scholarly journals Deliver Us From Evil: Morality's Ability to Divide and Conquer

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Elizabeth Weinberg

<p>At one point there was consensus that morality was solely based on matters of harm and justice. However, with advances in cultural and anthropological research, Haidt and Joseph (2004) proposed a more expansive approach to morality, known as the Moral Foundations Theory. This theory highlights five foundations: Harm/Care and Fairness/Equality (Individualizing foundations) and Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity (Binding foundations). Established links between the five foundations and political ideologies have been made, as well as broad links with religious affiliation in a US context. Considerably less research has been conducted on these foundations outside of an American context. Due to New Zealand’s particular ethnic composition, multi-party electoral politics and electoral system, and relatively secular climate, it makes for an ideal setting to investigate moral foundations in the context of political and religious ideology. I sampled 354 New Zealand participants (a mixture of general population and students: 39.5% male, 57.1% females, 3.4% other) on moral foundations, political self-identification, religious ideology, and individual-level individualism and collectivism. Political identification and religious ideologies were correlated with morality as predicted, with more conservative political and religious ideology being associated more strongly with the Binding foundations and more liberal political ideology being associated more strongly with the Individualizing. Furthermore, results raise speculation that the vertical dimension of individual-level cultural affiliation may be a strong predictor of morality endorsement alongside collectivism. This study replicates the connection between political and religious ideology, and morality but also adds additional insight into these relationships.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Elizabeth Weinberg

<p>At one point there was consensus that morality was solely based on matters of harm and justice. However, with advances in cultural and anthropological research, Haidt and Joseph (2004) proposed a more expansive approach to morality, known as the Moral Foundations Theory. This theory highlights five foundations: Harm/Care and Fairness/Equality (Individualizing foundations) and Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity (Binding foundations). Established links between the five foundations and political ideologies have been made, as well as broad links with religious affiliation in a US context. Considerably less research has been conducted on these foundations outside of an American context. Due to New Zealand’s particular ethnic composition, multi-party electoral politics and electoral system, and relatively secular climate, it makes for an ideal setting to investigate moral foundations in the context of political and religious ideology. I sampled 354 New Zealand participants (a mixture of general population and students: 39.5% male, 57.1% females, 3.4% other) on moral foundations, political self-identification, religious ideology, and individual-level individualism and collectivism. Political identification and religious ideologies were correlated with morality as predicted, with more conservative political and religious ideology being associated more strongly with the Binding foundations and more liberal political ideology being associated more strongly with the Individualizing. Furthermore, results raise speculation that the vertical dimension of individual-level cultural affiliation may be a strong predictor of morality endorsement alongside collectivism. This study replicates the connection between political and religious ideology, and morality but also adds additional insight into these relationships.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark John Brandt ◽  
G. Scott Morgan

Ideology and political beliefs are individual-level phenomena that are intended to describe the political thoughts of a person. However, the modal study of the structure of political ideologies and beliefs uses cross-sectional survey data to estimate what is central to the belief system or the dimensionality of the belief system. Cross-sectional data are ill-suited to the task of studying individual-level phenomena because they contain an unobservable mixture of within-person and between-person variation. In this project, we use longitudinal datasets from the Netherlands and the United States, spanning between 6 months and 10 years, to we ask whether the modal study helps us understand the ideologies in people’s heads? First, using Bayesian STARTS models (Lüdtke, Robitzsch, &amp; Wagner, 2018), we find that variability in measures of ideology and political beliefs is primarily due to stable between-person differences, with relatively smaller amounts variation due to within-person change. Second, we estimate between-person, within-person, and cross-sectional correlations between all items in our study and find that between-person correlations are substantially different from within-person correlations. Between-person correlations are larger and in some cases differ in their direction from within-person correlations. Cross-sectional correlations are most similar to between-person correlations, suggesting that the modal study may help describe divisions between people but is ill-suited to tell us about the structure of individual’s ideologies and political beliefs. New methods are necessary for a complete understanding of political attitudes that can focus on both between- and within-person processes.


Author(s):  
Mikhail Konstantinov

The aim of the article is to concretize the concept of political ideology in the aspect of its matrix structure and in the context of the cognitive-evolutionary approach. Based on Michael Frieden's morphological approach to the analysis of ideological consciousness, the concept of cognitive-ideological matrices is introduced, which allows us to describe the process of transition from proto-ideological to ideological concepts proper, especially at the level of individual consciousness. The identification of the ideological concept as the main “gene” of conceptual variability and inheritance made it possible to describe the main parameters of the evolution of political ideologies and associate it with changes taking place at the individual consciousness level. The described concept was tested in a series of sociological studies of youth consciousness conducted in 2015-2016 and 2018-2020. As a result of the study, it was possible to first identify the “zero level” of ideology, at which the minds of young respondents are potentially open to the influence of diverse and often mutually exclusive ideological orientations, and second, to pinpoint the changes that have occurred in the cognitive ideological matrices of Rostov-on-Don students over the past five years. This study was conducted by scientists from the southern Federal University.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Debus ◽  
Jale Tosun

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments to impose major restrictions on individual freedom in order to stop the spread of the virus. With the successful development of a vaccine, these restrictions are likely to become obsolete—on the condition that people get vaccinated. However, parts of the population have reservations against vaccination. While this is not a recent phenomenon, it might prove a critical one in the context of current attempts to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, the task of designing policies suitable for attaining high levels of vaccination deserves enhanced attention. In this study, we use data from the Eurobarometer survey fielded in March 2019. They show that 39% of Europeans consider vaccines to cause the diseases which they should protect against, that 50% believe vaccines have serious side effects, that 32% think that vaccines weaken the immune system, and that 10% do not believe vaccines are tested rigorously before authorization. We find that—even when controlling for important individual-level factors—ideological extremism on both ends of the spectrum explains skepticism of vaccination. We conclude that policymakers must either politicize the issue or form broad alliances among parties and societal groups in order to increase trust in and public support for the vaccines in general and for vaccines against COVID-19 in particular, since the latter were developed in a very short time period and resulted—in particular in case of the AstraZeneca vaccine—in reservations because of the effectiveness and side effects of the new vaccines.


Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Anna Miglietta ◽  
Barbara Loera

We analyzed the relationship between modern forms of populism and citizen support for exclusive welfare policies and proposals, and we focused on support for left-wing- and right-wing-oriented welfare policies enacted or proposed during the Lega Nord (LN)–Five Star Movement (FSM) government in Italy (2018–2019). In light of the theoretical perspective of political ideology as motivated by social cognition, we examined citizens’ support for the two policies considering adherence to populist attitudes, agreement on the criteria useful to define ingroup membership, and personal values. We also took into account the role of cognitive sophistication in populism avoidance. A total of 785 Italian adults (F = 56.6; mean age = 35.8) completed an online survey in the summer of 2019 based on the following: support for populist policies and proposals, political ideologies and positioning, personal values, and ingroup boundaries. We used correlation and regression analyses. The results highlight the relationships between populism and political conservatism. Populism was related to the vertical and horizontal borders defining the “people”; cognitive sophistication was not a relevant driver. We identified some facilitating factors that could promote adherence to and support for public policies inspired by the values of the right or of the left, without a true ideological connotation.


Fascism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-274
Author(s):  
Tamir Bar-On

With the dramatic rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, we witnessed the revival of the Islamism-fascism comparison. This paper begins with a short history of the Islamism-fascism comparison. It then argues that both Islamism and fascism are coherent political ideologies. The author proposes a four-fold typology of different discourses in respect of the Islamism-fascism comparison, which are called ‘Thou shall not compare’, ‘Islamofascism’, ‘Islamofascism as epithet’, and ‘Dare to compare’. It’s concluded that we should compare Islamism and fascism, but that the two ideologies are distinctive, totalitarian ideologies. Clerical fascism is the closest ideologically to Islamism, although it is also a distinctive political ideology.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205316801771917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Lyons Reilly

One of the focal points of social networks research has been the process by which individuals utilize information and cues from their social networks and communities to form political attitudes and make decisions about how and when to participate in politics. Not all individuals, however, have large social networks or are strongly connected to their local social environments. Furthermore, despite concerns about rising social isolation in American society, the role that relatively socially disconnected individuals play in politics is not well understood. Using a nationally representative data set with information about communities, social networks, and individual-level variables, this paper examines social connectedness and political behavior. Those who are more socially isolated, it is found, are neither more conservative nor liberal on any particular political issues, but clearly participate in politics less than individuals who are well connected to those around them. Finally, while individual political ideology is not correlated with isolation, the contextual influence of the local environment on individual preferences is correlated with social connectedness. When compared with well connected citizens, individuals who are more isolated are less likely to have their vote choices influenced by those around them. Individual social connectedness conditions the effect of contextual social influence.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Pyszczynski ◽  
Pelin Kesebir ◽  
Matt Motyl ◽  
Andrea Yetzer ◽  
Jacqueline M. Anson

We conceptualized ideological consistency as the extent to which an individual’s attitudes toward diverse political issues are coherent among themselves from an ideological standpoint. Four studies compared the ideological consistency of self-identified liberals and conservatives. Across diverse samples, attitudes, and consistency measures, liberals were more ideologically consistent than conservatives. In other words, conservatives’ individual-level attitudes toward diverse political issues (e.g., abortion, gun control, welfare) were more dispersed across the political spectrum than were liberals’ attitudes. Study 4 demonstrated that variability across commitments to different moral foundations predicted ideological consistency and mediated the relationship between political orientation and ideological consistency.


Author(s):  
Lorenz Graf-Vlachy ◽  
Tarun Goyal ◽  
Yannick Ouardi ◽  
Andreas König

AbstractThere is a lack of clarity in information systems research on which factors lead people to use or not use technologies of varying degrees of perceived legality. To address this gap, we use arguments from the information systems and political ideology literatures to theorize on the influence of individuals’ political ideologies on online media piracy. Specifically, we hypothesize that individuals with a more conservative ideology, and thus lower openness to experience and higher conscientiousness, generally engage in less online media piracy. We further hypothesize that this effect is stronger for online piracy technology that is legally ambiguous. Using clickstream data from 3873 individuals in the U.S., we find that this effect in fact exists only for online media piracy technologies that are perceived as legally ambiguous. Specifically, more conservative individuals, who typically have lower ambiguity intolerance, use (legal but ambiguously perceived) pirated streaming websites less, while there is no difference for the (clearly illegal) use of pirated file sharing websites.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wiktor Soral ◽  
Michał Bilewicz

Ideological convictions are known to shape attitudes and behaviour in various life domains. Based on existing psychological analyses of political ideology, we use an ideological dual-process approach to explain people’s vaccine hesitancy, in which distinguish between authoritarian (RWA) and hierarchical (SDO) facets of conservatism as potential antecedents of vaccination attitudes. In a large international study performed in Germany (N = 1210), Poland (N = 1209), and the United Kingdom (N = 1222), we tested the roles of SDO and RWA in predicting vaccination hesitancy, as well as cross-cultural universality of the the pattern of relationships between political ideologies and attitudes toward vaccines. In all three countries, high SDO was associated with higher vaccine hesitancy, whereas high RWA was associated with lower vaccine hesitancy. These findings contribute to our understanding of the distinctive roles that these two facets of right-wing ideology might play in the domain of public health.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document