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.

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.

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.”

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.)