This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 24 Aug 2012, by Todd Suomela.
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24 Aug 12
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This feature of their paper enables the motivated-reasoning position to square off directly against two other important positoins in contemporary moral psychology.
The first, associated most conspicuously with Jonathan Haidt, is that ideological or partisan conflicts over policy reflect a fundamental difference in "liberal" and "conservative" moral styles. Conservatives, Haidt argues, focus on nonconsequentialist evaluations of "purity" or "sanctity," whereas liberals focus on "harm."
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The second position with which Liu & Ditto join issue is the dual process theory of moral psychology. I view Josh Greene as the leading exponent of this perspective. Greene is a subtle thinker; like Haidt, he is both a first-rate philosopher and an amazing psychologist, But he has not been shy about equating nonconsequentialist (or "deontological") reasoning with emotion-driven, unconscious "system 1" (in Kahneman's terms) reasoning and consequentialism with conscious, reflective "system 2."
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So this raises the perennial (for me, in this blog; I am getting treatment, but still can't shake my obsession) issue of the "asymmetry thesis"-- the claim (ably advanced in Chris Mooney's Republican Brain) that motivated consequentialist reasoning is more characteristic of conservatives than liberals. Is the Liu & Ditto paper evidence in "favor" of the asymmetry thesis?
Sure. In fact, in one of their studies Liu & Ditto present a statistical analysis that shows that subjects' tendency to adopt empirical positions supportive of their intrinsic moral assessments increased as subjects became more conservative. As I've noted before, proponents of the "asymmetry thesis" usually don't try to assess whether any differernces observed in the force of motivated reasoning across the ideological spectrum (or cultural spectra) is statistically, much less practically, significant.
But does that mean the asymmetry thesis is "true" after all?
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There's just a lot more evidence in support of the "symmetry" thesis -- that ideologically motivated reasoning is uniform, for all practical purposes, cross ideologies--than there is for the "asymmetry" position. I myself don't view the Liu and Ditto finding of "asymmetry" as a reason to substantially revise my view of the likelihood that that position is correct.
Indeed, I don't think Liu and Ditto themselves view their results as particularly strong proof in favor of the asymmetry thesis. They note that the "associations between moral and factual beliefs" they observed--on issues like the death penalty, promotion of condoms to fight STDs, stem cell research, and forceful interrogations--" were stronger for conservatives but "still significant for ... political liberals." "[W]hile our political psychology results can be taken as consistent with the body of work associating conservatism with heuristic and motivated thinking," they conclude, "it is important to also note the modest size of these interaction effects and that significant moral-factual coordination was found across the political spectrum."
The paper is not a "show stopper" on the "asymmetry" question. On the contrary, it is, in this respect like the others, something much better than that: a pertinent, informative, and indeed elegant addition to an ongoing scholarly conversation.
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