Moral Foundations
Erik pointed me towards some interesting research with an accompanying website: It tries to understand the moral foundations behind political affiliations. Along with an interesting paper (worth the read, in my opinion), there is a survey that tries to get at the survey taker’s moral foundations. Here are my results (red is average conservative, blue is average liberal, and green is my score):
Hmm…
June 1st, 2009 at 08:22:53 pm
That quiz sucked big time. The wording was so terrible, I definitely would have had a totally different score with different but equivalent phrasing.
As a side note, my “harm” score was even less than yours.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:57:21 pm
The thing I noticed most when I took the quiz was that I often had to justify my answers to fairness questions by saying to myself, “This is my own definition of fairness (broadly, equality of opportunity), which is likely different than the authors’ definition (broadly, equality of outcome).”
I had a similar impression about the wording, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When enough people take the same quiz, you can still get reasonable results out — ie, correlations are still true. Changing the wording may have changed raw scores, but I doubt it would have changed the correlations.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:37:05 am
Let me be more precise, in the first section, there were a lot of words that were used that were code words – things like purity, etc. I’m sure they have a particular meaning in a particular setting, but their meaning is extremely ambiguous to me; without a definition I was lost and had to vote extremely low.
Also, words like fairness, justice and harm were routinely used in vague and inconsistent ways (it’s almost as if a liberal came up with this test…).