intuitions and dispositional traits of libertarians. Our second goal was to provide further evidence for the dispositional origins of ideology, the role of intuition in moral attitudes, and the role that social functioning plays in moral thinking. More specifically, we sought to replicate tests of a predictive model of ideological identification that is similar to McAdams' framework of personality. McAdams', three-level account of personality posits that the lowest level consists of global, decontextualized “dispositional traits,” such as the Big 5 or disgust sensitivity. Level 2 refers to a person's “characteristic adaptations” such as values, goals attachment styles, and defense mechanisms. McAdams' third level consists of “integrative life stories,” which are the idiosyncratic stories that people tell themselves about themselves. These stories often weave the level 1 and level 2 constructs into narratives that help people understand and justify their particular moral values. Haidt, Graham, and Joseph modified McAdams' third level for work in political psychology by pointing out that not all of these stories are self-constructed. We do not explicitly examine integrative narratives in this study, but when one gravitates toward an existing political party or ideology, one takes on many of the ideological narratives that have been laboriously constructed over decades by authors such as Ayn Rand (who, not coincidentally, put most of her political philosophy into narrative form in her novels).
To apply this model to the study of libertarians, we first show that libertarians do indeed have a distinct profile of moral concerns (Study 1). We then show that dispositional traits relate to ideological identification, and that this relationship is often mediated by moral intuitions, which can be thought of as a type of characteristic adaptation in McAdams' terminology (Study 2). In Study 3, we show that specific moral concerns relate to distinct styles of social functioning, and that libertarians' unique moral profile relates to their social preferences. Consistent with theories of parallel constraint satisfaction [37], we show that libertarianism can be understood as a set of relationships between a broad number of dispositional traits, social preferences, and moral values.
We begin with three general predictions.
Libertarians will value liberty more strongly and consistently than liberals or conservatives, at the expense of other moral concerns. This expectation is based on the explicit writings of libertarian authors (e.g. the Libertarian party website at lp.org, with the title “The Party of Principle: Minimum Government, Maximum Freedom”).
Libertarians will rely upon emotion less – and reason more – than will either liberals or conservatives. This expectation is based upon previous research on the affective origins of moral judgment, as well as libertarians' own self-characterizations. For example, one of the main libertarian magazines is called, simply, Reason.
Libertarians will be more individualistic and less collectivist compared to both liberals and conservatives. This expectation is based upon previous research concerning the social function of moral judgment. Libertarians often refer to the “right to be left alone”, and show strong reactance toward social or legal pressures to join groups or assume obligations toward others that are not freely chosen.
We evaluate these predictions in three studies using large web-based samples and a variety of measures related to morality, cognition, emotion, and social relatedness. Each “study” is actually a collection of separate studies that were conducted via a data collection website (described below), but for presentation purposes, we group them together based on the predictions they address."
"The analyses presented are based on data from 157,804 participants (45.6% female, median age = 34) who visited YourMorals.org and participated in one or more studies between June 2007 and January 2011. […] As of January 2011, 11,994 American visitors to YourMorals.org had self-identified as “libertarian”."
"Libertarians were comparable to other participants in terms of education, ethnicity, and age, but were much more likely to be male (79.6%) compared to both liberals (50.6% male) and conservatives (63.0% male). Because of this difference and because many of the distinguishing characteristics of libertarians turn out to be traits on which there are substantial gender differences, we include tables that show the effects separately for males and females."
"Libertarians were similar to conservatives on the fairness foundation, as both groups scored substantially lower than liberals. However, like liberals, libertarians scored substantially lower on the ingroup, authority, and purity foundations compared to conservatives. Finally, libertarians scored slightly lower than conservatives and substantially lower than liberals on the harm foundation."
"Our results suggest why libertarians do not feel fully at home in either of the major American political parties. Consistent with our prediction, libertarians were relatively low on all five foundations. Libertarians share with liberals, a distaste for the morality of ingroup, authority, and purity, characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right. Like liberals, libertarians can be said to have a two-foundation morality, prioritizing harm and fairness above the other three foundations. But libertarians share with conservatives their moderate scores on these two foundations. They are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly. Libertarianism is clearly not just a point on the liberal-conservative continuum; libertarians have a unique pattern of moral concerns, with relatively low reliance on all five foundations."
"Libertarians were unique on two values: benevolence, where they scored moderately below the other two groups, and self-direction, where they scored the highest (slightly higher than liberals and moderately higher than conservatives)."
"On lifestyle liberty, libertarians scored substantially higher than both liberals (d = .81), and conservatives (d = 1.19)."
"Our first prediction was strongly supported: libertarians value liberty more strongly and consistently than liberals or conservatives, at the expense of other moral concerns."
"The libertarian pattern on the Big 5 complements our findings on their explicit values in Study 1. Libertarians report lower levels of the traits that indicate an orientation toward engaging with and pleasing others (i.e., extraversion and agreeableness). Low scores on agreeableness in particular have been said to indicate a lack of compassion and a critical, skeptical nature. In addition, as in Study 1, we see that libertarians share traits with liberals (high openness to experience) as well as conservatives (low neuroticism)."
"Libertarians scored moderately lower than conservatives and substantially lower than liberals on empathic concern for others."
"Libertarians score moderately lower than conservatives on measures of disgust within both genders (see Table 3) and across all three classes of disgust.
Interpretation.
Previous research has shown that liberals are less disgust-sensitive than conservatives. The low level of disgust sensitivity found in libertarians is consistent with previous research about the relationship between disgust and conservative attitudes on social issues, particularly those related to sexuality (e.g. MFQ-Purity in Study 1). Libertarians may not experience the flash of revulsion that drives moral condemnation in many cases of unorthodox behavior."
"Libertarians score the lowest of any group on empathizing [empathy and understanding the social world], and the highest on systemizing (also see Figures 3 and 4). In fact, libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than on empathizing. Given that these traits are known to differ between men and women, it is important to examine these effects in each sex separately. Table 3 shows that the same effects hold when looking only at men, and when looking only at women."
"Libertarians may enjoy thinking about complex and abstract systems more than other groups, particularly more than conservatives."
"Our results suggests that libertarians are particularly unemotional in their moral deliberations."
"Libertarians were the only group to report a more systematic, rather than empathic, way of understanding the world, a characteristic of men that may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women."
"Libertarians also reported lower levels of agreeableness, measured using items such as “likes to cooperate with others”."
"Study 3 tests the idea that libertarians will be more individualistic and less collectivist compared to both liberals and conservatives, suggesting that their moral concern for liberty may represent the conversion of this preference into a value."
"The Individualism-Collectivism scale is a 32-item scale that measures an individual's levels of independence vs. interdependence. Individualists tend to emphasize self-reliance, independence and (sometimes) competition. There are two types of individualism: horizontal individualism reflects a belief that people are separate (independent) but equal entities (e.g. “I am a unique individual”), and vertical individualism emphasizes hierarchy and competitiveness between those separate entities (“It is important that I do my job better than others”). Collectivists, on the other hand, tend to emphasize cooperation, and (sometimes) equality. As with individualism, there are two kinds of collectivism, a more egalitarian (horizontal) dimension (e.g. “The well-being of my coworkers is important to me.”) and a more hierarchical (vertical) one (e.g. “Children should be taught to place duty before pleasure.”). The measure was completed by 2,975 participants (1,468 men; 1,987 liberals, 390 conservatives, and 291 libertarians).
Results.
Table 4 shows that libertarians scored lowest on both forms of collectivism, and highest on horizontal individualism, while matching conservatives on their high scores (relative to liberals) on vertical individualism."
"Table 4 shows that libertarians are less identified with their community compared to both liberals and conservatives. They also scored low (just below liberals) on identification with country, which was the dimension that conservatives most strongly endorsed. In addition, they scored low (equal to conservatives) on identification with people all over “the world,” which was the dimension that liberals most strongly endorsed."
"Table 4 shows that libertarians showed the lowest levels of loving feelings toward others, across all four categories [(friends, family, generic others, and their romantic Partner).]"
- Iyer R, Koleva S, Graham J, Ditto P, Haidt J (2012) Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLoS ONE 7(
: e42366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366
https://forum.liberaux.org/index.php?/topic/4314-type-de-personnalit%C3%A9-des-lib%C3%A9raux/&tab=comments#comment-17495
"In this paper, we document libertarian moral psychology, which, as we show, is distinct from both liberal and conservative moralities. We use this unique group to illustrate how psychological dispositions predispose individuals to endorse particular values and choose coherent ideological identifications, consistent with current models of moral intuitionism, ideological choice, and the moralization of preferences.
Beyond the Bipolar View of Political Personality
The “culture war” fought out in American public and political life since the 1980s has often been described in binary terms as a conflict between two visions of morality and moral authority. On the right, the conservative side has insisted that there is an objective moral truth. Traditional institutions are seen as embodying the wisdom of the ages, and therefore closely reflecting this moral truth. On the left, the liberal side has insisted that moral truth is not fixed for all time, but is a work in progress, to be reinterpreted toward the goal of promoting greater well-being for all. Psychologists have been able to measure these differences in moral judgment along with their underlying personality correlates. For example, political conservativism has been found to be associated with greater tolerance of inequality, and lesser tolerance of change, greater conscientiousness, and greater sensitivity to disgust. Political liberals, on the other hand, tend to be more open than conservatives to new experiences and more empathic. This research has been an important first step in understanding the ideology-personality relation, and the psychological organization of political attitudes."
"Libertarian Ideology
Modern libertarians are attitudinally diverse, but all types of libertarianism trace their origins back to the enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th century who argued that states, laws, and governments exist for the benefit of the people. The individual is the unit of value, and the liberty of the individual is the essential precondition for human flourishing. John Locke wrote: “the great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property” ([18] - Para 123). Locke had an expansive notion of property, which included men's “lives, liberties, and estates.” His ideas were later paraphrased into one of the most famous phrases in the Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Libertarianism has historically rejected the idea that the needs of one person impose a moral duty upon others. This is one of the major points on which liberals and libertarians diverged in the 20th century. Libertarianism stayed close to Locke's and Mill's notions of liberty as freedom from interference, which the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later called “negative liberty.” But beginning in the progressive era of the late 19th century, the American left began to adopt European ideas about the conditions and entitlements that people need to make the most of their liberty. Government action came to be seen as essential for ensuring “positive liberty” by providing the social conditions – such as education, health care, and financial security – that give people the freedom to pursue their own happiness.
Seen in this light it becomes clear why American libertarians are sometimes called “classical liberals,” and in Europe, the term liberal is often used in the same way that “classical liberal” is used in the United States. It also becomes clear why libertarian thought is now associated with anti-government and anti-progressive movements. Libertarianism provides an ideological narrative whereby the opposition to high taxes and big government is not just an “economic” position: it is a moral position as well. This narrative provides the basis for principled opposition to a government seen as unfair (because it takes from the productive and gives to the unproductive), tyrannical (because it violates the negative liberty of some people to promote the positive liberty of others), and wasteful (because governments rarely achieve the efficiencies generated by the competition of private firms)."
"Libertarians seem willing to reject both liberal concerns for social justice and conservative concerns for respecting existing social structure when those concerns conflict with their superordinate interest in maintaining individual liberty. The goal of our first study is to confirm these observations by directly surveying a broad range of moral values and concerns, and testing whether self-described libertarians place a higher value on liberty and a lower value on other moral concerns, compared to self-described liberals and conservatives.
But what might explain the libertarian focus on liberty to the exclusion of other moral concerns ? Recent work in moral psychology suggests that moral attitudes arise, at least in part, from low-level “dispositional traits”, emotional reactions, social function, and the moralization of preferences. These moral attitudes have, in turn, been found to be associated with ideological self-identification.
This work suggests that one explanation for the unique moral profile of libertarians is that they feel traditional moral concerns less than do most other people. Tetlock, et al. found that libertarians were less morally outraged by “taboo” moral tradeoffs (e.g., buying and selling body parts for transplantation) than were liberals, conservatives, or socialists. Recent research in moral psychology has emphasized the importance of intuitive and emotional reactions in producing moral judgments that appear, on their face, to be based on principled reasoning. Might libertarians be more tolerant on issues of private consensual behavior than conservatives because they exhibit lower levels of disgust sensitivity ? Might libertarians depart from liberals on social justice issues because they have weaker feelings of empathy ? Indeed, libertarian writers have historically been proud of the rational — rather than emotional — roots of their ideology. The possible exception to this rule, of course, is the vigorous reaction libertarians often have to violations of personal freedom. Libertarians' characteristic pattern of emotional reactions (and lack thereof) may constrain the types of concerns that they moralize, which in turn affects their attraction to libertarian self-identification. We investigate this possibility in Study 2.
Finally, emotional reactions, and the moral principles that derive from them, serve interpersonal functions, such as navigating the social world and forming groups with others. Libertarians may have a dispositional preference for independence, perhaps even for solitude, and therefore less use for moral principles that bind them to others. In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand writes about the importance of maintaining one's individuality within social relationships. Do libertarians identify less with the people in their lives, with groups, and with their nations? Do they derive less enjoyment from the company of others ? This relative preference for individualism may gradually become moralized into a conscious endorsement of liberty as a moral principle, predisposing them to a libertarian self-identification. We investigate these possibilities in Study 3."
"In this paper, we let libertarians speak for themselves. We report the results of 16 surveys in which a total of 11,994 self-identified libertarians participated. We show how self-described libertarians differ from self-described liberals and conservatives not just on their moral beliefs, but on a variety of personality measures that, given previous research on the emotional, and social origins of moral reasoning, help us to understand why libertarians may hold their unique pattern of moral beliefs.
Our goal, however, was not just to describe the moral intuitions and dispositional traits of libertarians. Our second goal was to provide further evidence for the dispositional origins of ideology, the role of intuition in moral attitudes, and the role that social functioning plays in moral thinking. More specifically, we sought to replicate tests of a predictive model of ideological identification that is similar to McAdams' framework of personality. McAdams', three-level account of personality posits that the lowest level consists of global, decontextualized “dispositional traits,” such as the Big 5 or disgust sensitivity. Level 2 refers to a person's “characteristic adaptations” such as values, goals attachment styles, and defense mechanisms. McAdams' third level consists of “integrative life stories,” which are the idiosyncratic stories that people tell themselves about themselves. These stories often weave the level 1 and level 2 constructs into narratives that help people understand and justify their particular moral values. Haidt, Graham, and Joseph modified McAdams' third level for work in political psychology by pointing out that not all of these stories are self-constructed. We do not explicitly examine integrative narratives in this study, but when one gravitates toward an existing political party or ideology, one takes on many of the ideological narratives that have been laboriously constructed over decades by authors such as Ayn Rand (who, not coincidentally, put most of her political philosophy into narrative form in her novels).
To apply this model to the study of libertarians, we first show that libertarians do indeed have a distinct profile of moral concerns (Study 1). We then show that dispositional traits relate to ideological identification, and that this relationship is often mediated by moral intuitions, which can be thought of as a type of characteristic adaptation in McAdams' terminology (Study 2). In Study 3, we show that specific moral concerns relate to distinct styles of social functioning, and that libertarians' unique moral profile relates to their social preferences. Consistent with theories of parallel constraint satisfaction [37], we show that libertarianism can be understood as a set of relationships between a broad number of dispositional traits, social preferences, and moral values.
We begin with three general predictions.
Libertarians will value liberty more strongly and consistently than liberals or conservatives, at the expense of other moral concerns. This expectation is based on the explicit writings of libertarian authors (e.g. the Libertarian party website at lp.org, with the title “The Party of Principle: Minimum Government, Maximum Freedom”).
Libertarians will rely upon emotion less – and reason more – than will either liberals or conservatives. This expectation is based upon previous research on the affective origins of moral judgment, as well as libertarians' own self-characterizations. For example, one of the main libertarian magazines is called, simply, Reason.
Libertarians will be more individualistic and less collectivist compared to both liberals and conservatives. This expectation is based upon previous research concerning the social function of moral judgment. Libertarians often refer to the “right to be left alone”, and show strong reactance toward social or legal pressures to join groups or assume obligations toward others that are not freely chosen.
We evaluate these predictions in three studies using large web-based samples and a variety of measures related to morality, cognition, emotion, and social relatedness. Each “study” is actually a collection of separate studies that were conducted via a data collection website (described below), but for presentation purposes, we group them together based on the predictions they address."
"The analyses presented are based on data from 157,804 participants (45.6% female, median age = 34) who visited YourMorals.org and participated in one or more studies between June 2007 and January 2011. […] As of January 2011, 11,994 American visitors to YourMorals.org had self-identified as “libertarian”."
"Libertarians were comparable to other participants in terms of education, ethnicity, and age, but were much more likely to be male (79.6%) compared to both liberals (50.6% male) and conservatives (63.0% male). Because of this difference and because many of the distinguishing characteristics of libertarians turn out to be traits on which there are substantial gender differences, we include tables that show the effects separately for males and females."
"Libertarians were similar to conservatives on the fairness foundation, as both groups scored substantially lower than liberals. However, like liberals, libertarians scored substantially lower on the ingroup, authority, and purity foundations compared to conservatives. Finally, libertarians scored slightly lower than conservatives and substantially lower than liberals on the harm foundation."
"Our results suggest why libertarians do not feel fully at home in either of the major American political parties. Consistent with our prediction, libertarians were relatively low on all five foundations. Libertarians share with liberals, a distaste for the morality of ingroup, authority, and purity, characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right. Like liberals, libertarians can be said to have a two-foundation morality, prioritizing harm and fairness above the other three foundations. But libertarians share with conservatives their moderate scores on these two foundations. They are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly. Libertarianism is clearly not just a point on the liberal-conservative continuum; libertarians have a unique pattern of moral concerns, with relatively low reliance on all five foundations."
"Libertarians were unique on two values: benevolence, where they scored moderately below the other two groups, and self-direction, where they scored the highest (slightly higher than liberals and moderately higher than conservatives)."
"On lifestyle liberty, libertarians scored substantially higher than both liberals (d = .81), and conservatives (d = 1.19)."
"Our first prediction was strongly supported: libertarians value liberty more strongly and consistently than liberals or conservatives, at the expense of other moral concerns."
"The libertarian pattern on the Big 5 complements our findings on their explicit values in Study 1. Libertarians report lower levels of the traits that indicate an orientation toward engaging with and pleasing others (i.e., extraversion and agreeableness). Low scores on agreeableness in particular have been said to indicate a lack of compassion and a critical, skeptical nature. In addition, as in Study 1, we see that libertarians share traits with liberals (high openness to experience) as well as conservatives (low neuroticism)."
"Libertarians scored moderately lower than conservatives and substantially lower than liberals on empathic concern for others."
"Libertarians score moderately lower than conservatives on measures of disgust within both genders (see Table 3) and across all three classes of disgust.
Interpretation.
Previous research has shown that liberals are less disgust-sensitive than conservatives. The low level of disgust sensitivity found in libertarians is consistent with previous research about the relationship between disgust and conservative attitudes on social issues, particularly those related to sexuality (e.g. MFQ-Purity in Study 1). Libertarians may not experience the flash of revulsion that drives moral condemnation in many cases of unorthodox behavior."
"Libertarians score the lowest of any group on empathizing [empathy and understanding the social world], and the highest on systemizing (also see Figures 3 and 4). In fact, libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than on empathizing. Given that these traits are known to differ between men and women, it is important to examine these effects in each sex separately. Table 3 shows that the same effects hold when looking only at men, and when looking only at women."
"Libertarians may enjoy thinking about complex and abstract systems more than other groups, particularly more than conservatives."
"Our results suggests that libertarians are particularly unemotional in their moral deliberations."
"Libertarians were the only group to report a more systematic, rather than empathic, way of understanding the world, a characteristic of men that may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women."
"Libertarians also reported lower levels of agreeableness, measured using items such as “likes to cooperate with others”."
"Study 3 tests the idea that libertarians will be more individualistic and less collectivist compared to both liberals and conservatives, suggesting that their moral concern for liberty may represent the conversion of this preference into a value."
"The Individualism-Collectivism scale is a 32-item scale that measures an individual's levels of independence vs. interdependence. Individualists tend to emphasize self-reliance, independence and (sometimes) competition. There are two types of individualism: horizontal individualism reflects a belief that people are separate (independent) but equal entities (e.g. “I am a unique individual”), and vertical individualism emphasizes hierarchy and competitiveness between those separate entities (“It is important that I do my job better than others”). Collectivists, on the other hand, tend to emphasize cooperation, and (sometimes) equality. As with individualism, there are two kinds of collectivism, a more egalitarian (horizontal) dimension (e.g. “The well-being of my coworkers is important to me.”) and a more hierarchical (vertical) one (e.g. “Children should be taught to place duty before pleasure.”). The measure was completed by 2,975 participants (1,468 men; 1,987 liberals, 390 conservatives, and 291 libertarians).
Results.
Table 4 shows that libertarians scored lowest on both forms of collectivism, and highest on horizontal individualism, while matching conservatives on their high scores (relative to liberals) on vertical individualism."
"Table 4 shows that libertarians are less identified with their community compared to both liberals and conservatives. They also scored low (just below liberals) on identification with country, which was the dimension that conservatives most strongly endorsed. In addition, they scored low (equal to conservatives) on identification with people all over “the world,” which was the dimension that liberals most strongly endorsed."
"Table 4 shows that libertarians showed the lowest levels of loving feelings toward others, across all four categories [(friends, family, generic others, and their romantic Partner).]"
- Iyer R, Koleva S, Graham J, Ditto P, Haidt J (2012) Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLoS ONE 7(
: e42366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366https://forum.liberaux.org/index.php?/topic/4314-type-de-personnalit%C3%A9-des-lib%C3%A9raux/&tab=comments#comment-17495
