No, I think that this is a really cool idea, it’s an extension of what we wrote that as far as I know it hasn’t been studied. But I think the short answer is definitely. I think that ideological differences in attention would definitely most certainly shape, or I predict they would shape how these ingredients work together. Descriptively, conservatives and liberals do tend to focus on different things, they attended different things selectively.
So if you look at ideological content, liberals focus a lot on perceived suffering of underprivileged groups, arguably conservatives are a little bit a less attentive to that, they focus more on liberty, and other kinds of things,, and you could talk about that in a way that doesn’t imply like the strong moral module thing the moral foundations theory does, you can say that well descriptively sure, liberals attend to certain kinds of things, and conservatives attend to other kinds of things. But that difference in attention, and just an underlying domain general process, can explain so many things in a way that you don’t have to go deep to make the stronger claim that there are these five distinct moral modules that are why conservatives and liberals differ. It could in fact be due to what they attend to, and how that shapes other things.
I’m a longtime William James fan, so your approach naturally appealed to me. But that’s not to say that I dismiss all of Haidt’s work out of hand—nor do I take it that you do. Liberals and conservatives do employ different sorts of language, for example, they orient around different sources of authority. But I come away from your paper with a stronger feeling than ever that most of what he’s pulled together belongs in the domain of sociology, anthropology, social psychology—not individual psychology. It’s all about the social surround that’s shaping the environment in which these basic processes that you’re writing about appear and work themselves out. That’s what I came up with as my way of making sense of this, and I wanted to find out is that just me or is that how you would see it, too?
I think that’s generally good way to think about it. I think I can specify the little bit. You’re right, Haidt and his colleagues have been heavily influenced by anthropology and sociology, they cite Durkheim all the time, and that’s great, moral psychology is interdisciplinary, and it flourishes when it is in many ways, no single field can claim to be the unique inroad [48:57] to understanding human morality.
I guess what I would say is that documenting descriptive variations, that’s one thing, but understanding why we make moral judgments is a separate thing. That’s more of a process focused question. So even though there is legitimate descriptive variation, and what people think morality is about, that doesn’t mean that we have to add a process level to argue for these mechanisms, these moral modules.
They’re not simply saying there is variation. They’ve also made the claim in multiple papers that there are these moral modules at the psychological level, that explain this descriptive variation. What were doing in our paper is saying that well, you we don’t have to do that, that might not be the most parsimonious answer. There may still be descriptive variation that may be accounted for by something a lot simpler, which is these domain general ingredients, of core affect, conceptual knowledge, and you can add in attention to that to as a moderating factor as well.
Coming back to [William] James, he has this term, the psychologist fallacy which he talks about in the principles of psychology, it’s one of my favorite bits of writing from him,, and he talks about the fallacy that when you’re studying the human mind, it’s tricky, right? So it’s not like biology or chemistry, because it’s a mind trying to study itself. So you have to be very careful about not taking how things seem to you, and then placing that back onto the world as how they actually are. So, how things seem to us, generally, we tend to see anger and disgust as different emotions. Just on the basis of our conscious experience, we might feel those are distinct things, biologically. But for James that would be a fallacy, because it’s a fallacy to assume that just because something seems different in your experience that it actually is different on a more basic level.
So we’re trying to suggest that we not do that, let’s not commit the psychological fallacy, when we understand emotions and morality, And if we do that, if we try to dispense with any blinders we might have in our own personal biases—well bias too strong, from our personal experience—then maybe we can understand things a little better.
I had the idea and was like, how can I pull this off? I asked a few people and there were a couple whose grandparents had fallout shelters from the ’50s, but it was a different era. I ran into an old friend, and he had started dating a girl who did production for TV and was one of the producers on “Doomsday Preppers.” She said she could introduce me to whoever I wanted, so basically I started watching the show and told her who interested me and why, so between people who had actually been on the show and other people who they had been in touch with but didn’t use in the show, she reached out and made introductions to all these people who had really particular food-centric preparations. I just reached out, and some people wrote novels back.
I would imagine they were very eager to share what they were doing.