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Innate Moral Spheres Key to Group Differences?

Posted by MIKKEL FISHMAN, Economics Editor in Uncategorized.
Nov 14th, 2008 | Comments

As I alluded to in my first post, the foundations of morality and its influence on individual and group behavior is a growing interest amongst social and cognitive scientists. Based on genetics studies and better brain imaging, it’s becoming readily clear that humans aren’t tabula rasa, even as we have to accept that it will long (if not always) be a mystery to how nature interacts with nurture.

I meant to link to this TED talk in my introduction and was inspired to write this post when I realized my error. As the speaker somberly notes:

Our righteous minds were designed to unite us into teams, divide us against other teams and blind us to the truth.

Yet this should not be cause for despair, merely acceptance. As the speaker notes (and I encourage you to all watch his talk and take the quizzes on the website) by focusing on the reality of division, rather than the substance of it, we are blind.

In my day job I try to apply mathematical constructs and understanding that are less than 30 years old (which means its an infant in mathematical timescales) to investigate biological systems and hopefully diagnose/cure disease. It is so obvious that the status quo approach is so wrong on a fundamental level, but we run into surprisingly great difficulty in trying to identify areas were it matters in practice. A large part is that many of the practitioners of the new science work completely on theoretical levels, while we are trying to apply it to real data, but it is more than that.

While we anticipated great strides from our revolution, we discovered that the accepted approximation of the Truth was accurate, even as it destroyed valuable details. Chastened, we stepped back and took a serious look at the areas where our new approach gave insight and those that did not. We realized that part of the reason why we were having trouble was that we were asking the wrong questions. We were looking for new answers, and we ended up with new questions: it is these new questions that would have never been proposed that may truly provide new insight.

In my first post I stated I was calling for radical solutions steeped in conservative approaches. But as the new science of morality is starting to suggest, perhaps the problem is that we have been looking for answers that seem to work, instead of accepting that there are none; by changing our perception of the nature of groups, the path will be open to devising new questions that will define our success or failure.

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CStanley

Haven't had a chance to check out the link but I will. I just wanted to say that I find this all fascinating. I've always believed that people innately trend either conservative or liberal (or pick any two world views and you can similarly divide into groups) and that there's a yin/yang to it all. In simplistic terms, it's like our body politic is a car which needs both accelerator and brakes.

People who don't identify strongly with either one probably are hybrids- and then they may trend one way or the other based on how each party is currently functioning (good solutions from liberal side + less corruption would definitely push such people in that direction, if one of the two are present than it depends on which of the two is more pressing to that individual. And conservatism might have appeal during certain time periods but not others for such individuals- but again, how well the more conservative party is functioning (are they proposing any conservative based solutions or just strictly applying brakes, and do they obstruct for good reason or for self interest, and again, is there corruption?) would make a difference (as it obviously is right now.)

mikkel

I have another long post that focuses abstractly on government expenditures that touches on the same message you are saying. I'm going to put it up on Monday because Joe says the weekend gets less hits and I don't want to have people get burnt out on me.

While I agree with you fully I'm curious to see what you think about what he says in the talk, since it's not an either/or supposition. The most interesting thing is that two of the moral spheres have almost identical importance across the board, but the differences in the three other spheres modifies the emphasis even on the two where we "agree."

pacatrue

I just got through listening to the TED talk. There were a lot of good ideas in it, but I also viewed almost the entire thing as a possible issue of correlation not causation. I haven't ever read the technical papers on this, but I assume they are indeed finding significant correlations between their various test scores and some political self-identifications. However, the speaker seems to move very easily from that correlation to causation, to proposing that the connection explains something deep and even biological about humans. Yet there could be a million steps intervening between the two. In fact, there certainly are a million steps between the two. Is the signal from the proposed moral starting point truly strong enough to outlast all of the steps in between? Very much an open question.

mikkel

I completely agree that it is hard to know whether there is self selection on a social level, or biological underpinnings. However, I am increasingly convinced that it is a distinction without merit.

It seems to me that when looking at any thing that has possible interplay between genetics and environment, the key is to look for a few characteristics such as:
Global Dispersion: Does the disease/trait have a similar distribution across wide cultures at this present time.
Historical Similarity: Does it have similar distribution across time?
Inheritance: Something that they look at already (I'll mention in a second why it's not sufficient)
Individual Consistency: Does it remain similar throughout an individual's lifespan.

I am very irritated when there is a study that is interpreted as saying "obesity is 80% genetic" because it only looks at the inheritability of obesity within a particular environment. Sure, within our lifestyle it might be largely genetic influences that determine whether you get fat or not, but comparing across time and across the globe, obvious obesity patterns are highly different and it's based on social influences (diet? lifestyle? pollution?).

So on one level I definitely agree with you that it is of the upmost importance to not assume evolutionary motives for behavior -- and evolutionary behavorists seem to be stretching a lot of the time in their explanations, almost to the post of having it be a philosophical exercise.

But for this particular thing, he mentioned that they have done it in many countries (although I'd be curious to see if the group sizes change even if the group characteristics are similar), and I think there is strong evidence to say that those particular distinctions have been present for a very long time...at least in western culture.

I am starting to kind of look at these types of things through a social Kantian viewpoint. I really like his works that pointed out that there is objective sensory input but it is only universal because humans all have the same basic underpinnings for perception. So from that viewpoint, I definitely think that it does good to question the fundamental nature of things, but on a more practical and immediate level, it looks like the social-moral framework is highly robust in that it produces similar distinctions across both geography and time. To me, it is a good enough definition of innate.

pacatrue

I also thought that one of the best moments in the talk was when he mentioned similar results in other nations and political environments. In a sense, my question is: what do we get by attaching the words "conservative" and "liberal" to these things. As I think Haidt would be the first to say, many of the exact policy positions that a conservative party (or a liberal party) takes are due as much to team identification than to consistent ideology.

I've seen no reason yet, for instance, why there should be any strong connection between beliefs about the truth of climate models and one's views on the military or abortion or many other activities that do tend to cluster in everyday life. My guess would be that they cluster because people team identify for one issue and then essentially adopt all the other issues from being part of that team they trust and like. However, this might weaken the excitement with which Haidt's ideas are presented.

Perhaps what the research is actually showing is that people who have strong opinions on order in political and social life also have biological dispositions towards order. Everything else, most of the particulars of immediate decisions, is better explained by my team / your team concepts. While this is certainly interesting by itself -- that there's a biological basis for beliefs about order -- it's a rather different idea than the notion that we are getting at the roots of liberalism or conservatism.

Or another way to think of my reservations is this: We want to do a cross-societal look at feelings about social order. And so we go to each country and ask which political group typically focuses on this issue and which doesn't and then give them our test. The result: people who say they like order it turns out like order.

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