What makes people vote Democrat?

What Makes People Vote Republican?

Jonathan Haidt asks this question at The Edge. He could as easily have asked "What Makes People Vote Democrat?"

He opens with the standard diagnostic answer:

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Yet this diagnostic answer may lead to a trap:

...Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.

In order to address the question of why people vote Republican, he examines what we mean by "morality". He comes up with two rules governing morality. First, "feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete." Most moral decisions are not thought through, but are felt. The guidelines we use were internalized and sub-conscious-ized so long ago that they've become conditioned reflexes. Our subconscious programming tells us what's right or wrong in a situation, and then, if pressed, we concoct reasons to justify our stand. These reasons may or may not be valid, but by the time we're coming up with them, it doesn't matter.

The second rule is, "morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way."

...imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other's selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy.

This is in contrast to a society "as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit" where everyone is free to do as he or she wills, so long as it doesn't harm others. Laws that are implemented exist to prevent this harm as much as possible. (Haidt cites John Stuart Mill, and calls a society organized in this fashion "Millian".

Now it turns out that a "Millian" society rests on two moral dimensions --

First, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights and justice. Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions about fairness and reciprocity.

This seems to be the essence of society, according to social liberals. What about social conservatives? How are they different? Don't they support fairness and the prevention of harm and suffering?

Well, it turns out they do, but there are other factors as well:

My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

Or, another way of looking at is that Democrats are morally color-blind when compared with Republicans.

Indeed, this might be a better analogy.

Take a person with red-green color blindness. Most of the time, the condition is a nuisance. He can see just fine for most purposes. He can walk through an art museum and enjoy most, if not all, of the paintings there. But in a situation where he needs to distinguish between a red light and a green light, he could get himself killed, and possibly take others with him.

A morally color-blind person is the same way. He's sensitive to the harm/suffering and fairness/reciprocity "colors" of the moral spectrum, but if he needs to come to the right answer with respect to group loyalty, respect for authority, or purity, he may be in trouble.

In the case of individuals, color blindness is usually only a nuisance, because people with normal color vision have mostly screened out dangerous situations where color vision is essential. You don't need color vision to distinguish poisonous berries from edible ones in a grocery store, for example. Likewise, in the moral realm, long-established institutions exist that protect individuals, whether they recognize the mechanisms involved or not.