Jonathan Haidt’s fascinating work on moral psychology has gotten a lot of buzz in the blogosphere….even from me. Here’s the crux of Haidt’s work in his own words:

From a review of the anthropological and evolutionary literatures, Craig Joseph (at Northwestern University) and I concluded that there were three best candidates for being additional psychological foundations of morality, beyond harm/care and fairness/justice. These three we label as ingroup/loyalty (which may have evolved from the long history of cross-group or sub-group competition, related to what Joe Henrich calls “coalitional psychology”); authority/respect (which may have evolved from the long history of primate hierarchy, modified by cultural limitations on power and bullying, as documented by Christopher Boehm), and purity/sanctity, which may be a much more recent system, growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others. …

My UVA colleagues Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and I have collected data from about 7,000 people so far on a survey designed to measure people’s endorsement of these five foundations. In every sample we’ve looked at, in the United States and in other Western countries, we find that people who self-identify as liberals endorse moral values and statements related to the two individualizing foundations primarily, whereas self-described conservatives endorse values and statements related to all five foundations. It seems that the moral domain encompasses more for conservatives—it’s not just about Gilligan’s care and Kohlberg’s justice. It’s also about Durkheim’s issues of loyalty to the group, respect for authority, and sacredness.

Controversial work to say the least. I think this says something about why culture and national security issues seem to work better in turning out conservative voters in the US. Issues like Iran, Gay Rights and Mosque building work better with a group that has more “moral buttons” that can be pushed. It’s an interesting way of reframing the whole “What’s the Matter with Kansas” trope.

If you want to find out where you sit on the moral specturm, go to Haidt’s et. al’s site, yourmorals.org.

Yes Magazine points to a whimsical example of the power of collective intelligence. The website Fallen Fruit identifies locations in Los Angeles where you can find public fruit, or fruit trees that are hanging over private property into public space.

While this isn’t earth shattering social change, it highlights the potential for the web to strenghten social networks. The site organizers conduct “fruit jams” based on the information they gather from “the crowd.” It would be an interesting research question to highlight which types of cities encourage and build upon these types of crowdsourcing initiatives to create denser social networks for its residents.

David Dylan Thomas questions the popular assertion that Internet content will be stored forever:

We assume that formats like .jpg (that picture of you doing a kegstand) or .mp3 (that ill-advised phone message you left at 3am) or — I won’t even pick a video format since they change every week — will be here forever because they’ve been around as long as we can remember consumer-friendly digital information. But the odds that your Facebook page will still be here in ten years — or will be readable in ten years — while not terrible, probably aren’t as good as you think.

His larger point is that digital information has to be stored somewhere. Old information often has to be converted at a cost. While reasonably current information has a value to market researchers, of what value is a 10-year old Facebook update? Perhaps for the sake of nostalgia, we’ll store our own information, but there’s some reason to question the notion that someone benevolent force out there will keep track of our digital lives for us for free.

The New York Times Bits blog invites a number of readers to “unthether” themselves from technology for a period of time and to create a video of their experience. Reactions to this mini-exercise ran the gamut:

For Jenn Monroe, 40, giving up the Internet and phone led to a desire to purge other technologies from her life.

“I didn’t want to open my computer at all, even though that wasn’t part of the deal,” she said. “I avoided the microwave, which was also sort of strange and surprising to me.”

But for many, finding the right balance can be hard. James Cornell, 18, spent his day away from his cellphone feeling jittery, and he worried that he was annoying people by not responding to them. John Stark, 46, told his friends that he wouldn’t be responding to text messages, expecting them to call him on the phone if they needed to communicate. They sent text messages to his wife instead, asking her to relay information to him.

I know I have to make it a point to turn the computer off when I’m with my six year old. The instant gratification of a tweet or an e-mail is hard to resist. But then again, so is television, food, a good novel, smoking, etc. The need to distract ourselves from our daily lives does not begin and end with the Internet. The distraction might be more visceral on-line, but couldn’t we say the same thing about radio, print, phonographs, etc. I worry about this “Google is making us stupid” meme, popularized by Nick Carr’s Atlantic article, is producing a whole set of articles and books that don’t really advance our understanding of the effect of technology on our lives. Imagine an article called “is alcohol making me drunk”? or “is food making me fat”? You couldn’t. It’s more complicated than that. The point isn’t that the medium has no effect on humans, it’s that those effects are nuanced and contextual.

A new study in the journal Political Communication by David Lazer et. al., a group of authors endeavor to answer an important question:

Do people influence each other’s views so that they converge over time or do they primarily affiliate (by choice or happenstance) with those of similar views?

The find the former to be the case:

We find significant conformity tendencies: Individuals shift their political views toward the political views of their associates…. We also find that political views are notably unimportant as a driver for the formation of relationships.

This is a heartening finding. It suggests that the “confirmation biasr” effect, where citizens seeks out views that already reinforce their own, is restricted to political information. The fact that we as US citizens are apolitical generally means we have more of a chance to “have our minds changed” by a friendship network. The trick is encouraging the formation of diverse, broad-based friend networks that would encourage broader, better vetted, political views

What do you think of this finding? Do you seek out friends based on their political views or have your friends shaped your political outlook? Or is it impossible to untangle?

I find this passage from Nick Couldry’s new book book Why Voice Matters a particularly apt description of modern politics.

Human beings can give an account of themselves and of their place in the world… Treating people as if they lack that capacity is to treat them as if they were not human; the past century provides many shameful examples of just this. Voice is one word for that capacity, but having a voice is never enough. I need to know that my voice matters in various ways. Yet we have grown used to ways of organizing things that ignore voice, that assume voice does not matter. We are experiencing a contemporary crisis of voice, across political, economic and cultural domains, that has been growing for at least three decades.

I may be getting cynical in my old age, but I sense that our hyper-connected digital age disperses voice rather than enhancing it.

What do you think of this passage?

Donald Miller introduces me to my favorite poem for the moment by Billy Collins. As a social scientist who formerly wrote poetry, I sometimes find academic writing stultifying. You spend must of your graduate and pre-tenure life writing for others, even while you are supposed to be “finding your own voice.” The great joy of academia is when you at last figure out how to research and write in a way that is methodologically sound while also being courageous, personal and pure.

Purity

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.
Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
Completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.
Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.
Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.
I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.
In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
most of them exploiting the connection between sex
and death.
I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death and typewriting.
After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes
in language light as the air between my ribs.
Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
And clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage
And speed through woods on winding country roads,
Passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
All perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

What do you think? Does this poem apply in any way to academic writing? Or is this simply an illustration of effective fiction/literary writing? I personally think that social scientists can “remove their flesh” via the questions they ask, the conclusions they draw, and the way they seek to apply the knowledge they create.

I’d like to take this graph, place it on a 3X5 index card and show it to the random assortment of family members and acquaintances who are convinced that “goddamed welfare” is bankrupting the country.

Dylan Mathews reminds us that welfare payments constitute .7 percent of the US federal budget. And in fact the number of eligible people accessing welfare has been steadily declining (see graph). People are free to have policy disagreements with the efficacy of the state providing “temporary assistance to needy families,” but a little reality is nice sometimes.

Have any of you ever had conversations with relatives, friends or neighbors that perpetuated an “urban legend” about government spending?

To paraphrase Bill Murray in Groundhog Day…The USA is not the land of opportunity, it’s a land of opportunity. The OCED chart below tracks the relationship between parents and child earnings. The US is more mobile that England and Italy, but lags behind all the other countries in the chart.

This, of course, is one measure of income mobility (inter-generational income mobility). It doesn’t measure the ability of new immigrants to succeed in the US. Similarly, it doesn’t account for the higher heterogeneity in the US when compared to Scandinavia or even Canada/Australia. Nevertheless, it does raise questions about how whether the American “gospel of success” still resonates today?

What do you think accounts for the differences in intergenerational-income mobility between nations?

HT: Dylan Matthews on Ezra Klein’s Blog

I usually say to my students that accuse academia of having a liberal bias, “ok, I’ll give you that one, but the military, religious institutions, talk radio and corporate America have a conservative bias.” I might have to rethink the last one after this graph from Adam Bonica.

It shows a wide spread of ideology by members of corporate boards based on their giving patterns. While this doesn’t necessarily prove that corporate America is ideologically neutral, it does suggest that members of corporate boards aren’t agents of the right. This might say something about the lack of serious distinction between our two political parties when it comes to issues of corprorate governance — but that for another blog post.

What do you think this says about corporate America’s ideological views?

HT: The Monkey Cage