elainegrey

From the arXiv blog:

Signatures of the neurocognitive basis of culture wars found in moral psychology data

Nestor Caticha, Renato Vicente
(Submitted on 31 May 2010)

Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) states that groups of different observers may rely on partially dissimilar sets of moral foundations, thereby reaching different moral valuations on a subset of issues. With the introduction of functional imaging techniques, a wealth of new data on neurocognitive processes has rapidly mounted and it has become increasingly more evident that this type of data should provide an adequate basis for modeling social systems. In particular, it has been shown that there is a spectrum of cognitive styles with respect to the differential handling of novel or corroborating information. Furthermore this spectrum is correlated to political affiliation. Here we use methods of statistical mechanics to characterize the collective behavior of an agent-based model society whose inter individual interactions due to information exchange in the form of opinions, are in qualitative agreement with neurocognitive and psychological data. The main conclusion derived from the model is that the existence of diversity in the cognitive strategies yields different statistics for the sets of moral foundations and that these arise from the cognitive interactions of the agents. Thus a simple interacting agent model, whose interactions are in accord with empirical data about moral dynamics, presents statistical signatures consistent with those that characterize opinions of conservatives and liberals. The higher the difference in the treatment of novel and corroborating information the more agents correlate to liberals.

Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures
Subjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC)
Cite as: arXiv:1005.5718v1 [physics.soc-ph]

In critiques of Moral Foundation Theory, i find this interesting nugget:

Stephen Vaisey, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, suggests that authenticity and being true to yourself is an aspect of modern morality that cannot be easily linked to any of the 5 foundations. He draws on Charles Taylor's work to suggest an "ethic of authenticity" that makes the following actions bad:
* a person marrying for money
* a person marrying someone they respect and like (but don't LOVE) because they want to have children
* an independent documentary filmmaker taking a job making commercials for Wal-Mart

He adds: "If I had to tell some kind of cultural story here, I'd look to the Protestant Reformation (and further back
to one of its inspirations -- St. Augustine), which encouraged people to find God by looking inward rather than outward to external authority and interpretations. It's pretty easy to imagine the transition from looking inward to find God's will for you to looking inward to find "your true nature." This would be one cultural mechanism for explaining the colonization of one's own internal life with the emotional overlay of the ethic of purity."

This lead to http://www.yourmorals.org/ which is a place where one can find piles and piles of quizzes.

Apparently, liberals and conservatives score equally on preference for a logical style above the experiential style. My answers are minutely more preference for logical style, such a minute difference the score might as well be the same, i expect.