Value Competition

Predictions on the Reframed Questionnaire

What follows are my hypotheses/guesses as to how the answers on the reframed questionnaire are likely to be different from or similar to those on the original questionnaire:

 

H1--Ideology: In the original framings, liberals are somewhat higher in rating Harm and Fairness as important and conservatives are much higher in rating Purity, Authority, and Loyalty as important.  In the revised framings, the prediction is that conservatives will be comparable or higher in rating Harm and Fairness as important and liberals will be comparable or higher in rating Purity, Authority, and Loyalty as important. 

 

H2--Education: My assumption is that on the original framings, highly educated respondents respond more or less as liberals do and less educated respondents respond more or less as conservatives do.  In the revised framings, the prediction is that in a correlation or regression analysis the more educated will continue to value Harm and Fairness more and Purity, Authority, and Loyalty less than those with less education, though by a lesser degree. 

 

H3--National origin: On the original framings, those from wealthier nations respond more or less as liberals do (though less strongly so) and less educated respondents respond more or less as conservatives do.  In the revised framings, the prediction is that in a correlation or regression analysis those from wealthier nations will continue to value Harm and Fairness more and Purity, Authority, and Loyalty less than those from less wealthy nations, though by a lesser degree.

 

H4--Ethnicity: My tentative guess is that on the original framings, whites and Asians respond more or less as liberals do and blacks and Latinos respond more or less as conservatives do (if ideology is controlled for).  In the revised framings, the prediction is that in a regression analysis whites and Asians will continue to value Harm and Fairness more and Purity, Authority, and Loyalty less than blacks and Latinos. 

 

 

 

 

Reframed Questionnaire

What follows is an altered version of the questionnaire on moral foundations that appears on yourmorals.org, a site run by Jon Haidt and others.  I believe it would be very interesting to see if and how the responses to the reframed questionnaire differ from those on the original, which is also shown below.   Each question on the orginal and reframed questionnaire relates to one of five dimensions identified by Haidt; the relevant dimension is identified in the text below, though not in the actual questionnaire.

 

Reframed Moral Foundations Questionnaire—Reframed version first [original question in brackets]

Part 1. When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking? Please answer according to this scale:

  [1] = Not At All Relevant (This consideration has nothing to do with my judgments of right and wrong)
    [2] = Not Very Relevant
   [3] = Slightly Relevant
  [4] = Somewhat Relevant
    [5] = Very Relevant
    [6] = Extremely Relevant (This is one of the most important factors when I judge right and wrong)

1.   Whether or not someone was denied his or her freedom.

[Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights.]

Fairness

2.   Whether or not someone did something to betray his or her co-workers.

[Whether or not someone did something to betray his or her group.]

Loyalty

3.    Whether or not someone suffered.

  [Whether or not someone suffered emotionally.]

Harm

4.   Whether or not someone honored the tradition that money is the root of all evil.

[Whether or not someone conformed to the traditions of society.]

Authority

5.   Whether or not someone threw a multimillion dollar birthday party for himself.

[Whether or not someone did something disgusting.]

Purity

6.   Whether or not someone showed a lack of loyalty to his or her employees.

      [Whether or not someone showed a lack of loyalty.]

Loyalty

7.   Whether or not someone violated the purity and sanctity of the natural environment.

[Whether or not someone violated standards of purity and decency.]

Purity

8.   Whether or not someone showed a lack of respect for scientific authority.

[Whether or not someone showed a lack of respect for authority.]

Authority

9.  Whether or not an action caused job insecurity.

[Whether or not an action caused chaos or disorder.]

Authority

10.  Whether or not someone's action showed love for his or her cause.

  [Whether or not someone's action showed love for his or her country.]

Loyalty

11.  Whether or not someone was good at math.

[same]

Irrelevant--control

12.  Whether or not someone cared for someone.

  [Whether or not someone cared for someone weak or vulnerable.]

Harm

13.  Whether or not someone was cruel for no reason.

   [Whether or not someone was cruel.]

Harm

14.   Whether or not someone acted in a way that an Earth Spirit (Gaia) would approve of.

   [Whether or not someone acted in a way that God would approve of.]

Purity

15.  Whether or not someone acted unfairly.

   [same]

Fairness

16.  Whether or not some people were treated differently than others in the same situation.

  [Whether or not some people were treated differently than others.]

Fairness

Part 2. Please read the following sentences and indicate your agreement or disagreement. Please answer according to this scale:
  [1] = Strongly Disagree
    [2] = Moderately Disagree
   [3] = Slightly Disagree
  [4] = Slightly Agree
    [5] = Moderately Agree
    [6] = Strongly Agree

16.   I think it's morally wrong when people get something they don’t deserve.

   [I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing.]

Fairness

17.   It can never be right to murder a human being.

   [It can never be right to kill a human being.]

Harm

18.   It is more important to be respectful of all people in society than to express oneself.

   [It is more important to be a team player than to express oneself.]

Authority

19.  Respect for science is something all children need to learn.

  [Respect for authority is something all children need to learn.]

Authority

20.  The purity of the natural environment is an important and valuable virtue.

  [Chastity is an important and valuable virtue.]

Purity

21.  Science has proven that the concept of race is a myth.

  [Men and women each have different roles to play in society.]

Authority

22.  I am proud of the history of my political side.

  [I am proud of my country's history.]

Loyalty

23.  Charity for the truly needy is the most crucial virtue.

  [Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.]

Harm

24.  If I were a teacher and disagreed with my state’s rules that I teach evolution, I would obey anyway because that is my duty.

  [If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer's orders, I would obey anyway because that is my duty.]

Loyalty

25.  I would call some acts wrong on the grounds that they are contrary to the sacredness of nature.

  [I would call some acts wrong on the grounds that they are unnatural.]

Purity

26.  One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal for no reason.

  [One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal.]

Harm

27.  When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone gets what they deserve.]

  [When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone is treated fairly.]

Fairness

28.  Freedom is the most important requirement for a society.

  [Justice is the most important requirement for a society.]

Fairness

29.  People should not make more than a certain amount, even if no one is harmed.

  [People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed.]

Purity

30.  It is better to do good than to do bad.

  [same]

Harm

31.  People should be loyal to their co-workers, even when they have done something wrong.

  [People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong.]

Loyalty

Dilemmas of a Value Competition Believer

Going further into introspection with this post...

As a believer in a value competition analysis that says social value is generated by the competition of liberal and conservative ideologies that are both inconsistent on the individualism/communitarianism and pro-elite/ pro-majority dimensions, what ideology if any should I adopt?

Given my cultural identity--signaled by my beard and turtleneck--my comparative advantage lies on the left side of the spectrum.  People on the left are comfortable with my cultural characteristics, and I with theirs, in a way that I'm less sure of for people on the right, like the Republican Assemblyman and ex-high school principal I had an exchange with in Trenton the other day.  So by those lights I should be a centrist liberal, trying to help the Democrats turn in a more sensible direction on how to run the government and non-profits effectively and damping down my wilder forms of cultural liberalism, in keeping with a value competition analysis under which one should not be simply a tribune of an elite that favors both economic and cultural flexibility.  Or if I want to go the other way and join the conservatives I should cut my hair and beard, get some good suits, ditch the turtlenecks, and finally figure out how to keep my glasses clean and tuck in my shirt-tail properly...that last point I suspect might present me with an insuperable obstacle to changing my cultural identity, though...

But here's the rub: As a believer in a particular kind of value competition analysis, I believe that the system functions better when important cultural identities like CEO, bearded/casual professor, African-American, and so on, are split as close as possible to 50-50 rather than belonging to one side or the other.  So while I'm entirely comfortable with identifying as an eclectic utilitarian because doing so in my judgment accords with my comparative advantage as an individual, I'm not at all comfortable with identifying as a centrist liberal for the same reason.   My brand of value competition analysis tells me it' would be a good thing for my society to have more people like me be conservatives.  That collective case doesn't necessarily override the individual case for me identifying with the right side of the left.  But it creates a dilemma that makes the question of my optimal political ideology quite unlike the question of whether to espouse utilitarianism or deontology.

The Brain Executive in the Individual Model

In the collective V-C model of politics as thus far formulated, all the action is at the level of the electorate, with the pols treated as rational actors who will be aligned or not to the greater good according to whether the electorate is.  For the collective model, doing it that way has pros and cons, with one major factor on the pro side being the reality that voters in fact are feeling, thinking agents.  For the individual V-C model of the brain, on the other hand, modeling based on the "electorate" having complex preferences/values may put more weight on individual neurons/"voters" than is plausible.  To multiply entities by modeling the brain as having millions/billions of sub-centers of choice/consciousness, etc. is not viable; I've always thought, and still think, that that problem can be avoided by conceptualizing "voters" in the brain as operating through a mechanistic process, but another way to try to get around the problem is by foregrounding the preferences/values and strategies of a brain executive or executives rather than beginning with the assumption made in the collective model that the greater good is latent in the preferences of the electorate.  Instead, greater goods (no need to postulate one "greatest good"; presumably, a hill-climbing approach analogous to natural selection in which changes are for the better though not necessarily for the best will do just fine) could be seen as discoverable through effort by the brain executive(s).  A problem I see at the end of the road is that brain executives need to be subject to some type of discipline by the brain electorate, so I'm not sure whether the problem of the brain electorate's preferences can be avoided in the end.  But at least one can begin with the executive(s), and see where that goes.

A second key issue is whether one needs competing brain agents who both (or all) are reasoning, feeling agents or whether it's sufficient to have one rational agent, who is not competing against another agent but rather competes against the autonomic/limbic/System 1/unconscious/subconscious/baseline brain, which in turn rewards/punishes the rational agent.  Though I'm personally attracted to a "competing rational agents within the brain" assumption, a single agent has the advantage of not multiplying entities and of corresponding to a mainstream sense of ourselves, with considerable grounding in the recent psych lit, as having a single rational consciousness that operates alongside nonrational parts of ourselves.  

So--beginning with the single agent, is there a good baseline model of suboptimality?   One candidate would be a rational agent without preferences other than for getting rewarded by the System 1 brain.  On the surface, that agent sounds like what we want, in that it combines rationality with lacking an agenda of its own.  So what's wrong with that agent?  One story is that the agent must care about factors other than System 1's approval or disapproval: The agent needs preferences in order to be motivated to act, and if lacking in any guide to action other than getting approbation from System 1 will be overly prone to do what System 1 wants and will hence under-discover courses of action that System 1 would not come up with but that bring it benefits.

A second set of potential baseline models for suboptimality involve solely egoistic or solely altruistic agents, with subcategories of egoism and altruism defined (e.g., egoism could be with reference to the executive itself, to the brain itself, or to some subgroup other than the universe, and likewise for altruism).  The intuition is that an agent with an admixture, possibly a randomly varying one, of egoism and altruism has advantages in avoiding the pitfalls of the more purely egoistic or altruistic agent.

A third issue as to which I'm less clear involves the relative role of calculative utilitarian reason and pattern-oriented deontological reason in the agent.  One can follow Gary Marcus, Joshua Greene, et al, and equate the reasoning agent with utilitarianism.  I've never seen things things that way personally--I've always supported the idea of competing calculative and cultural agents, both of which are rational (or alternatively of a single rational agent with an admixture of utilitarian and deontological reason).  But taking the Marcus-Greene approach is simpler, and allows for cross-cutting of the self-other and utility-deontology dimensions, with a calculative reasoning self that is both self and other oriented and a deontological System 1 that is also both self and other oriented.

Concretizing the Individual Model

A situation: Consider an employee (e.g., an associate in an investment bank or law firm) who is deciding whether to commit wholeheartedly to the firm or whether to combine employment with commitment to his or her own pursuits (e.g., writing a novel, having a child, etc.).  The choice involves egoistic/individualistic and altruistic/communitarian logic and emotions on both sides of the ledger. 

A claim (not necessary for the model to work, but nice if true): Human choices in general are like the employee example just given.  That is, whether the choice is to buy a Prius or a Hummer; to work for Teach for America or McKinsey; to maximize immediate firm profit or to act in a way that is more environmentally beneficial and possibly better for the firm long-term; or to help a man of another ethnic group who has been robbed and is bleeding by the side of the road, the emotional and the logical considerations on both sides of the ledger fuse individualism and communitarianism.  (E.g., one who does not help the robbery victim is not simply acting in an egoistic fashion but is also responding to a communitarian emotion or logic that postulates that one should uphold the ideal of loyalty to one's group even though failing to help someone in obvious need is personally painful.)

The background story: Human beings have a complex, ambivalent mix of individualism-egoism and communitarianism-altruism (as in E.O. Wilson's reference to the Arjuna-Krishna story).  Arguably, we are structured so as to have these positions intertwined within our brains rather than separated.  That is, instead of opposing superego and id centers located in different parts of the brain, in both emotion-oriented regions (e.g., the amygdala) and executive reason-oriented centers of the brain (e.g., the pre-frontal cortex) we have an ambivalent fusion of loyalty to broader groups (e.g., family, firm, faction, or society compared to self) along with loyalty to narrower groups or entities (e.g., self, family, firm, or faction compared to society).  (At the micro-level, this could be conceptualized through an analogy to voters: Neurons have "preferences" of a certain intensity and also randomly or otherwise have "overlapping preferences" or "values" that reinforce or counter the underlying preferences.)

If this position is right, a given choice in practice involves a fusion of individualistic and communitarian emotions and/or reasons on both sides of the ledger.  From an efficiency/optimality modeling perspective, the challenge is to analyze the optimality or non-optimality across the board or under specific circumstances of a fusion of individualism and communitarianism in the brain as opposed to other arrangements (e.g., a separate superego and id, or no individualistic or communitarian preferences/values).  (A key modeling sub-issue is how to construct the executive; it seems right to assume an executive, or competing executive centers, checked by feedback/"votes" from the rest of the brain, but in the individual case there is not the empirically obvious evidence of competing sides within consciousness that there is in the collective case, where we can observe competing parties and ideologies.  My intuition, partly supported by fMRI research by Greene, et al, is that the brain executive can be defined in terms of Benthamite-Kantian competition, with the reasoning part of the executive, if we follow Greene, being Benthamite.)

Kluge

In presenting Kluge on Friday at NYU, Gary Marcus made a nice case for the propositions that human evolution is characterized by market failures and that improvements to the human brain are achievable.  His presentation went differently from I'd expected, in that he avoided relying heavily on a distinction between "system 1" nondeliberative decisions and "system 2" deliberative reason.  As a result, I didn't ask him about whether deliberative decisions themselves show a dichotomy between calculative reason and pattern-oriented deontological reason.  Instead, I asked him about the individual-collective issue and collective action problems: Perhaps human imperfections from the individual perspective (e.g., crippling depression) are useful from the social perspective (value of realistic appraisals by depressives), and perhaps future improvements in human skills (e.g., better logical capacities) would advantage those who have them, but not those who don't or society as a whole.  His response was partly a psychologist's "I study individuals" one, and partly a questioning of the logic of group selection. 

Does Value Heterogeneity Help When One Product Feature Has More Social Value?

Suppose, in keeping with intuition, that the gas guzzlers preferred by the Burners in the previous example generate higher negative externalities than the economical vehicles preferred by the Greens.  In that case, could it still be better to have some consumers with Burner preferences, as opposed to a homogeneous market in which all consumers have Green preferences? 

One intuition is that heterogeneity could be better if it induced the producer to develop an effective Green car rather than an ineffective one; Burner preferences would serve as a useful check on problems associated with a homogeneous Green market.  What follows is an effort to flesh out that intution with a principal-agent plus asymmmetric information story:

Suppose the employees of the car company can either devote a high effort level to make a "True Green" car that genuinely reduces negative externalities and performs well on other counts, or slack and make a "Faux Green" car by, say, reducing use of gas by substituting another fuel source with even higher negative externalities.  Further suppose that whether a car is "True Green" or "Faux Green" is private information of employees that cannot be communicated to the employees' principal P or to consumers.  Finally, suppose all consumers are homogeneously Green, meaning that that they internalize the relative negative externalities of auto fuel sources in their welfare function. Given these assumptions, consumers will assume that a purported Green car is Faux Green rather than True Green and will not purchase it, resulting in a market failure and a return to employees of X. 

Now, alter the assumption of consumer value homogeneity to an assumption of value heterogeneity, in which a portion of consumers are Greens who internalize negative externalities that are known to them and a portion are Burners who do not.   Further, assume, as is intuitively plausible, that the asymmetric information problem of True Green and Faux Green cars is not present for Burner cars.

The presence of Burner as well as Green consumers allows P to set up a Burner division as well as a Green division within the firm and assign employees to the different divisions.  (Assume that employees in different divisions cannot collude).  A Burner car will be produced without a market failure.  (One can if one wishes assume that Green consumers will prefer to buy the Burner car over a Faux Green car, or adopt less restrictive assumptions.)  The employees in the Green division now face a different situation from the one in the homogeneously Green market.  Instead of a payoff of X for Faux Green work, they now face a payoff Z as low as 0, in the event P can terminate them and rely solely on the Burner car.  Given that difference, the payoff Y to the Green employees of exerting the effort to develop a True Green car may well now be higher than the payoff Z of developing a Faux Green car.  The introduction of heterogeneity in the form of Burner preferences has alleviated the market failure occurring in the homogeneous market.

Tweaking the Heterogeneous Values in Markets Story

Suppose a car company is deciding whether to invest $10 billion in developing a new car.  Assume that the result will be a good product, in that the net social benefit of the new car is $3 billion.  Further assume the private benefit of the product is $8 billion.  Given these conditions, the socially beneficial investment will not be made.

Now assume that the market is divided into two types of consumers, both of whom deviate from RC.  Type 1 ("Greens") overvalue fuel economy compared to RC; type 2 ("Burners") undervalue fuel economy compared to RC.  Neither type is purely irrational, though, in that both are willing to pay more for a good car that is either fuel-economical (for Greens) or fuel-uneconomical but with other virtues (for Burners), as opposed to a car that is not good.  Specifically, assume Greens will overpay $5000 for a good fuel-economical car and $1000 for a mediocre one; Burners will overpay $5000 for a good uneconomical car and $1000 for a mediocre one; both sides will pay corresponding amounts *less* than RC levels for cars of the other, non-preferred type.  Finally, assume there are 1 million Greens and 1 million Burners. 

With the value-divided non-RC market, the investment will be made by the company, as long as the car can be fit into either the Green category or the Burner category.  Either a good Green car or a good Burner car will generate an extra $5 billion in private benefit for the company compared to the RC case, or an extra $4 billion compared to producing a not-good car of the desired type in the non-RC case. 

Now compare a non-RC market with homogeneous values.  Suppose consumers are all Greens, with a non-RC preference for high fuel economy.  If one believes that ex ante good new cars are likely or very likely to be Green cars rather than Burner cars, the story can readily be told in a way that makes Green value homogeneity better than bifurcation into two contrasting camps.  To make the case for value heterogeneity in terms of the story, my intuition is that you need to do one or both of the following: a) introduce a "work cheaper" component of the story in which car company managers/employees will work at lower cost in the value heterogeneity environment (there's an analogy to politics, in which an optimistic story can be be told about pols accepting lower than RC compensation because of nonmonetary benefits they receive from working on behalf of their ideology); or b) tell a dynamic story about how value heterogeneity promotes better products compared to homogeneity by penalizing bad products of either type in a way that an all-Green or all-Burner market fails to do.  The dynamic story strikes me as the first avenue to pursue, partly because I think it may be latent in the assumptions already made about Greens and Burners, or in a plausible tweaking of those assumptions.

Modeling the Optimality of Opposing Non-RC Preferences in Markets

Suppose a business has to make a product decision between Change (C) and Stasis (S).  It can spend X to develop the optimal C or S product for the firm; assume that the profit-maximizing decision is also the socially optimal decision.  The development cost X is greater than the private benefit PB to the business assuming rational consumers, but less than the net benefit to society SB of the optimal C or S product.  Accordingly, the business will not incur the development cost and society will lose SB. 

Now assume that the consumer market is divided into non-rational consumers.  Half of the market consists of pro-C early adopters who have a non-RC preference for new products, especially ones that work well, and half of the market consists of pro-S late adopters who have a non-RC preference for the tried and true, especially what works well.

The intuition: The non-RC bifurcation of the consumer market between early adopters and late adopters can induce the business to spend X to develop the optimal C or S product in cases in which an RC market or a market of all early adopters or late adopters will not induce it to do so.   A numerical example: Suppose the cost X is $100 million, with a private benefit PB of $75 million and a social benefit SB of $200 million.  As noted before, the cost will not be incurred by the business given rational consumers (and no government or other subsidy).  Now assume that the market consists of one million pro-C early adopters who will overvalue an optimal C product at $100 each and a suboptimal one at $50 each, and one million pro-S late adopters who will overvalue an optimal S product at $100 each and a suboptimal one at $50 each.  Given this bifurcated non-RC consumer market, it now pays the business to spend the $100 million, since developing an optimal C or S product will give the business an additional $50 million from non-RC preferences in addition to the $75 million from RC preferences. 

If everyone has non-RC preferences in favor of C or S, the business's incentives to develop the optimal product are weakened.  For example, if everyone is an early adopter and if the business believes there is a .5 chance the optimal choice is S rather than C, the numbers shift back against spending the $100 million.

Your Parents and How Bad the World Appears to Be

In a recent email on my book proposal I got good pushback on my contention that it's good for politicians to be electorally oriented.  It depends, my interlocutor correctly noted, on how bad a place you think the world is currently--if it's bad enough, the risk of politicians just imposing what they think is right is presumably less than if the world's doing sort of all right.   In my response, I acknowledged that the world didn't seem nearly as bad as it had to me in the 1980s when I was working at a law firm job I disliked.  Afterword, I thought of a response that I think also gets to the psychological reality of the situation: My sense of a world awry in the 1980s had a lot to do with going from a home setting in which my parents had been highly solicitous of me (and from school settings that rewarded certain skills of mine) to work settings that weren't so aligned with my desires and skills.  The point, I suppose, apart from the VC issue of whether "the world is doing pretty well"/"the world is doing terribly" dichotomy is a useful value dichotomy (yes) is that a dark view of the world can be associated not only with having had mean parents but also with having had benevolent ones.