Optical Non-Political L/C-Mind Discriminator?

[Updated 14 July see "TRUTH"] Is there a non-political optical illusion that could discriminate L-minds from C-minds? That is the challenge Joel posted in an earlier Comment.

I thought about it and adapted the image Joel linked to and came up with a new image that shows a number of cylinders on a field of light and dark squares.

Using the cylinder labeled "A" as a reference, and using your powers of absolute judgement, which of the numbered cylinders is the most similar to "A"? Which is the most different?

Please post a Comment and express your answer as a two-digit number, the first being the number of the cylinder that is the most like "A" and the second the number of the most different from "A". (Of course, also say if you have Liberal or Conservative tendencies.) If you wish, I'd appreciate it you tell us how you came to these conclusions.

DISCUSSION

Joel wrote, in part: "When I started studying my concept of inborn L/C-minds, I hoped that I could find a simple non-political discriminator. It would be interesting to find an optical illusion that would do this. The trouble with most of them is that they are universal. ... It would be wonderful if L-minds saw one and C-minds saw the other at least at first glance. That would be proof of a wiring difference unconnected to education."

A few days from now, I will update this posting and indicate why I think this might possibly be a valid test of L- vs C-minded tendencies (or not :^).


TRUTH [the following was added July 14th]


The image below shows the "truth" about the five numbered cylinders as they relate to cylinder "A". Spoiler - Don't scroll down to the image unless you have thought about the issue for a while.


As Joel and Howard noted in their Comments, at first glance, "51" appears to be the answer. Cylinder "5" looks most like "A" in shading and size and "1" looks least like "A", much lighter in shading.


However, further "logical" consideration reveals some problems with that initial conclusion. The cylinders do not seem to conform to the laws of illumination. How can a cylinder in the shadow of the larger green cylinder have a bright top? Also, Howard remembered the base image is an optical illusion and the squares behind "A" and "3" are actually the same exact shade. Thus, since neither cylinder "A" nor "3" have a left edge, their left sides must also be the same exact shade.


So, how does this relate to L/C minds?

IRA'S L/C MIND THEORY

I have a theory that we each have both an L-mind and a C-mind, and we learn to use each of them to maximum advantage. We need both to survive and prosper in the real world.

Our L-mind is "warm-hearted" and "instinctual". Our C-mind is "hard-nosed" and "logical". Those of us with L-minded tendencies, tend to use more of that side of our intellect and vice-versa for those of us with C-minded tendencies.

For example, most L-minds would subscribe to Benjamin Franklin's notion that "it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer". Our L-mind imagines the anguish we would feel if we were wrongly convicted of a crime and sent to rot in jail.

Most C-minds would ask "Why 100? Why not 1000 (Maimonides)? Or 10 (Blackstone)? Or 1 (Trajan)? Should the number be higher or lower for capital cases?" A C-mind would inquire as to the recidivism rate: "How many of the hundred guilty would in future commit crimes that victimize other innocent persons?" Our C-mind imagines the anguish we would feel if we, or other innocents, were victimized by a guilty person who had previously been aprehended and tried for a serious crime but had been set free due to a crafty lawyer or some technicality.

In many situations it is important to react "instinctually" - "kill or be killed". In many other situations we have the time and resources to act more "logically" - "checks and balances". My point is that L-minds tend to react "from the heart" while C-minds "from the head". I thought my optical illusion problem might separate the two.

SO, WHAT IS THE TRUTH"

Back to the image! After logical consideration, it is clear that the instinctual "51" cannot be correct. There is something out of place about all the small cylinders. Those in the shadow of the large green cylinder should not have bright right sides, yet they do. Those outside the shadow of the large green cylinder should cast shadows of their own and yet they do not.

Clearly, these small cylinders are not in the original optical illusion image, but have simply been pluncked down in front of the image to confuse the viewer. Take them out of that image and put them on a uniform white background and the truth will come to the fore.

Cylinder "3" is identical to "A". Cylinder "4" is both larger and darker, so it is the most different. Thus, the correct answer is "34".

Ira Glickstein

Were Plato and Aristotle L-minds or C-minds?

Were Plato and Aristotle L-minds or C-minds


Although I might have posted this as a comment within a previous thread, it's simply easier to find a conversational thread when it's listed as a title in the archives. My comments here are stimulated by a remark made by H. Pattee, which I thought might be interesting to pursue.

H. PATTEE’s 07/07/07, 07:07 AM response to IRA’s comment of July 3, 2007 10:31 PM

IRA: The L-mind is distrustful of the wisdom of the citizenry (for good reason) and thinks they need an intellectual elite to guide them down the correct path.

HP: This is wrong historically and wrong today. It was C-mind elitist like Plato and Aristotle that distrusted the citizenry. Plato thought philosopher kings should rule. Aristotle called democracy “mob rule.” The L-mind actually began as a revolt against elitist C-mind monarchies and aristocracies.

Modern L-minds and C-minds can be discriminated through the use of a series of questions concerning public policy and personal responsibility issues. It is impossible to go back over 2300 years and ask these same questions, since even with time travel, the questions would be meaningless to Plato and Aristotle. However, if we can establish objective criteria and basic properties for L-minds and C-minds without being biased by partisanship, we can surmise from their writings what type of mind these philosophers might have had.


I believe commenter H. Pattee is wrong when he accuses Plato of being a C-mind elitist. First of all it has not been demonstrated that C-minds are elitist. That's just political rhetoric speaking. In fact, as Ira points out C-minds generally propose solutions to problems which respect the individual and his or her capability and independence. L-minds seem to prefer solutions which assume the individual incapable or functioning without outside intervention. L-minds generally support ERA, racial quotas, labor unions and minimum wages.

Plato's notion of the "philosopher king" certainly doesn't make him an "elitist" as proposed by H. Pattee. Plato was in favor of a meritocracy (in The Republic). Anyone could become a philosopher king if they had the talent. Plato also favored equal rights for women including equal access to military training. Both Aristotle and Plato had a problem with pure democracy in their historical analyses of the constitutions of various governments. They both believed that democracy inevitably led to government by tyrants and the loss of rights of the individual. They observed that democracy led to an elite which catered to, and then manipulated the mob to the detriment of the individual. According to modern day Libertarians, we are witnessing that progression today.

In terms of the objective criteria we have been talking about, I think that Plato was a top-down thinker, while Aristotle was a bottom-up thinker. Plato saw the world in terms of broad principle such as Justice and Right and Dignity. He deduced correct behavior by questioning whether such and such an action would be consistent with the broad intuitive principles. Aristotle, on the other hand, was an experimentalist, closely observing the world around him. Alexander the Great's soldiers carried samples of flora from all over the world back to Aristotle. He then theorized the broad reasons why nature was so constructed.

I'm sure that by picking and choosing among the vast writings of these two thinkers, we can find support for either L-mind or C-mind status. This would probably be useful in clarifying our notions. But, let's not forget that we're dealing with a couple of very special minds that were perhaps capable of approaching the world from either direction.

P.S. It is also not true that "The L-mind actually began as a revolt against elitist C-mind monarchies and aristocracies." That period started with revolts of serfs who believed they had natural rights against their masters. That belief in oneself (as opposed to the hierarchy) is a characteristic of the C-mind. It's easy to confuse the word "liberal," because it has changed so much over the centuries. For example, the French still call their Republican Party, "the liberals." I hope we can steer clear of partisan assumptions about one another and avoid equating political thinking and philosophical thinking.

[Minor typo and long quote structure edit by Ira]

Dilbert Bridges the Liberal/Conservative Divide.

I've often said that Dilbert is "the story of my life."

Well, this recent strip is, IMHO, the funniest (and most true) ever.

This strip has triggered quite an active cross-discussion on the Dilbert website. Unfortunately, some of the comments are "flaming" (hostile and insulting interaction), so be forewarned.

However, one comment that caught my eye included a pithy P. J. O'Rourke quote:

"The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors — psychology, sociology, women's studies — to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view."

-- P.J. O'Rourke

This strip also plays into the Liberal/Conservative (L/C) theme of quite a few postings on this blog, with links to some below.

Just click on the blue titles to read them. Some include serious, extended, courteous cross-discussion
between me and my friends and colleagues, including the Chairman of my PhD committee, Howard Pattee. Some of those may even qualify to be published alongside the dialogs and writings about Socrates by Plato and Aristotle. Enjoy!

L-MINDS AND C-MINDS

A series of Topics and Comments on the Liberal Mind (L-Mind) or Conservative Mind (C-Mind) we observe in many of our fellow human beings.
Click for: 1 - Fallibility, 2 - More on..., 3 - Origin of..., 4 - Plato and Aristotle..., 5 - Even More on ...,6 - L/C Persistence, 7 - Still More on, 8 - L/C Presentation, 9 - Back to L/C Basics, 10 - L/C Mental Health, 11 - Voting and Notions of Fairness, 12 - L/C Good Vibes vs Good Deeds, 13 - Lessons from Tuskegee Experiment, 14 - Haidt's Paper: What the Democrats Don't Get, 15 - Carbon Tax a Loser (Too Bad), 16 - L/C Minds and Temper, 17 - Vi and Ira: L/C Minds on AP Video, 18 - Haidt's TED Talk: L/C Five Channels of Morality.

Ira Glickstein

Origin of L-minds and C-minds

[Figure added by Ira]


L-Minds and C-Minds

I see from a comment using the terms "Bush-Cheney", "cronies" and "corrupt incompetence" that we are beginning to get into dangerous waters. In part this is my fault because I failed to properly introduce the concept of L-minds and C-minds. These terms are specifically designed to avoid political wrangling. Such wrangling is in fact antithetical to their notion. Unfortunately, y'all have come in in the middle of a conversation between Stu and myself, thus missing important background. I think the best approach is to give little history from my side.

Some ten years, ago I started a conversation with myself. I'm a conservative and a university colleague of mine, for whom I have great respect, is a liberal. We differ on virtually every issue having to do with public policy and individual responsibility. Yet, we have respect for one another's intelligence in our fields of engineering science. How is it that two people of similar intelligence and cultural background come up with such different views, so different that the other seems irrational? I concluded that our impression of each other's defective reasoning had to be wrong and a product of something fundamentally different about our minds. I coined the terms L-minds and C-minds in order to avoid political implications. (Those of you who know our dear departed liberal friend, John Filley, might be interested to know that for a time we worked on the concept together.)

Politics and politicians should have nothing to do with this discussion. Politics is the art of the possible, according to one observer. As such, it involves compromises that are associated with getting re-elected that clutter the picture. I'm not interested in whether or not one politician or another is a "good guy" or a "bad guy." They are not distilled versions of L-minds and C-minds. Quite the opposite. Examining politicians and politics gets us nowhere in the analysis of the fundamental mental differences that cause the population in general, to split consistently into two camps in their judgment concerning public policy and personal responsibility.

I start with this assumption. If an L-mind thinks a C-mind is consistently irrational and a C-mind thinks an L-mind is consistently irrational then the odds are that their views of each other are defective. I'm interested in discovering the fundamental differences in their reasoning that are not due to error, but are due to a logical and rationally allowable choice of approach. The requirement that I impose on myself is that there be a certain degree of symmetry that favors neither side. Let me give an example.

L-minds and C-minds seem to differ in the location of their point-of-view. The L-mind chooses to step forward and view the situation from as close as possible. The C-mind chooses to step back and view from a great distance. Neither of these points of view can said to be the correct one. They are simply different. The first leads to empathy while the second leads to sympathy. In a recent debate I had with an L-mind on the subject of illegal immigration, he used the phrase "You wouldn't feel that way if you stood in their (the illegal immigrant's) shoes." He empathized with the undocumented alien, while I only sympathized with their plight. He felt the need save them from their fate, while I felt sorry for them and wanted to mitigate their damages, but considered them as necessary casualties viewed from a national or international perspective. He believed that I was cold and had no compassion, while I believed he had no common sense. Both of us were wrong about the other. We simply chose to stand in two different frames of reference when solving a problem.

I have identified other choices that separate L-minds and C-minds, which I will not go into in this introduction. I repeat that the differences need to be non-political, fundamental and symmetrical. (Ideally, they need to be something that could be programmed into a rule-based expert system.) One should strive to escape from the shadow of one's own bias. The reward for this is a better understanding of our neighbors and less animus toward those with differing opinions. With respect -Joel

The TED Talks - Five Channels of Morality

Howard linked to this TED Talk in a Comment on a previous Topic. I think it is worthy of being a new Topic so I am copying it here, along with Joel's positive Comment as well as my favorable take on it.

Jonathan Haidt's views on the five channels of morality were previously posted by Stu. Howard also posted a previous link to a TED talk on memes. If Howard, Joel, Stu, and Ira agree on the importance of a concept, and the value of TED talks, we can't all be wrong, can we? ("Great minds think alike" but "fools seldom differ" or something like that :^)

Please view the 19-minute TED video because it is definitely worth your time.

Here is my short version, using screen captures from the video with some annotation I added.

The image above shows what Haidt posits are the five channels or tools or foundations of traditional morality: 1) Harm-Care, 2) Fairness-Reciprocity, 3) Authority-Respect, 4) Ingroup Loyalty, and 5) Purity-Sanctity.

The graph shows the result of over 23,000 US respondants who took the online test at http://www.yourmorals.org/

You may want to take the test and report your personal results here as a Comment.

Haidt points out that self-described liberals rate Harm and Fairness very high.

They rate Authority, Ingroup, and Purity very low.

Conservatives rate all nearly equally, with Harm at the top and Fairness at the bottom, but all in a tight range.

Moderates score between the extremes.

The final image indicates why liberals reject three of the five tools of traditional morality, in Haidt's view:


LIBERALS REJECT> Ingroup Loyalty (they CELEBRATE DIVERSITY)

LIBERALS REJECT> Authority-Respect (they QUESTION AUTHORITY)

LIBERALS REJECT> Purity-Sanctity (they say KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY)





HOWARD'S COMMENT
Ira exhibits another C- vs. L-mind difference that...
November 12, 2008, 9:46:00 PM(Howard Pattee)

Ira exhibits another C- vs. L-mind difference that I think makes sense. C-minds make judgments based on the past performance over a lifetime.

L-minds make judgments based on the potential of youth for the future. If I judged my students on C-mind criteria, I would fail as a teacher.

Here is a TED talk about C- and L-minds that I think pretty much covers the conclusions of our own discussions, except that it does appear liberally biased to some conservatives. Remember, he is speaking to an audience that is mostly liberal. The comments are also interesting.

In this post-US-election week, TED is passionately discussing Jonathan Haidt's talk on the difference between liberals and conservatives.


JOEL'S COMMENT
Howard said:If I judged my students on C-mind crit...
November 13, 2008 (joel)

Howard said: If I judged my students on C-mind criteria, I would fail as a teacher. Here is a TED talk about C- and L-minds that I think pretty much covers the conclusions of our own discussions, except that it does appear liberally biased to some conservatives. Remember, he is speaking to an audience that is mostly liberal. The comments are also interesting.

Joel responds: Thanks for the citation. I think it was an excellent presentation. I especially liked the fact that he tied the prewired part of morality to evolution. Although he and the audience (or his expectation of the audience) appear to be L-minds, the theory itself seems pretty free of bias to me.As for judging students, it seems to me that you aren't making allowances for ALL of Haidt's five criteria.

A C-mind would also be concerned with fairness and therefore judge based upon the current course only.

I've seen teachers (both L-minds and C-minds) make allowances, based upon excellent performance in previous courses. I condemn such a practice (although frankly I've occasionally been a beneficiary as a student).

On the other hand, the grade point average is cumulative. It's the appropriate measure for recruiters and graduate school admission. I must say that I've seen recruiters give somewhat more weight to the last year. I've also seen a recruiter overlook lackluster academic achievement based upon a candidate's impressive performance at the interview. Is the latter situation comparable to the selection of Obama over McCain?

With respect -Joel

Ira Glickstein


NOTE: See the : Morality profiles of the participants in this cross-discussion.

Still More L/C MInds

Stu recently wrote that he thought the tendency to be "judgmental" might be a characteristic of the C-Mind. That's an interesting assertion and worth following up on, in my opinion. First we need to review the rules of the game, at least as far as I've proposed them. The first is that we agree that there is great fallibility in the human mind. The second is that the C-mind's view of the L-Mind and vice-versa are flawed. The third is that characteristics, if they have any hope of being true, need to be non-partisan, non-pejorative and symmetrical.

Although there is something to this "judgmental" appellation, we need to find other words less confrontational and negative. My dictionary defines the word in negative terms: tending to make moral judgments. example; to avoid a judgmental approach when dealing with divorced couples. The word became popular during the 1960's when young people and pop psychologists labeled those who disliked the new morality as being "judgmental." The concept itself is much older, dating at least from the time of Jesus, who admonished "Judge not that ye be not judged."

Let's find an example of this behavior that we can all live with, and then find appropriate labels. Desi and Lucy have been married for many years. Desi starts fooling around with his secretary and decides to leave Lucy and the kids. Fred has habitually gone bowling with Desi on Thursday night. After the divorce Fred makes excuses to avoid Desi. When questioned by Ethel, his C-Mind replies that he can't associate anymore with a person who has revealed himself to be so lacking in moral character. What if everyone behaved that way? Ethel tells him he's being ridiculous. Her L-Mind says that Desi has done nothing to harm Fred and that it's none of Fred's business. He should quit being so judgmental.

If you agree that the above is an example of the thinking so often labeled "judgmental" and "non-judgmental", please see if you can provide adjectives which classify the two kinds of thinking. Make an effort not to bias the labels or use pejorative terms. I have a suspicion that this is actually a sub-set of the proximity factor we have previously discussed. L-Minds tend to value examining a situation on a personal basis, trying to understand motivation as much as possible. C-Minds place more value on examining from a distance on a global basis. Note that both are capable of thinking at either proximity, but they VALUE the approaches very differently. With respect -Joel

Do Liberals Consume More Health Care than Conservatives?

The stereotypical Conservative (C-Mind) is well-off financially, attends religious services regularly, and tends to vote Republican, while the stereotype Liberal (L-Mind) is less well-off, less likely to attend religious services, and tends to vote Democratic. Of course there are many well-known exceptions, but I think reasonable people would accept these generalizations on average. One would think that C-Minds, having more disposable income, would tend to spend more on medical care than their poorer L-Mind colleagues. If one thinks that, one would be surprised by the following maps. [Click maps for larger versions.]

L/C Mental Health

This posting relates to our previous discussions of the limitations of polls and our L-mind C-mind dichotomy. The following, from Gallup indicates a linear relationship between self-reported mental health and party affilliation.



According to Gallup, "Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education."

The following chart shows that even low-income Republicans report better mental health than Democrats with similar incomes. As expected, Democrats with higher incomes report 17% better mental health than Democrats with lower incomes, but high-income Republicans report 19% better mental health than high-income Democrats and 36% bettter mental health than low-income Democrats!

Of course, Democrats and Republicans do not exactly map to L-mind and C-mind, but that is at least an approximation.

Some portion of the population will not participate in polls and others will tell the pollsters what they think they want to hear or what will make the pollster think more highly of them - or they may lie outright. Thus, despite the best efforts of the pollsters, the results may or may not represent the actual opinions of the total population.

Never-the-less, poll results may be the best information available for certain things. Also, the high visibility of polls indicates that media audiences tend to pay attention to them.

On the other hand, since the differences are so strong (20% difference between Republicans and Democrats) there is a good chance the conclusions are true. Therefore all you L-minds, if you adopt some C-mind attitudes, your mental health may actually improve (or, at least, you may think it has improved! :^)

Ira Glickstein

(feeling mentally healthy)

Back to L/C basics

Before we became enmeshed in these statistical concerns, which I think illustrate the near fruitlessness of population studies, Howard brought up an interesting concern. I've reexamined my principle that C-Minds make moral judgments about personal problems based upon broader impact. (Recall that Fred said that he couldn't keep bowling with Ricky, because it would encourage cheating in the general population. Ethel tried to sympathize with and forgive Rickie's yielding to temptation.) Even though Howard's torture case doesn't quite fit the situation, I'll revise my analysis.

Both L-Minds and C-Minds will examine specific applications when offered a piece of global legislation or general policy. If one proposes a policy which outlaws the use of torture (I won't bother to define this term, since Howard and Ira disagree as to its meaning.) then all kinds of minds will demand that nebulous terms be clearly defined. All kinds of minds will ask "what if?" (As I've said before, I'm not interested in what politicians say, since they are motivated by electoral and partisan considerations that obscure their L/C Mindedness.)

Hmmm. Now that I think about it, I may have spoken too soon. Maybe specifics are not a universal desire. Two cases come to mind. The ERA was opposed by many C-Minds, because it was too general and would place too many issues in the hands of the courts. L-Minds argued the general principle was sufficient and that the courts could iron out the details. The same was true for the Americans with Disabilities Act. The law was lacking in specifics and subject to judicial interpretation. The latter resulted in the removal of street toilet facilities in New York City, because they couldn't be made wheelchair accessible. So, I guess I'm still uncertain about the underlying principle. I believe it's there but I can't seem to find it.


I would just like to clarify something. The kind of principles I'm looking for, should allow one to design an expert system capable of doing what you and I easily do intuitively. The expert program would be able to take any problem whether public or personal and select an L-Mind or C-Mind position. If it is a rule-based system we ought to be able to set of rules that would make this possible. ( I'll let someone else worry about the parser.) I believe this thought experiment will reveal some interesting things about the thinking process. With respect -Joel

Our Moral Profiles

UPDATED 20 Nov 2008

See our Blog Topic on Five Channels of Morality based on Jonathan Haidt's TED Talk 19-minute TED video.

Please take the online test at http://www.yourmorals.org/ and report your scores in a Comment to this Topic. The above graph compares the moral profiles of the average L-MIND and C-MIND with the profiles of members of this Blog.

• The L-MIND profile starts off high for the first two channels and then trails sharply downward for the final three.
  
• The C-MIND profile is pretty level all across the channels.
  
• Ira starts off moderately low at Harm and slowly increases over the remaining channels.
  
• Steve Ruberg has a "u" profile that is higher at either end, for Harm and Purity.
  
• Stu starts off extremely high at Harm and then steadily goes downhill to very low at Purity.
• Howard is all over the place like a "sawtooth wave", relatively high on Fairness and Ingroup and low on Authority and Purity.
• Joel is relatively low on most channels and pretty level across the board.


• The BLOG AVERAGE is pretty level, starting a bit high and ending a bit low.

How can we possibly agree about anything? Or be friends? Yet we are!

TYPE

Harm Fairness Authority Ingroup Purity

L-MIND

3.6 3.7 2.1 2.1 1.3

C-MIND

3.0 3.0 3.3 3.1 2.9

Ira

2.5 3.5 3.5 3.8 4.2

SteveR

3.5 2.8 2.7 2.8 4.0

Stu
4.5 3.8 3.0 2.5 1.2

Howard
2.2 4.2 1.3 3.2 1.2

Joel

2.2 2.7 1.8 2.7 2.5

Ira Glickstein

L/C Persistence

I see from a comment by Howard that I may not have been clear about my L/C brain concept. I'm not suggesting that there is one key characteristic that separates L-minds and C-minds. A dominant local-versus-global point of view is only one that I suggest. Here's another that may prove interesting. I think there's a difference in persistence according to my observations. Although this C-mind is very persistent in personal goals, I fatigue easily when trying to accomplish a communal objective.


For instance. I speak French fluently, although it took me fifteen years to accomplish that, having no real gift for languages. I've worked at oil painting for all my life, taking a month or two on average to complete one painting. I'm still not any good, but I persist. One the other hand, in a committee or public situation, I can debate opponents for one meeting. If the decision is postponed for further discussion, my tendency is to lose interest. My impression from university internal politics is that L-brains can persist forever. What is your impression in this domain?

L/C Mind Neural Research

I'm happy to see that some neural research has been done which impacts our L/C mind concept. Although the work and especially the media reports contain certain biases as can be seen from the critique, it at least validates the concept that we are wired with different neural processes. I think the problem is that the study and ones that preceded it do not use a rule that forbids describing the differences in pejorative terms. It doesn't help that they use the terms conservative and liberal label either. With respect -Joel


Here's the website and a brief quote below.

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v10/n10/abs/nn1979.html;jsessionid=5295E483D9A844426631F547AFEE6E78

Here's the site for a critique of the work.

http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2007/09/david-amodio-responds.html


Title:

Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism
David M Amodio1, John T Jost1, Sarah L Master2 & Cindy M Yee2



Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

[I added the links in clickable form. Ira, 5 Feb 2008]

L/C Presentation

Fallibility and L/C Minds

I'm going to give a talk at our local philosophy club this coming Friday. I would once again like to bounce some ideas off of you folks and see what you think.

During the first half of the talk, I'll talk about fallibility. I'll start with some quotes from Thomas Jefferson, who mistrusted his own judgment when it differed from those around him. I'll talk about the fact that on huge issues like religion the world is highly divided signaling us that a large number of brains are wrong. The high divorce rate is another demonstration that the human brain is a faulty decision maker. Many people make low level decisions concerning job selection, car choice and home selection and are later full of regret. How is this possible?

I'll then review some of the sources of error in human thinking and decision making process such as bad statement of the problem faulty data in, incorrect modeling of the world and incorrect execution. In fact there are so many opportunities for error that one is surprised that we ever get anything right. We are fortunate that most choices are binary and we have a 50/50 chance of being right despite the brain's manifold inadequacies.

We might ask why we have this strange situation. Why is it that nature has screwed up so badly? I believe that the answer is simple. We are not using our brains for the purpose they were intended by nature. That's an anthropomorphic way of saying that our brains evolved to fulfill a life or death survival function, and we use them in ways that are mere "spandrels" or unintended consequences. I'll describe the importance of the brain as a tool to predict the intention of a potential mate, friend or adversary. I'll also discuss the value of the brain in the prediction of the movement and location of game, weather and plant life. All these things have direct implications for survival of the species. Great works of art, literature and philosophy have an effect on the survival of the very few creators involved, but little effect on the propagation of the dna of the creators throughout the population. Therefore, we should not expect a great ability for complex thinking and decision-making to be a common trait in our species. I'll split the audience into small groups and have them see if they can come up with an L/C Mind trait that is non-pejorative.

I'll then move into all this stuff about L-C Minds that we have previously discussed. My objective is to get people to think a little harder about the point of view of others i.e. to show respect. My definition of "to respect" is to act as though there is a possibility that you are wrong and your intellectual adversary is right, no matter how totally farfetched that might seem on the surface.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. With respect -Joel

Amazing Color Illusion - You Can't Deny It Even When You Know It is False

[Modified 10 July - Thanks Joel! See "PPS:"]
See the GREEN and BLUE swirls? Do you believe they are the EXACT same AQUA color?

I copied the area of GREEN swirl labelled as "1" and the area of BLUE swirl "2" and put expanded versions of each adjacent to each other so you can see they are really the EXACT same AQUA color.

OK, now that you know they are the same, look back at the swirls and you cannot make them not look GREEN and BLUE. Can you?

I think this is proof that, at least for color vision, we humans see things in a relative, contextual way rather than an absolute, isolated manner. A computer scanning the image pixel by pixel would have no trouble seeing the same color in both sets of swirls. However, we humans, even when we know for sure they are the same color, cannot dismiss the optical illusion.

Does this perhaps extend to other mental activities? Does it explain the contradictions in L-Mind and C-Mind thinking? L-Minds often willing to allow an otherwise normal unborn baby to be put to death at the whim of the mother while denying the justice system the legitimacy to use the death penalty on the most awful criminal? The C-Mind sometimes insisting that human life, once conceived, has an absolute right to live, while, at the same time, often supporting wars that kill large numbers of innocents as "collateral damage"?

Ira Glickstein

PS: Thanks to my son-in-law Avi for bringing this illusion to my attention on his Blog.


PPS: [Added 10 July] Thanks to Joel for his Comment with a link to an equally compelling optical illusion. I went to Joel's link and downloaded the image. Then I copied part of the "A" GRAY square and part of the "B" WHITE-looking square and pasted them in the upper left corner so you can see they are exactly the same shade of gray!

A Fresh View of Copyright Law in the Digital Age

Larry Lessig is a lawyer and self-proclaimed liberal leftist, but don't let those facts keep you from watching his TED talks! He sheds a bright new light on our previous discussions of L-Mind vs C-Mind issues here at The Virtual Philosophy Club. He has shaken some of my biases and awakened me to new possibilities. Perhaps he will do the same for you.

In the first [click above image to view it], recorded a couple months ago, he contrasts the traditional conservative values with modern liberal ones with logic that will twist your mind into a knot. In the second [click image below to view it], recorded a few years ago, he uses common sence to suggest a balanced view of ownership of creative content.

I'd appreciate your comments. He has clarified and corrected some of my views and, at this point, I am almost completely in agreement with him.

Ira Glickstein

Audio Illusions

[from Joel] We've previously spoken of optical illusions in the hope of differentiating L/C minds. While dog-sitting at my daughter's house yesterday, we took the opportunity to wash some clothes. While the machine was running, I tried to do some plastering around the new shower. I had to stop after awhile because the washer was driving me crazy. It kept repeating "Running bear. Running bear. ........" I'm sure you've all had that kind of experience. It recalled to me camping in a tent and being awakened in the morning to the cooing of doves that repeated over and over, "You're so damned stupid. You're so damned stupid." If you search the web you'll find among other sites the following one:

http://listverse.com/2008/02/29/top-10-incredible-sound-illusions/

A most interesting one is "Phantom Words", a repeated sound that eventually become a word in your own mind. When I played it this morning, all three dogs snappped to attention and a normally silent dog began to bark.

Although most auditory illusions refer to music, some are based on "defects" in our mental interpretation of sound into words. It would be interesting to be able to separate L-minds from C-Minds in this way, or at least as an IQ test that would distinguish intellect from indigestion. -Joel

On a tree by a river a little tom-tit
Sang "Willow, titwillow, titwillow"
And I said to him, "Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing 'Willow, titwillow, titwillow'"
"Is it weakness of intellect, birdie?" I cried
"Or a rather tough worm in your little inside"
-Gilbert and Sullivan (apologies to Ira)

Socialist Utopia Found and Lost

A relative by marriage spent a number of years in a Kibbutz (communal living) in Israel. She recently described how this seemingly idealistic lifestyle, which she enjoyed when she lived there about forty years ago, has since succumbed to the worldly pressures of capitalism.

NOTE (added 10 Sep): At my invitation, the relative mentioned above has posted a Comment below, using the "Anonymous" option. As she mentions, there was lots of information coming at me rapidly and I was not taking written notes, so I got some information factually wrong. I thank my relative for Commenting and I have corrected my Topic text to indicate the corrections. [Changes are indicated by brackets. Material in quotes is from her Comment below.] My erroneous text has been grayed out. I appologize for the incorrect information I included in my original posting.

As she recounted her time in a small (100 person) non-religious (no rabbis allowed) kibbutz south of Beer Sheva in the Negev desert, I found myself drawn by the idealism of the concept and the reality that it could (and did) exist here on Earth during my lifetime. I was sorry to hear how and why she and her husband left the kibbutz for a new life in the US and how, on two subsequent visits, she found the original concept diluted to the point she hardly recognized it.

Could it be that this dedicated C-mind (me) has some L-mind memes kicking around?

Her utopian story awakened my idealistic, utopian imagination!

HER UTOPIAN STORY

She was born and raised in the US in a non-practicing Jewish family and met her husband-to-be while he was visiting from Israel. He had spent his teenage years living on a kibbutz. They married and ended up living in a small kibbutz, one of a group of three that were some distance from each other and quite far from any other settlements.

Living arrangements were simple. Each couple had use of their tiny apartment with a bedroom and a shower and toilet. Everything else was communal.

Children lived in a separarate building and were, in essence, raised by the whole community. With only 100 people, everyone knew everyone else and took responsibility for every child. I was reminded of the saying "it takes a village to raise a child" - in this case it was literally true. (That "African proverb" was made famous by first lady Hillary Clinton's 1996 book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.)

The main work at the kibbutz was farming. They raised much of their own food and sold the excess to fund purchases of supplies. There was sufficient social pressure to assure that everyone worked relatively hard. Work was distributed to everyone according to their abilities. For example, she told me, one man, who was blind, was kept busy sorting lumber by size by feeling it. Another, who was mentally handicapped, was given tasks he could accomplish despite his limitations. Everyone did their share of "grunt" work on the farm and took turns preparing, serving, and cleaning up after communal meals.

No one was paid for their work, except for a small "stipend" that could be used to buy personal items. Social pressure and the public nature of communal living assured that everyone consumed only what they needed.

No one was "in charge". She told me there was one designated person who dealt with the external authorities, but he had no special authority within the kibbutz. There were regular meetings attended by all adults and decisions were reached by general consensus.

Thus, the kibbutz was a living example of the Karl Marx slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (1875). (I have refrained from calling this kibbutz "communist" because that word has gathered the "bad breath" of the totalitarian examples of Stalin's Russia and Mao's China. I think it is better to think of it as idealistic socialism.)

HOW UTOPIA DECLINED

So, I asked, if it was so ideal, why did you and your husband leave?

Well, it turned out that her husband ["wanted to be a success in the business world."] was not satisfied with the productivity of the work arrangements. He, along with some others, wanted to start a factory and hire outsiders to work there and also supply labor for the farm. ["The philosophy of this kibbutz was that all work was to be done by members and if something required extra hands, that work would not be undertaken if it required becoming a 'boss' to outside 'workers.' This arose in one case because we had a few extra fields where peanuts or potatoes could be planted, but not enough 'hands' to do the work, so the fields remained fallow."] The problem with that was the idealistic idea that no one should have any employees and no one should work for anyone else. The whole problem with capitalism, according to this view, is ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class and the necessary exploitation of labor class that that system implies.

Shortly before she and her husband left the kibbutz, a decision was reached to purchase a communal TV set. That, in her opinion, was the beginning of the end of the kibbutz as she knew it!

They came to the US where they completed their educations and found professional employment and raised their family.

THE END OF UTOPIA

She made two subsequent visits to her former kibbutz and sadly recounted how things had changed.

A decision was reached to build a factory and hire outside workers. ["There is now a factory for polymers, but there are only three workers, none hired from outside. The crops have changed to amaryllis for export rather than crops for local and internal consumption. And there is the major difference that they have migrant workers for the fields (interestingly, from Thailand primarily) -- which is so against the Marxist philosophical foundation)."] With additional income, kibbutz members demanded larger stipends and used that money to purchase their own record players and other luxuries.

Children no longer lived in separate housing. Apartments were enlarged to accommodate entire families.

As outside workers were hired to work the farm, more and more kibbutz members found employment outside the kibbutz. The number of kibbutz members working the farm declined to six (out of the total membership that remained about 100). Those earning larger salaries in their outside employment objected to giving their entire earnings to the kibbutz to be shared equally with those working the farm. ["More members now work outside the kibbutz than inside the kibbutz, but it is not true that they resent having their larger salary pooled back into a central source. "] Demands were made for larger stipends and they were met. The level of privately-owned luxuries increased. ["As exposure to material comforts increases, through television and movies -- and the consumer movement, the stipends must grow."]

More and more non-kibbutz Israelis settled in areas near the kibbutz until it was no longer remote from outside influences. The kibbutz had houses built on some of their former farmlands and rented them to non-members. ["While some kibbutzem do rent out houses for outsiders, the kibbutz where I worked and lived does not. Interestingly, of the 100 plus people who lived there in the '60's, so many have remained! I was truly astonished at how many old friends were still there. Of course, the obverse is also true, I did not see that many new people and changes, such as the pending decision to allow individual automobiles, is being pushed by the newer members."]

I must confess I was sad to hear how their utopian, idealistic socialism had been corrupted by capitalistic tendencies. The kibbutz members were now owners of a factory and farm that employed others as laborers and also landlords of rental properties. Oy!

ANY LESSON FROM THIS?

Well, we have been led to believe that democratic socialism does not go far enough and that "real communism" has never been tried.

The problem, we have been told, was with tyrants like Stalin and Mao and others who distorted communism and replaced the privileged capitalist class with "The New Class" (Milovan Djilas) of privileged Communist ruling elite.

The problem was the large scale of supposedly communist countries.

However, the story above has no tyrants at all. It is on a small scale of 100 people who voluntarily agreed to come together on a kibbutz. And yet, it still failed to maintain the idealistic utopian concept. [This apparently was an overstatement by me. My relative disagrees: "I think that by and large it still has maintained most of its Marxist underpinnings, but they are being eroded by time and a shrinking world. The kibbutz movement started primarily from a harsh need; how to survive and how to build an agrarian community with only a handful of people."]

Perhaps the problem is the basic concept: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"?

Perhaps it is irreversibly at odds with inate human nature?

Ira Glickstein

The Female-Mind vs the Male-Mind

Here is a hillarious video by Mark Gungor on how male and female brains are different! PLEASE CLICK AND VIEW IT - YOU WILL ENJOY!

It seems male brains are composed of separate boxes that never touch while female brains are totally interconnected and wired with emotion.

We've discussed the Liberal/Conservative-Mind on this Blog and this video may help to explain why men seem more likely to be C-Minds and women L-Minds according to political polling data.

We have a couple of women Authors on this Blog and, most probably quite a few women Lurkers, and I would especially like to see comments on this video from them.

Ira Glickstein

"Carbon Tax" a Loser (Too Bad)

One key issue in the Canadian parliamentary elections this week was the Liberal Party leader, Stéphane Dion's newfound support for a "carbon tax".

This is a shift for Dion. Previously, only Canada's Green Party supported that type of tax.

Election results indicate the "carbon tax" is a loser. The Conservatives gained 16 seats and the Liberals lost 19. The Conservatives still lack an absolute majority, holding 143 seats to the Liberals 76, with 89 in the hands of three minority parties, the Quebec separatists (50), the New Democrats (37), and the Independents (2). The Greens have zero seats.

As readers of this Blog know I favor a punitive tax on burning of sequestered carbon (oil, gas, coal) as a way to encourage development of nuclear energy and renewable energy (water, wind, biofuels, ...).

All energy used on Earth (with the exception of nuclear) is originally from the Sun.

Some of this energy was delivered to the Earth from the Sun eons ago and was sequestered in the form of carbon and hydrocarbons found in underground deposits of oil, gas, and coal. That carbon was removed from the Earth's atmosphere and, until the industrial age, remained there.

We are now burning increasing amounts of sequestered carbon to energize our mechanized civilization. It is spewing into the atmosphere in the form of man-made carbon dioxide, a "greenhouse gas". Increased levels of carbon dioxide have been detected and are certainly responsible for some percentage of the rise in worldwide temperatures. (The majority of the temperature rise is probably due to Sun and Earth-orbit effects that are beyond our control, but we can control some of the "greenhouse" effects of release of sequestered carbon.)

Nuclear energy is carbon-neutral, and it should be used to reduce cabon emissions, but it is, ultimately, non-renewable.

Until earlier this year, sequestered carbon energy from oil, gas, and coal was considerably less expensive than alternative fuels, which discouraged development of more wind, solar, nuclear, and other sources. The recent spike in oil prices altered that equation, and, as energy prices skyrocketed, many people changed their driving habits and gasoline usage dropped a bit. Interest in alternative energy sources increased.

However, the recent worldwide economic downturn has driven oil prices from about $140/barrel back down to about $70/barrel, half their peak levels. If they remain at these low levels, development of alternate energy will be endangered.

We need to reduce our dependence on sequestered carbon, a non-renewable resource. We must instead power our civilization with the renewable energy that arrives daily from the Sun. As you know, hydroelectric energy is driven by the Sun, which evaporates water from the sea and delivers it as rain that drives our rivers. The Sun also powers the weather, which causes winds that we can capture with wind turbines. Biofuels (including corn and sugarcane-based ethanol) are also powered by the Sun. When we burn biofuels we do release carbon into the atmosphere, but it is carbon that was recently removed from the atmosphere when the crops were grown. As a long-term goal, we may be able to grow crops and then bury them as a way to re-sequester carbon out of the atmosphere.

There are two ways the government can encourage alternative energy. The first is to subsidize it and the second is to punitively tax sequestered carbon as a way to make alternative energy relatively less expensive and allow market forces to do their magic. I favor the second approach. An added benefit of a punitive tax on sequestered carbon is that it will increase the rewards for energy conservation.

According to Wikipedia

The intention of a carbon tax is environmental: to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and thereby slow climate change. It can be implemented by taxing the burning of fossil fuels — coal, petroleum products such as gasoline and aviation fuel, and natural gas — in proportion to their carbon content. Unlike other approaches such as carbon cap-and-trade systems, direct taxation has the benefit of being easily understood and can be popular with the public if the revenue from the tax is returned by reducing other taxes.

As a C-mind, I find it somewhat distressing that my support of a punitive "carbon tax" puts me with the Green Party and Liberal Party of Canada, and other L-minds like President Bill Clinton, and Senators Al Gore and John Kerry. However, Wikipedia notes:

A carbon tax is an indirect tax — a tax on a transaction — as opposed to a direct tax, which taxes income. As a result, some American conservatives have supported such a carbon tax because it taxes at a fixed rate, independent of income, which complements their support of a flat tax.[2]
Prices of carbon (fossil) fuels are expected to continue increasing as more countries industrialize and add to the demand on fuel supplies. In addition to creating incentives for energy conservation, a carbon tax would put renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and geothermal on a more competitive footing, stimulating their growth. Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker suggested (February 6, 2007) that "it would be wiser to impose a tax on oil, for example, than to wait for the market to drive up oil prices."[3]

Ira Glickstein

What the Democrats don't Get

Here is another entry into the L/C-mind discussion.

I got it from the edge.com website. My comments are after the end of the article...

Stu Denenberg

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? [9.9.08]
By Jonathan Haidt

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?

After graduate school I moved to the University of Chicago to work with Shweder, and while there I got a fellowship to do research in India. In September 1993 I traveled to Bhubaneswar, an ancient temple town 200 miles southwest of Calcutta. I brought with me two incompatible identities. On the one hand, I was a 29 year old liberal atheist who had spent his politically conscious life despising Republican presidents, and I was charged up by the culture wars that intensified in the 1990s. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those tolerant anthropologists I had read so much about.

My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and confusion. I dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen. My hosts gave me a servant of my own and told me to stop thanking him when he served me. I watched people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine.

It only took a few weeks for my shock to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. And once I liked them (remember that first principle of moral psychology) it was easy to take their perspective and to consider with an open mind the virtues they thought they were enacting. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, and fulfilling one's role-based duties, were more important. Looking at America from this vantage point, what I saw now seemed overly individualistic and self-focused. For example, when I boarded the plane to fly back to Chicago I heard a loud voice saying "Look, you tell him that this is the compartment over MY seat, and I have a RIGHT to use it."

Back in the United States the culture war was going strong, but I had lost my righteous passion. I could never have empathized with the Christian Right directly, but once I had stood outside of my home morality, once I had tried on the moral lenses of my Indian friends and interview subjects, I was able to think about conservative ideas with a newfound clinical detachment. They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn't think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why the religious right wanted to "thicken up" the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mindset (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later), and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.

On Turiel's definition of morality ("justice, rights, and welfare"), Christian and Hindu communities don't look good. They restrict people's rights (especially sexual rights), encourage hierarchy and conformity to gender roles, and make people spend extraordinary amounts of time in prayer and ritual practices that seem to have
nothing to do with "real" morality. But isn't it unfair to impose on all cultures a definition of morality drawn from the European Enlightenment tradition? Might we do better with an approach that defines moral systems by what they do rather than by what they value?

Here's my alternative definition: morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible. It turns out that human societies have found several radically different approaches to suppressing selfishness, two of which are most relevant for understanding what Democrats don't understand about morality.

First, imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit. All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill, who wrote (in On Liberty) that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Mill's vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians; a Millian society at its best would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other's rights and band together voluntarily (as in Obama's calls for "unity") to help those in need or to change the laws for the common good.

Psychologists have done extensive research on the moral mechanisms that are presupposed in a Millian society, and there are two that appear to be partly innate. First, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights and justice. Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions about fairness and reciprocity.

But now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other's selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness), and wrote, in 1897, that "Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him." A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one's groups over concerns for outgroups.

A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at http://www.yourmorals.org/.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.

Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup, authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers.

The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith." But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights--but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum ("from many, one"). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.

A useful heuristic would be to think about each issue, and about the Party itself, from the perspective of the three Durkheimian foundations. Might the Democrats expand their moral range without betraying their principles? Might they even find ways to improve their policies by incorporating and publicly praising some conservative insights?

The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate doses a sense that "we are all one" is a recipe for high social capital and civic well-being. A recent study by Robert Putnam (titled E Pluribus Unum) found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people's sense of belonging to a shared community. Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns), then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation and a sense of shared identity.

The purity/sanctity foundation is used heavily by the Christian right to condemn hedonism and sexual "deviance," but it can also be harnessed for progressive causes. Sanctity does not have to come from God; the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower, grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher, nobler, and more spiritual. Many liberals criticize the crassness and ugliness that our unrestrained free-market society has created. There is a long tradition of liberal anti-materialism often linked to a reverence for nature. Environmental and animal welfare issues are easily promoted using the language of harm/care, but such appeals might be more effective when supplemented with hints of purity/sanctity.

The authority/respect foundation will be the hardest for Democrats to use. But even as liberal bumper stickers urge us to "question authority" and assert that "dissent is patriotic," Democrats can ask what needs this foundation serves, and then look for other ways to meet them. The authority foundation is all about maintaining social order, so any candidate seen to be "soft on crime" has disqualified himself, for many Americans, from being entrusted with the ultimate authority. Democrats would do well to read Durkheim and think about the quasi-religious importance of the criminal justice system. The miracle of turning individuals into groups can only be performed by groups that impose costs on cheaters and slackers. You can do this the authoritarian way (with strict rules and harsh penalties) or you can do it using the fairness/reciprocity foundation by stressing personal responsibility and the beneficence of the nation towards those who "work hard and play by the rules." But if you don't do it at all—if you seem to tolerate or enable cheaters and slackers -- then you are committing a kind of sacrilege.

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

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STU'S COMMENTS:
I liked this article and generally agreed with most all of Haight's hypotheses.
However, I found this paragraph to be misleading:

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally.

The above paragraph implies that conservatives are not only more complete but more diverse in their ethical positions than liberals. I don't know the reliability and validity of the statistical analysis of the surveys but I find it hard to believe that liberals do not care about "ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity". I think everyone cares about all five of these issues but to varying degrees. I would even go so far as to say that everyone has has the capacity for every belief,emotion and action, good and evil, as everyone else --- but these vary according to the individual which, I guess, is just another way of saying that we're all human.
And to end on a lighter note, here is a "joke" that even a liberal/independent like myself has trouble arguing with...
Amazon.com: HOW AND WHY I BECAME A CONSERVATIVE - nonfiction Discussion Forum

A little pertinent humor:

Right to the point and one of the big differences between Democrat and Republican outlook.

I was talking to a friend of mine's little girl, and she said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, "If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?"

She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people."

"Wow - what a worthy goal!" I told her. "You don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then, I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food or a new house."

She thought that over for a few moments because she's only 6 years old. And while her Mom glared at me, the young child looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?"

And I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party." Her folks still aren't talking to me.