I really think it should measure masculine / feminine thinking, however I also think the way some researchers define that is weird. For example sometimes m. is seen as “autistic”, emotionless thinking (why? how is a Rambo-rage not an emotion?), in some other research e.g. Hofstede, it is “live to work”, work-oriented attitudes… frankly this is IMHO not what the term means. I would measure masculine thinking like:
Do you think fraud is sometimes worse than force?
Do you think it can be right to avenge verbal insults by force?
Do you think not responding to force with force is dishonorable?
Do you think breaking your word is dishonorable even if it leads to the best or least bad result for all?
I think this would be very interesting! See how it overlaps (or not) with conservatism, loyalty, authority, purity etc.
I think at least the first one of those is okay, but caring about honour seems to be culture-specific and tradition-specific enough to be a separate thing from masculinity, and asking whether something is “dishonourable” in place of whether it’s bad is going to get false positives from anyone who thinks “well, I’m not sure if honour is even a real thing, but as I understand it, refusing to break your word even when it’s obviously a bad idea is the kind of thing “honourable” people do”.
How easy is it to test for things without being culture-specific and tradition-specific?
Haidt’s authority foundation, for example: how would you test for that? You could ask people to identify authorities in their lives, but maybe they don’t make the connection between the word and the concept—how many people who believe the NYT, the “scientific consensus”, etc. on faith would recognize that they’re doing so? You can’t test that by asking about the military; the people who think the NYT on authority are probably less likely than the people who don’t to think that the military is a legitimate authority whose commands can be trusted.
And what about the purity foundation? Haidt has written a few times about liberal purity, but it hasn’t been incorporated into the test yet. It’s not hard to see that it exists: concerns about the purity of food, disgust-evoking metaphors for illiberal positions and the people who hold them, and so on. Inorganic food is full of toxins and nationalism is a revolting disease. But how would you test for liberal and conservative purity at the same time? You’d have to go meta enough to capture both (as well as the concepts of purity that exist in every other cultures) in such a way that the people taking the test would not only know what you’re talking about but also make the connection between the concepts you’re asking about and the things they’re doing.
Given the memetic success of Haidt’s test (a college professor I had referenced it in a lecture a few times, and said he’d heard about it from NPR), it doesn’t appear obviously wrong to a lot of people. This could be because they legitimately haven’t seen evidence of liberal concern for the other foundations (which would imply social distance from at least certain strands of what Haidt calls liberalism), but it could also be because they don’t make the connections between that evidence and the concepts.
It’s not hard to miss connections. I’ve ordered fast food innumerable times in my life, so I’ve heard phrases along the lines of “the meal, or just the sandwich?” after ordering a burger. But I still didn’t think burgers counted as sandwiches until someone pointed it out a year or so ago. (It’s probably relevant that I’d never seen a sandwich on a roll [circular, bunlike] until this year—burgers are nowhere near my image of the prototypical sandwich.) And this is a case where there’s no major political movement with an interest in making people miss those connections! Part of the memetic success of the five-foundations theory is probably that Haidt provided academic evidence for what liberals already liked to think about themselves.
It may be possible to find a way to test for these things culture-neutrally, but it’s much harder a problem than you think. The question of masculinity would probably also need separate tests tailored to separate cultures—or you could have a test measuring the extent to which the test-taker follows some number of different forms of masculinity. Some cultures are honor cultures, and some cultures aren’t, but in honor cultures, honor tends to be in the male domain.
More general: fairness and caring are pretty universal, but purity, loyalty and authority are not only culture-specific, also political tribe-specific, and there are huge mistake potentials here, what is authority for one is a proper expert for another, what is purity for one is understandable revulsion over an immoral act for the other, what one sees as disloyalty can be loyalty to a non-standard group and so on. In fact, my prior would be that loyaly, authority and purity will not predict major political tribes at all when the questions are truly properly set. The lack of them will predict a small number of really smart people. Then there is a larger bunch of people who imitate that small number, follow them as authority, loyal to their causes and feel revulsion when their ideas are dragged in the mud, but still use the non-authoritarian, non-loyalist, non-purist language of their leaders. (This tribe would be called “liberal” in the American terminology. In many Easter European cultures too, in Western Europe just called “normal”.) The vast majority of that tribe majority will have loyalist, authoritarian, and purist instincts, just not towards the common targets, and wrapped into a language that denies it. Loyalty to the group that identifies as disloyal individualists. Using Dawkins quotes as authoritarian discussion-stoppers, yet many of those quotes will contain funny, irreverent, anti-authoritarian bits. Conforming to non-conformism. Rebellion as a mass fashion item. These are not new ideas.
The fairness foundation isn’t universal. I know people who test low for it, but that may just be a testing artifact. “Whether or not some people were treated differently than others”—people are different, so of course there will be circumstances where it’s right to treat them differently. There are some cultures where it’s probably legitimately absent.
purity, loyalty and authority are not only culture-specific, also political tribe-specific, and there are huge mistake potentials here, what is authority for one is a proper expert for another, what is purity for one is understandable revulsion over an immoral act for the other, what one sees as disloyalty can be loyalty to a non-standard group and so on.
Note that you just made an argument for these being terrible bases for public and social policy in a diverse society.
Yes. And you can go two ways from there. Either you can try to eliminate them, but then you meet the issue that for most folks it is incredibly difficult to make a difference between policy and values as both are approached from an “I cheer for X” angle. If succesful, you end up with a society that does not have a culture. From this viewpoint I feel for the conservative case. It is very, very weird to try to build a society without culture, it is as if it was not meant for human brains. And it would be very good if people could see a clear difference between policy and culture but again it is very, very hard, it goes against many instincts.
I am basically a product of that. My parents were always the kinds of secular Euroliberals who don’t really believe in many values, and for this reason I alway found it hard to find goals in life: there was nothing they were passionate or judgemental about, so I find it to be passionate about anything. From this kind of upbringing it is just hard to think anything matters as everything was taught as a mere preference, hobby, interest...
The opposite solution is to try to break up into an archipelago, where sub-societies, sub-cultures are forming their own rules. This sounds a bit sci-fi but look at it this way. The Roman Empire was largely monolithical. The Dark Ages afterwards an archipelago. Charlemagne’s empire monolithical, then the German-Italian city-states and small kingdoms again an archipelago. It sounds a bit like it ebbs and flows.
Both the Roman and especially Charlemagne’s empires were archipelagos compared to today’s states. Both contained many sub-states that where mostly left to govern themselves as long as they acknowledged imperial authority and paid taxes.
Look, if YourMorals wanted to be culture-neutral, the first step would be purging terms like “liberal” and “conservative”. (I know countries where “conservatives” are far more anti-capitalistic than “liberals” because their capitalism is largely controlled by foreign firms and they dislike that on a nationalism basis: better our government than foreigner’s businesses.)
YourMorals is strongly US-centric, and the rest of the world like myself has to resort to rule-of-thumb heuristics to modify both input given and output received…
My input modifier heuristic is “how would those American movie actors I can identify with most answer”. I expect others around the world doing something similar. For example, my list of questions is based on “what would Clint Eastwood and people around the world who easily identify with him reply”.
I’m not saying it should be culture-neutral, I’m assuming that if “masculine thinking” is a real thing, then it’s going to be culture-neutral, and we want to, as much as possible, separate “do you think in a masculine way” from “do you think in the way this culture prescribes for men”. Otherwise, it’ll just be a poll of gender identity with a lot of noise added.
This is a good point, but is it true for the other metrics? It can get confusing when an atheist who does not happen to personally studied evolution much but still believes in it because the scientists say the evidence is good and he trust they don’t lie, so he is taking it more on an authority basis, and a creationist, who is doing the completely opposite based on the basis of religious authority, so they may both think the other person is anti-authoritarian :) Because obviously the only the authorities I trust are real authorities. To construct a test for every possible authority people may trust, well, does not sound easy.
The other option is of course construct very abstract and generic tests which may have their own failure modes. Not everybody will understand questions like “if an authority figure tells you to...”—some people like something more specific, and that is culture-dependent.
Well, generally I think “abstract and generic” is the obvious way to go, and I think is usually the done thing—I think the very US-specific tests on yourmorals are from studies that were originally only done in the US and are as abstract and generic as they needed to be in that context. The possibility that tending not to understand abstract, generic questions is a culture-dependent trait seems like a really tricky problem, although in some contexts you might just compromise with e.g. “you pastor, or if you are not religious then someone you trust similarly, tells you...”
I really think it should measure masculine / feminine thinking, however I also think the way some researchers define that is weird. For example sometimes m. is seen as “autistic”, emotionless thinking (why? how is a Rambo-rage not an emotion?), in some other research e.g. Hofstede, it is “live to work”, work-oriented attitudes… frankly this is IMHO not what the term means. I would measure masculine thinking like:
Do you think fraud is sometimes worse than force?
Do you think it can be right to avenge verbal insults by force?
Do you think not responding to force with force is dishonorable?
Do you think breaking your word is dishonorable even if it leads to the best or least bad result for all?
I think this would be very interesting! See how it overlaps (or not) with conservatism, loyalty, authority, purity etc.
I think at least the first one of those is okay, but caring about honour seems to be culture-specific and tradition-specific enough to be a separate thing from masculinity, and asking whether something is “dishonourable” in place of whether it’s bad is going to get false positives from anyone who thinks “well, I’m not sure if honour is even a real thing, but as I understand it, refusing to break your word even when it’s obviously a bad idea is the kind of thing “honourable” people do”.
How easy is it to test for things without being culture-specific and tradition-specific?
Haidt’s authority foundation, for example: how would you test for that? You could ask people to identify authorities in their lives, but maybe they don’t make the connection between the word and the concept—how many people who believe the NYT, the “scientific consensus”, etc. on faith would recognize that they’re doing so? You can’t test that by asking about the military; the people who think the NYT on authority are probably less likely than the people who don’t to think that the military is a legitimate authority whose commands can be trusted.
And what about the purity foundation? Haidt has written a few times about liberal purity, but it hasn’t been incorporated into the test yet. It’s not hard to see that it exists: concerns about the purity of food, disgust-evoking metaphors for illiberal positions and the people who hold them, and so on. Inorganic food is full of toxins and nationalism is a revolting disease. But how would you test for liberal and conservative purity at the same time? You’d have to go meta enough to capture both (as well as the concepts of purity that exist in every other cultures) in such a way that the people taking the test would not only know what you’re talking about but also make the connection between the concepts you’re asking about and the things they’re doing.
Given the memetic success of Haidt’s test (a college professor I had referenced it in a lecture a few times, and said he’d heard about it from NPR), it doesn’t appear obviously wrong to a lot of people. This could be because they legitimately haven’t seen evidence of liberal concern for the other foundations (which would imply social distance from at least certain strands of what Haidt calls liberalism), but it could also be because they don’t make the connections between that evidence and the concepts.
It’s not hard to miss connections. I’ve ordered fast food innumerable times in my life, so I’ve heard phrases along the lines of “the meal, or just the sandwich?” after ordering a burger. But I still didn’t think burgers counted as sandwiches until someone pointed it out a year or so ago. (It’s probably relevant that I’d never seen a sandwich on a roll [circular, bunlike] until this year—burgers are nowhere near my image of the prototypical sandwich.) And this is a case where there’s no major political movement with an interest in making people miss those connections! Part of the memetic success of the five-foundations theory is probably that Haidt provided academic evidence for what liberals already liked to think about themselves.
It may be possible to find a way to test for these things culture-neutrally, but it’s much harder a problem than you think. The question of masculinity would probably also need separate tests tailored to separate cultures—or you could have a test measuring the extent to which the test-taker follows some number of different forms of masculinity. Some cultures are honor cultures, and some cultures aren’t, but in honor cultures, honor tends to be in the male domain.
More general: fairness and caring are pretty universal, but purity, loyalty and authority are not only culture-specific, also political tribe-specific, and there are huge mistake potentials here, what is authority for one is a proper expert for another, what is purity for one is understandable revulsion over an immoral act for the other, what one sees as disloyalty can be loyalty to a non-standard group and so on. In fact, my prior would be that loyaly, authority and purity will not predict major political tribes at all when the questions are truly properly set. The lack of them will predict a small number of really smart people. Then there is a larger bunch of people who imitate that small number, follow them as authority, loyal to their causes and feel revulsion when their ideas are dragged in the mud, but still use the non-authoritarian, non-loyalist, non-purist language of their leaders. (This tribe would be called “liberal” in the American terminology. In many Easter European cultures too, in Western Europe just called “normal”.) The vast majority of that tribe majority will have loyalist, authoritarian, and purist instincts, just not towards the common targets, and wrapped into a language that denies it. Loyalty to the group that identifies as disloyal individualists. Using Dawkins quotes as authoritarian discussion-stoppers, yet many of those quotes will contain funny, irreverent, anti-authoritarian bits. Conforming to non-conformism. Rebellion as a mass fashion item. These are not new ideas.
The fairness foundation isn’t universal. I know people who test low for it, but that may just be a testing artifact. “Whether or not some people were treated differently than others”—people are different, so of course there will be circumstances where it’s right to treat them differently. There are some cultures where it’s probably legitimately absent.
Also, I don’t think liberal language hides the purity intuition.
From my, admittedly limited, knowledge of non-Western cultures, I get the impression that the fairness norm is very much a Western Civilization thing.
My bad. I wanted to say universalist.
Note that you just made an argument for these being terrible bases for public and social policy in a diverse society.
Yes. And you can go two ways from there. Either you can try to eliminate them, but then you meet the issue that for most folks it is incredibly difficult to make a difference between policy and values as both are approached from an “I cheer for X” angle. If succesful, you end up with a society that does not have a culture. From this viewpoint I feel for the conservative case. It is very, very weird to try to build a society without culture, it is as if it was not meant for human brains. And it would be very good if people could see a clear difference between policy and culture but again it is very, very hard, it goes against many instincts.
I am basically a product of that. My parents were always the kinds of secular Euroliberals who don’t really believe in many values, and for this reason I alway found it hard to find goals in life: there was nothing they were passionate or judgemental about, so I find it to be passionate about anything. From this kind of upbringing it is just hard to think anything matters as everything was taught as a mere preference, hobby, interest...
The opposite solution is to try to break up into an archipelago, where sub-societies, sub-cultures are forming their own rules. This sounds a bit sci-fi but look at it this way. The Roman Empire was largely monolithical. The Dark Ages afterwards an archipelago. Charlemagne’s empire monolithical, then the German-Italian city-states and small kingdoms again an archipelago. It sounds a bit like it ebbs and flows.
Both the Roman and especially Charlemagne’s empires were archipelagos compared to today’s states. Both contained many sub-states that where mostly left to govern themselves as long as they acknowledged imperial authority and paid taxes.
Look, if YourMorals wanted to be culture-neutral, the first step would be purging terms like “liberal” and “conservative”. (I know countries where “conservatives” are far more anti-capitalistic than “liberals” because their capitalism is largely controlled by foreign firms and they dislike that on a nationalism basis: better our government than foreigner’s businesses.)
YourMorals is strongly US-centric, and the rest of the world like myself has to resort to rule-of-thumb heuristics to modify both input given and output received…
My input modifier heuristic is “how would those American movie actors I can identify with most answer”. I expect others around the world doing something similar. For example, my list of questions is based on “what would Clint Eastwood and people around the world who easily identify with him reply”.
I’m not saying it should be culture-neutral, I’m assuming that if “masculine thinking” is a real thing, then it’s going to be culture-neutral, and we want to, as much as possible, separate “do you think in a masculine way” from “do you think in the way this culture prescribes for men”. Otherwise, it’ll just be a poll of gender identity with a lot of noise added.
This is a good point, but is it true for the other metrics? It can get confusing when an atheist who does not happen to personally studied evolution much but still believes in it because the scientists say the evidence is good and he trust they don’t lie, so he is taking it more on an authority basis, and a creationist, who is doing the completely opposite based on the basis of religious authority, so they may both think the other person is anti-authoritarian :) Because obviously the only the authorities I trust are real authorities. To construct a test for every possible authority people may trust, well, does not sound easy.
The other option is of course construct very abstract and generic tests which may have their own failure modes. Not everybody will understand questions like “if an authority figure tells you to...”—some people like something more specific, and that is culture-dependent.
Well, generally I think “abstract and generic” is the obvious way to go, and I think is usually the done thing—I think the very US-specific tests on yourmorals are from studies that were originally only done in the US and are as abstract and generic as they needed to be in that context. The possibility that tending not to understand abstract, generic questions is a culture-dependent trait seems like a really tricky problem, although in some contexts you might just compromise with e.g. “you pastor, or if you are not religious then someone you trust similarly, tells you...”