The Meta-Narrator

Moral Foundations Theory is very popular with the media. Its creator, Jonathan Haidt, speaks to standing-room-only crowds around the nation. Our local, modest-sized public library owns ten (ten!) hardcover copies of his book, The Righteous Mind. In social psychology, it’s a Big Deal.

In a nutshell, Moral Foundations Theory says there are basic foundations that underlie people’s moral beliefs and values. The five foundations that Haidt and his colleagues have written about most often are:
Harm/Care (don’t harm people, take care of people, relieve suffering)
Fairness/Justice (treat people fairly)
In-Group Loyalty (support the value of the group you identify with, such as your nation)
Authority (respect traditional authority)
Purity/Sanctity (don’t do disgusting or unnatural things)

Interesting, huh? There’s a reason people are so excited about Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). It’s really appealing to be able to think and talk about the basic building blocks of morality, and Haidt’s book intriguingly relates his “foundations” to key aspects of human evolution. He also stands firmly in the camp of “moral intuitionism,” believing that people’s moral responses tend to be automatic, gut-level reactions. These reactions can contribute to more effortful moral reasoning, but they also shape our beliefs and behavior just on their own. I agree.

My problem with MFT is in how Haidt and his colleagues interpret their data – which, coincidentally, is what’s brought them so much publicity. The very first big finding from the MFT team is that conservatives make use of all five of the moral foundations, but liberals – supposedly – only care about two. Example: “…justice and related virtues (based on the fairness foundation) make up half of the moral world for liberals, while justice-related concerns make up only one fifth of the moral world for conservatives.” Basically, they’re saying that all five foundations are of equal weight, and conservatives are more morally complex than liberals.

In essence, the MFT team identified five basic building blocks for morality, but then, based on their survey data, they conclude that some of these building blocks don’t matter to a large group of people. And that’s just not so. Everyone who cares about right and wrong uses these building blocks, but many of them use them differently than the MFT researchers have studied with their research program. Let’s look at MFT more closely.

The “Moral Foundations” are biased
First, let’s start with the first two foundations, the ones pretty much everyone values: Harm/Care and Fairness/Justice. When designing their MFQ survey (the source of most of their data), the MFT researchers asked about these two foundations in a biased way. Nearly everyone, conservative or liberal, values not harming people and taking care of those we’re personally responsible for, but the MFQ focuses more on taking care of people more generally and animal welfare (two issues more associated with liberals than conservatives), and the MFQ leaves out protection entirely (which usually matters more to conservatives than liberals). In other words, the MFQ is asking people how much they agree with a liberal version of Harm/Care, rather than how much they care about Harm/Care in general.

Turning to Fairness/Justice, the same kind of bias appears again. Conservatives and liberals both care about treating people fairly, of course, but they tend to mean different things by it. Conservatives usually care more strongly about making sure people are repaid for their actions (especially their misdeeds), and liberals care more about equal opportunity and level playing fields. The MFQ focuses more on the latter and, again, is biased more towards the liberal end of the U.S. political spectrum.

And three of the “foundations” are actually about something else
The real problem with MFT, though, is the way they talk about the other three foundations, which they describe as the “binding foundations” that keep groups working together. When they ask their MFQ survey questions about loyalty, authority, and purity, they’re mostly looking only at one specific domain of behavior that matters primarily to social conservatives. The gist of their Loyalty and Authority questions is: Should we put our group ahead of both individuals and humanity at large (Loyalty), and rely on our group traditions when deciding what to do (Authority)?

The Purity questions also tie into this general theme of valuing the group. They ask how important it is to do things that are pure and decent, to avoid things that are disgusting or unnatural, and to practice chastity. They leave it to the reader to imagine the types of activities that might be impure, indecent, disgusting, or unnatural, but – at least for conservatives – the popular associations of these terms are readily evident. The MFQ Purity questions may not have been intended this way, but many survey respondents are likely interpreting them as asking about sexuality, that is, Reproductive Purity. This is primarily a concern for those who care about regulating both the conformity and (since sex can lead to babies) the membership of a group.

Essentially, the MFT “binding foundations” are really looking at whether or not people have moralized the idea of in-group integrity: putting the group first, relying on traditions, and worrying about unregulated sexuality like sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, and (especially in earlier generations) marriage outside the group.

In general, U.S. conservatives think that in-group integrity is a moral issue and U.S. liberals do not (although it turns out that liberals who attend church are more likely to agree with conservatives that this is important). That means the Moral Foundations people have done something specific with three-fifths of the MFQ questions: They’ve basically rigged their survey into an either/or test of whether you’re a conservative (or at least, whether you have “traditional” values). For the first two foundations, they ask how much you agree with liberal ideas, and for the other three, they ask how much you agree with conservative/traditional ideas.

As a test of conservatism, it’s a useful thing to have, and the MFQ is more friendly (less hostile or condescending) towards conservatives than some of the other surveys psychologists have used. But it’s simply not correct to claim that these three ideas (valuing in-group loyalty, respect for traditional authority, and promoting reproductive purity) are “foundations” on the same level with concepts like harm prevention and justice, when they’re really just asking people whether or not they’ve moralized one domain, in-group integrity.

Fortunately, the ideas underlying their Loyalty, Authority, and Purity can be salvaged. Not only can these three concepts be used to assess social conservatism, but when they’re reinterpreted more broadly, they can help us identify and understand a wide variety of moralized domains.

A more comprehensive approach
As I’ve shown here and here, the types of questions the MFQ asks about loyalty, authority, and purity can be used for numerous domains, not just in-group integrity. Here’s an illustration of how the “moral foundations” can be mapped onto my “moralization steps.”

MFT’s Loyalty becomes just one domain of moral concern, something people might care about and want to moralize. Harm/Care and Justice/Fairness are examples of wrongs that might befall a domain (though in the MFQ, remember, they’re asking about these as they apply to individuals, not a domain – it’s part of their liberal bias for these two foundations). Traditional Authority is just one instance of where one might go for moral knowledge, and Purity/Sanctity can appear in many, many contexts beyond chastity, indecency, and “unnatural” acts.

I’m basically reinterpreting the ideas underlying MFT in a way that’s much broader and much more useful. With my model, you can study any moralized topic, see how its proponents have used the steps, and consider whether they’re oversimplifying things when appealing to “purity” and whether a more complex take on the topic would be more reflective of reality.

Or, if you really wanted a thorough model of people’s moral intuitions, you could create a survey that asked about dozens of “foundations” in sets of three: one to establish a domain as important and threatened, one to show what types of authority people tend to respect where this domain is concerned, and one to bring in the “purity” motivator. I don’t think this would be all that practical, but it would help overcome the biases in Moral Foundations Theory.

If you want to take the current version of the MFQ yourself, you can do it at the Moral Foundations Theory website, yourmorals.org.

Next time: How several generations of admired writers set out to deliberately moralize a new domain – humanity’s relationship with nature. Muir! Leopold! Carson! Stay tuned.

Last time, I described my model of the cultural process that leads people to adopt new ideas about right and wrong. Before I can really tell the story properly, though, I need to invest a few paragraphs in the nitty-gritty details. Here we go!

To review, the model has four parts:
1. Identify a valued domain.
2. Show that the domain is threatened.
3. Establish a source of moral knowledge.
4. Appeal to the emotionally powerful concept of purity.

Okay.

Threats to Something Valued

Parts 1 and 2 go together. They’re answering the question, “What should we do, and why?” But there’s actually two ways this can work. One way is to focus on some entity that we care about, and a threat to that entity, like “We should protect wilderness because otherwise it will vanish to development and industry.” Another way, though, is to focus on some sort of behavior or activity that we think is desirable (or undesirable), and this behavior might be relevant to multiple domains. A good example is, “We should be vegetarians, because (a) we don’t want to hurt animals, and also we think eating plant-based foods is better for (b) the environment and (c) our own health.” (In fact, when people are vegetarians for moral reasons, research shows that they do tend to “recruit” more and more moral reasons that also matter to them, beyond whatever their initial reasons were.) However complex a moral argument becomes, though, the two basic parts always appear in moralization – something important, and a potential harm to it.

Authority: What’s Right?

Then comes 3: How do we know what to do, and whether we’re doing it right? One answer, of course, is to rely on whatever one’s traditions (religious, legal, community elders) say. Another answer is to defer to science, which makes sense when there’s hard evidence about causation, or at least about risk. When it comes to interpersonal matters, a good source of knowledge is empathic perspective-taking, trying to imagine the relevant thoughts and feelings either of the other people involved or of some credible role-model. What would Jesus, or the Dalai Lama, do? Sometimes direct personal experience is considered a good source of moral knowledge – when John Muir wanted to save Yosemite, he convinced Teddy Roosevelt to go camping there with him, and it worked. And of course, one’s own conscience can be a trusted guide to moral matters.

The Power of Purity

And now for 4, purity. There are several emotionally powerful ideas wrapped up in the concept of purity. Something that’s pure is in an ideal form, especially associated with origins – that is, sometimes it’s the way things are imagined to be before they became diluted or degraded or contaminated with other things (for example, the pure heart of a child, or the pure teachings passed along by the founder of a religious movement). It’s often seen as something’s true or best form (pure water, pure reason). The distance from a pure ideal can be experienced as a lack or need that motivates people to act. Purity is closely associated with the sacred, the transcendent, original conditions, and ultimates. Purity is also closely associated with the opposites of these things: things that are disgusting, reviled, demonic. Each of these ideas can be powerfully motivating, either as things to avoid or things to desire or protect.

Sacredness, in particular, is worth a bit more discussion, because the idea is much more broad than religion. A nation’s flag and historic monuments have a kind of “secular sacred” status, and deliberately damage to them can be seriously upsetting, as can deliberate or careless damage to a wilderness area or a coral reef. Even scientific discovery can be considered a sacred calling that shouldn’t be corrupted by the desire for fame or wealth. People are drawn to what they personally consider sacred and react poorly to its desecration, and people’s ideas of the sacred are strongly influenced by whichever authorities they most respect.

So when people are trying to inspire others to agree with them about the importance of a moral cause, purity has its own emotional impact, and it also reinforces the other three elements. A cause associated with purity is especially important – a threat to small children is perceived much more negatively than the same threat to adults. Purity-related language can highlight the nature of a threat (contamination, for example) – the pollution of pure spring water seems a greater loss than the pollution of everyday, ordinary water. Purity can function as an idealized standard, which becomes part of one’s moral knowledge, telling one how to act and when one is doing things right (coming closer to that standard). And finally, appealing to purity makes any issue simpler and easier to communicate – it becomes more of an either/or, black-and-white issue. It’s hard to argue with someone who believes that life (or anything else) is sacred, except to ask them to be consistent about it.

There’s another way that purity affects motivation, too, and that has to do with fitting things into categories. The anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote extensively about this aspect of purity. In many societies, sometimes including our own, there’s a drive towards creating systems of categories, where everything’s supposed to fit into a category so it can be understood and sometimes managed. We might think of this as a form of “conceptual purity.” Of course, there are always going to be exceptions, and the key issue is how people feel about these exceptions. Sometimes it can be really important to keep things distinct. An observant Jew might feel disgusted by the idea of a cheeseburger, which violates the dietary laws about the importance of keeping two things separate (meat and dairy) that are both fine on their own. Category “violations” can lead some people to feel uneasy and uncomfortable, whereas others might find the same things to be energizing and creative – think of examples in art, for example. Or drag queens.

For people who value having things in their proper categories, there can be a strong motivation to try to stifle and repress (or at a minimum, ignore) things that don’t fit. Those who actively prefer unconventionality, on the other hand, believe that strangeness and mixing things up can be important for societal flexibility and adaptation. And of course nobody’s going to be consistent about this all the time; someone in a “mixed” marriage, or someone who loves “fusion” cuisine, might prefer conventional art and music genres or want men and women to conform to traditional gender roles.

In sum, there are many to appeal to purity when trying to moralize a topic, but as the examples show, there’s a lot of variation in whether any given mention of purity will affect a particular person. It’s likely to depend on the issues the person already cares about, and the types of authority the person already respects, as well as personality differences in terms of comfort with categories vs. ambiguity. Being susceptible to the emotional power of purity seems to be a deep-seated and widespread phenomenon, though, and worthy of further research.

Next time, I’m planning to write about the much-publicized Moral Foundations Theory, and I’ll explain how it fits into my model. In other words: sex and politics. Stay tuned!

Q: What do marine biologist Rachel Carson, civil rights activist Malcolm X, evangelist Jerry Falwell, and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler all have in common?
A. Each of them is, or was, an expert in moralization, the cultural process of changing people’s beliefs about right and wrong.

It seems to me that few topics are more essential to understanding how the world works than figuring out the processes underlying the great social movements of our time, whether we endorse the causes they’re promoting or abhor them. One of these processes is moralization. I’ve recently written a paper on the topic, and while it goes off to the journals for peer review, I’m planning to share the gist of it here.

How does moralization work? My model has four elements:
1. Identify a valued domain. This could be the integrity and well-being of our country, or human health, or wilderness protection – anything one might identify with, care about, and want to take action to protect.
2. Show that the domain is threatened and vulnerable to some form of harm or wrong.
3. Establish a source of moral knowledge that can tell us how to act in this context – how to do the right thing.
4. Appeal to the emotionally powerful concept of purity, both as a motivation to act and a standard to try to meet.

Let’s take a classic example: cigarette smoking.

For the past 20 years, I’ve been working on projects to improve the methods available to people who want to quit tobacco, and I’m fairly well acquainted with both the scientific literature and the ways people talk about their experiences with tobacco. One psychologist, Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania, has done a lot of research on food and morality, and he’s also written a bit about the moralization of smoking, which is how I first learned about the concept.

Fifty years or so ago, smoking was considered a reasonable lifestyle choice – watch the old black-and-white classic films, and it’s pretty much taken for granted that cigarettes and glamour go hand in hand. About half of all American men, and a third of the women, were smokers. Then, of course, people started noticing the relationship between smoking and lung disease, and many people began trying to quit smoking, although the personal freedom of others not to quit was generally respected too. It wasn’t until second-hand smoke became a public health issue that moralization became commonplace. Now, practically everyone knows “you shouldn’t smoke,” or at least, “you shouldn’t smoke around others.”

Which domain is valued here? Human health.
What kind of harm or wrong is threatened? Death or major loss in quality of life, mostly; also people’s right to enjoy clean air.
How do we know what to do? Medical science is the primary authority referred to, but aesthetic factors (our immediate sensory reaction to being around tobacco) also play a part.

When purity comes into the picture, this is where it gets interesting. You can easily make a case that smoking is “wrong” or “bad” without ever talking about purity, but because the ideas associated with purity are so powerful, they inevitably get brought in anyway whenever people are trying to convince others to change their values.

One of the main ways to evoke purity in an argument is by setting it up as a standard and showing that conditions are actually the opposite: contaminated, dirty, disgusting. Smoking is now often described as a “filthy habit,” and indeed, the idea that innocent, helpless children were being exposed to carcinogens and other toxins was probably what most clinched the case against second-hand smoke. Then, as public policies expanded to forbid smoking in workplaces, restaurants, and even many outdoor locations, the moral associations of smoking have spread from the behavior itself to the people involved. A recent Canadian study interviewing current and ex-smokers described the way that smokers have become stigmatized, with such disapproval that a smoker can be shamed and made to feel like a “bad person,” and this experience is probably widespread throughout North America at a minimum.

Sometimes when purity appears in moral discussions it refers to the sacred. Since the authority behind arguments for tobacco control is the medical profession rather than religion, sacredness is unlikely to appear in anti-smoking campaigns. Its opposite, however, does make an appearance. On the home page of the QuitNet website, one of the most popular online quitting programs, visitors are invited to “Beat the Nicodemon at his own game.” Participants on our own ChewFree.com website, for smokeless tobacco users, described nicotine as a demon, a devil, and even a vampire. This kind of metaphor is essentially an “anti-sacredness,” with the same emotional punch as the sacred but in the opposite direction.

Yet another way that purity features in public discussions of smoking and tobacco use is in debates among health care professionals. One camp insists that the goal for every tobacco user should be complete abstinence, and that for doctors to accept any less is a betrayal of their responsibilities; the other camp contends that not everyone is willing or able to quit, and the goal should really be to optimize everyone’s health, regardless of whether or not they’re smoking. The second group might try to encourage people to cut back on their smoking, or to switch to a safer form of tobacco or a non-tobacco form of nicotine delivery. This “harm reduction” approach is the same general idea as a needle exchange for hardcore drug users – not everyone’s going to quit, but let’s at least help them be as healthy as possible anyway. If this controversy reminds you of the debate over teaching high school kids about safe sex vs. abstinence only, or the fat acceptance movement and the health at every size campaign, it should. They’re all examples of one side favoring a simple, purity-oriented standard, and the other maintaining that there’s more to be gained by taking a more complex and nuanced view of things.

In my next post on this topic, I think I’ll describe the four elements of my moralization model in greater depth. Later, I’m planning to write about other examples, like environmentalism, in-group loyalty, and even genocide, which relies on the very same types of moral arguments. Or let me know what you’d like to hear more about!