Somehow I’ve failed to blog a result about libertarians in one of Jonathan Haidt’s recent papers (with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, 2009 — you can request a copy here) on the relationship between political ideology and his five foundations theory of moral sensibility and judgment. (You can read up on that here.)
So here’s some background on the study. Haidt et al have set up a number of online surveys to test their hypothesis about the foundations of moral judgment. This one concerns a survey titled “Sacredness Survey: What Would You Do for a Million Dollars?” During registration, participants reported their political identity. An unusually high number of self-identified libertarians (over 1000 out of a sample of a bit more than 8000) took this survey, so they were able to say something about how libertarian moral judgments differ from conservatives’ and liberals’.
The survey asks participants to do the following:
Try to imagine actually doing the following things, and indicate how much money someone would have to pay you (anonymously and secretly) to be willing to do each thing.
They go on to say that you should assume nothing bad will happen to you and that you can’t use the money to make up for your choice. The survey asks how much money someone would have to pay you to kick a dog in the head, renounce your citizenship, get a blood transfusion from a child molester, and so on. Participants were given these options: $0 (I’d do it for free), $10, $100, $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, a million dollars, and never for any amount of money.
All right? So Haidt et al found that the results supported their hypothesis about liberals and conservatives. Liberals care most about the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations and accordingly largely refused to make trade-offs on the items that reflected these concerns, but were more willing to perform actions that violated the three “binding” foundations — Ingroup, Authority, and Purity. Conservative concern was spread more evenly over the five foundations, and they were less willing than liberals to violate Ingroup, Authority, and Purity for money.
What about libertarians? Here’s what they say:
Because we had a large sample of libertarians, who are usually ignored in political-psychological research, we compared their sacredness reactions to those of liberals and conservatives. Overall, libertarians showed less refusal to violate the five foundations for money that did liberals or conservatives. Each of the five average never scores for libertarians was lower than the corresponding score for conservatives, and each was lower than the corresponding concern for liberals.
Further down they report:
A further novel finding of the present study was that libertarians had the lowest sacredness scores on all five foundations. This finding supports Tetlock’s predictions [see here] that free-market libertarians would be the least outraged and most open to contractualizing moral violations. The differences were particularly stark between libertarians and conservatives on the three binding foundations. Libertarians may support the Republican Party for economic reasons, but in their moral foundations profile we found they more closely resemble liberals than conservatives. [Emphasis added]
This supports what I’ve been saying for a while now: libertarians are liberals who like markets.
An interesting feature of the Sacredness Survey is that the set-up seems to assume that Purity/sanctity dimension is recruited to reinforce the other dimensions of the moral sense. When we come to find it disgusting to, say, kick a dog in the head, we’re using the Purity/sanctity foundation to amplify the force of our Harm/care judgments. It stands to reason that those with the least tendency to make judgments on the basis of the Purity/sanctity responses would also be least likely to find it intolerably profane to bring moral considerations into the cash nexus.