Conservatives Understand Liberals. Liberals Don't Understand Conservatives.

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Ricochet:

Diane Ellis

3/22/12

 

As a conservative living in San Francisco, I often struggle with a sense of alienation because while I know and understand the liberal mindset of my neighbors, acquaintances and friends, I don't perceive them to understand how I think or to care why I hold the beliefs I do. I often encounter gross stereotypes of conservatives — we're xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, judgmental racist bigots who want the rich to get richer and the sick and poor to go ahead and die already to reduce the surplus population. And that's not even taking our foreign policy positions into consideration! That one could actually believe all those ugly things about a fellow American who votes for someone like John McCain instead of Barack Obama is mind boggling.

 

It turns out my perception of how liberals view conservatives isn't too far off the mark. In his *NYT op-ed today, Nicholas Kristof writes that conservatives seem to understand liberals far better than liberals understand conservatives.

 

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The 2009 UVA study linked above explains its findings by positing that liberals form their basis of morality by considering three values: caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty. Conservatives, on the other hand, have a much more complex system of morality. In addition to caring about all of the things liberals do—while of course understanding fairness and liberty in very different ways—conservatives factor in loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity into their conception of morality. It's these added dimensions that seem to baffle the Left. From the study:

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*Politics, Odors and Soap

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

March 21, 2012

 

 

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One academic study asked 2,000 Americans to fill out questionnaires about moral questions. In some cases, they were asked to fill them out as they thought a “typical liberal” or a “typical conservative” would respond.

 

Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.

 

Now a *fascinating new book comes along that, to a liberal like myself, helps demystify the right — and illuminates the kind of messaging that might connect with voters of all stripes. “The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.

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Liberal car in Charlottesville

 

Conservative car in Charlottesville

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The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives

Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, and Jonathan Haidt

University of Virginia

July 24, 2009

 

Abstract

We investigated the moral stereotypes political liberals and conservatives have of themselves and each other. In reality, liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity

more than liberals do. 2,212 U.S. participants filled out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire with their own answers, or as a typical liberal or conservative would answer. Across the political spectrum, moral stereotypes about “typical” liberals and conservatives correctly reflected the direction of actual differences in foundation endorsement but exaggerated the magnitude of these differences. Contrary to common theories of stereotyping, the moral stereotypes were not simple underestimations of the political outgroup’s morality. Both liberals and conservatives exaggerated the ideological extremity of moral concerns for the ingroup as well as the outgroup.

Liberals were least accurate about both groups.

 

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To examine the moral stereotypes that liberals and conservatives hold about each other, we took advantage of a method introduced by Dawes, Singer, and Lemons (1972) of having partisans indicate the attitudes or values of “typical” partisan group members, allowing comparison of these projections with the partisans’ actual answers. Participants completed multiple versions of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ; Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer,

Koleva, & Ditto, 2009). One version asked participants for their own responses; we refer to these as the “actual” scores. The other two versions asked participants to complete the MFQ as a “typical liberal” would, or as a “typical conservative” would; we refer to these as the “moral stereotype” scores. These versions allow us to assess moral stereotypes about liberals and conservatives, and to quantify the exaggeration and accuracy of these stereotypes by comparing them to the responses people gave for themselves, and to the responses given by a nationally representative sample.

 

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The ideological “culture war” in the U.S. is, in part, an honest disagreement about end (moral values that each side wants to advance), as well as an honest disagreement about means (laws and policies) to advance those ends. But our findings suggest that there is an additional process at work: partisans on each side exaggerate the degree to which the other side pursues

moral ends that are different from their own. Much of this exaggeration comes from each side underestimating the degree to which the other side shares its own values. But some of it comes, unexpectedly, from overestimating the degree to which “typical” members of one’s own side

endorse its values. Studies of ingroup stereotypes tend to show that they are more accurate and less exaggerated than stereotypes about an outgroup (Linville, Fischer, & Salovey, 1989), especially for higher-status groups like Whites (Ryan, 1996). However, the current study found that moral stereotypes about an ideological group (e.g., liberals) can be just as exaggerated when held by ingroup members as by outgroup members, and sometimes even more so. We suspect that this is partially due to the continuous nature of political identification, in that one can

imagine members of one’s own group more extreme than oneself (and even believe that “typical” ingroup members are more extreme than oneself). But this may also be a unique feature of moral stereotypes, in that one can exaggerate the moral values of one’s own group in ways that are in line with those same values.

 

The asymmetrical pattern found in moral stereotypes about the individualizing

foundations fits remarkably well with recent work on ideological opponent and own-group misperceptions. Examining co-perceptions of conflicting groups such as pro-life/pro-choice and hawks/doves, Chambers and Melnyk (2006) found that partisans saw their adversaries as motivated by an opposition to their own core values, rather than being motivated by promotion of the adversaries’ values. This is consistent with the moral stereotypes that liberals appear to have of conservatives: liberals see conservatives as being motivated by an opposition to liberals’ core values of compassion and fairness, as well as being motivated by their own (non-moral)

values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and spiritual purity. For instance, when conservatives express binding-foundation moral concerns about gay marriage—e.g., that it subverts traditional gender roles and family structures—liberals may have difficulty perceiving any moral value in such traditional arrangements and therefore conclude that conservatives are motivated by simple homophobia, untempered by concerns about fairness, equality, and rights. This misperception is asymmetrical: conservatives did underestimate liberal moral concerns with the binding foundations, but they were no more likely to underestimate than liberals themselves.

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The paper is interesting, of course it should be noted that being an academic paper it is.... how shall I put this? Not exactly a Robert Ludlum novel.