Jonathan Haidt, a professor at UVA, runs an online lab with quizzes that will compare your moral values to the rest of the population. I have found the test results useful for avoiding the typical mind fallacy. When someone disagrees with me on a belief/opinion I feel certain about, it’s often difficult to tease apart how much of this disagreement stems from them not “getting it”, and how much stems from them having a different fundamental value system. One of the tests alerted me that I am an outlier in certain aspects of how I judge morality (green = me; blue = liberals; red = conservatives):
Another benefit of these quizzes is that they can point out potential blind spots. For example, one quiz asks for opinions about punishment for crimes. If I discover I’m an outlier w.r.t. the population, I should reconsider whether my opinions are based on solid evidence (or did I see one study that found tit-for-tat punishment effective in a certain context, and take that as gospel?).
Extra reading: Haidt wrote a WSJ article last month that applied the learnings of these moral quizzes to better understanding the Tea Party.
Link: Compare your moral values to the general population
Jonathan Haidt, a professor at UVA, runs an online lab with quizzes that will compare your moral values to the rest of the population. I have found the test results useful for avoiding the typical mind fallacy. When someone disagrees with me on a belief/opinion I feel certain about, it’s often difficult to tease apart how much of this disagreement stems from them not “getting it”, and how much stems from them having a different fundamental value system. One of the tests alerted me that I am an outlier in certain aspects of how I judge morality (green = me; blue = liberals; red = conservatives):
Another benefit of these quizzes is that they can point out potential blind spots. For example, one quiz asks for opinions about punishment for crimes. If I discover I’m an outlier w.r.t. the population, I should reconsider whether my opinions are based on solid evidence (or did I see one study that found tit-for-tat punishment effective in a certain context, and take that as gospel?).
Extra reading: Haidt wrote a WSJ article last month that applied the learnings of these moral quizzes to better understanding the Tea Party.