Interesting Study on Libertarian Psychology

[EveryVoluntaryistIsLemons]

I saw this study on r/psychology, and found it to be interesting, specifically the differences libertarians have from liberals and conservatives.

 

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366

[NotDarkYet]

It looks interesting, but super long (15,000 words).

 

Do you have a summary or general take-away that you found valuable?

[shirgall]

It looks like I have a lot of reading to do, but understand that the questionnaire is based on this (quoted for academic interest, therefore fair use):

 

The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: (a) Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; (b) convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and © we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality. (PsycINFO Database Record © 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/101/2/366/

 

So these guys developed a moral model and a questionnaire based on that and the report in the original post is about self-identified libertarians answering the questionnaire.

 

Even so, the conclusions aren't going to surprise most people here. Libertarians use reasoning more, and use emotion less, than either typical conservatives or typical liberals (from the conclusion):

 

Libertarians have a unique moral-psychological profile, endorsing the principle of liberty as an end and devaluing many of the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives. Although causal conclusions remain beyond our current reach, our findings indicate a robust relationship between libertarian morality, a dispositional lack of emotionality, and a preference for weaker, less-binding social relationships.

[NotDarkYet]

All the following are true of the libertarians I know:

 

a robust {...} morality,

a dispositional lack of emotionality

a preference for less-binding social relationships.

 

That last point is the most interesting observation.  

 

I know I dislike being tied to social events (parties, sports events, weekly meetings, etc), and don't understand people who fill their life up with social events.  Isn't that stressful?   When do they have time to go inward?  

[shirgall]

All the following are true of the libertarians I know:

 

a robust {...} morality,

a dispositional lack of emotionality

a preference for less-binding social relationships.

 

That last point is the most interesting observation.  

 

I know I dislike being tied to social events (parties, sports events, weekly meetings, etc), and don't understand people who fill their life up with social events.  Isn't that stressful?   When do they have time to go inward?  

 

Yeah, it rings true, but it doesn't make it true. For example, there's a sharp difference in personality between the religious and non-religious libertarians I know. I served as a Membership Director for a state party, I got to meet a lot of people.

 

I don't like big crowds either, probably because I dislike the mentality of large crowds. However, that doesn't stop me from having people over to dinner or a Walking Dead watching party.

[square4]

Libertarians have a unique moral-psychological profile, endorsing the principle of liberty as an end and devaluing many of the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives.

 

"endorsing the principle of liberty as an end": I am not happy with the characterisation "as an end", as if it stops there, and we look no further. Liberty means absense of violence. The question is whether this principle is endorsed or not. Any principle taken as an end in itself is strange, because it forgets the person for whom the principle is applied.

 

"devaluing many of the moral concerns": If I am not willing to use violence to further certain things, this does not mean at all that I devalue those things. "You do not want the government to do this, so you are unconcerned about it" is quite the typical charge, but incorrect.

[Maxime Pare]

It looks like I have a lot of reading to do, but understand that the questionnaire is based on this (quoted for academic interest, therefore fair use):

 

 

So these guys developed a moral model and a questionnaire based on that and the report in the original post is about self-identified libertarians answering the questionnaire.

 

Even so, the conclusions aren't going to surprise most people here. Libertarians use reasoning more, and use emotion less, than either typical conservatives or typical liberals (from the conclusion):

 

 

I'd be very conservative in interpreting these results. The questionnaire's internal fidelity is either under research basic acceptable levels, or barely above. Their decision to take less items that measure different aspects of a concept is misguided, as it exposes they questionnaire to too much error.

 

They also use and defend pragmatic validity, which is limited in it's ability to resist scrutiny in most psychometrics manuals. 

 

The questionnaire is really short but has many sub-scales. It's a problem because you might miss a lot of what a concept could need to be included to be fully measured. And for what it's worth, they basically made caricatures of old moral categories and added scales with them.

 

The statistical models they use are really sophisticated, but you can also link certain genes with the skills to eat with chopsticks, so i'm not impressed there either.

 

The arcticle ahs been cited a lot, and JPSP is huge in social psychology.

 

I could go on about methodological limits of this study, The conclusions are interesting, but the method is lacking.