The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [128]
Over the years Haidt and his University of Virginia colleague Jesse Graham have surveyed the moral opinions of more than 118,000 people from over a dozen different countries and regions around the world, and they have found this consistent difference between liberals and conservatives: Liberals are higher than conservatives on 1 and 2 (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity), but lower than conservatives on 3, 4, and 5 (in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity). Conservatives are roughly equal on all five dimensions: lower than liberals on 1 and 2 but higher on 3, 4, and 5. (Take the survey yourself at http://www.yourmorals.org.) The breakdown can be seen in figure 11.
Figure 11. The Five Moral Foundations
Based on surveys of the moral opinions of 118,240 people from more than a dozen countries conducted by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham of the University of Virginia, there is a consistent difference between liberals and conservatives in which liberals score higher than conservatives on moral foundations numbers 1 and 2 (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity), but score lower than conservatives on moral foundations numbers 3, 4, and 5 (in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity). Conservatives are roughly equal on all five dimensions, lower than liberals on 1 and 2 but higher on 3, 4, and 5. The graph is of responses to five subscales of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. GRAPH COURTESY OF JONATHAN HAIDT. SURVEY AVAILABLE AT www.yourmorals.org.
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In other words, liberals question authority, celebrate diversity, and often flaunt faith and tradition in order to care for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice even at the risk of political and economic chaos. By contrast, conservatives emphasize institutions and traditions, faith and family, and nation and creed. They want order even at the cost of those at the bottom falling through the cracks. Of course, there are exceptions to such generalizations, but the point here is that instead of viewing the Left and the Right as either right or wrong (depending on which one you are), a more reflective approach is to recognize that liberals and conservatives emphasize different moral values and tend to sort themselves into these two clusters.
Consider just one study among many on the relationship between generosity and the rule of law. In a 2002 experiment by the economists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter on “moralistic punishment,” subjects were given the opportunity to punish others who refuse to cooperate in a group activity that calls for altruistic giving. The study employed a cooperation game in which the subjects could give money into a shared commons. In the experimental condition in which there was no punishment for “free riding” (people could receive the benefits of being in the group without giving anything into the commons), the experimenters discovered that cooperation among the subjects quickly decayed within the first six rounds of the game. In the seventh round Fehr and Gachter introduced a new condition in which subjects were allowed to punish free riders by taking money from them. This they did with impunity, which immediately triggered a rise in the levels of cooperation and giving by the former free riders.14 Conclusion: in order for there to be social harmony society needs to have in place a system that both encourages generosity and punishes free riding.
There are two such systems in the modern world—religion and government—and both arose about five thousand to seven thousand years ago to meet the needs of social control and political harmony when small bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers, fishermen, and herders coalesced into much larger chiefdoms and states of agriculturalists,