What makes someone conservative or progressive? A political quiz.

What makes someone conservative or progressive? And actually, are those really the only two choices? 

I’d like to talk about politics today. But not about the politics of the day -- there’s no value in such fleeting things. Instead I’d like to talk about the roots of politics. What makes someone conservative or progressive. 

And I’d like to talk about why sometimes we talk about politics as though those are the only two choices. They aren’t, but there are reasons why things often get distilled down to simplifications like that. 

And I’d like to know if YOU are conservative or progressive. Or if maybe you just think you are. I’m going to give you a quick quiz, and the answers might surprise you. 

Moral Foundations

So let me first tell you about the psychological science behind this quiz. I’m pulling this info from the work of a group of academics, most famously Jonathan Haidt from NYU, but let me also give all the due credit, to Ravi Iyer, Sean Wojcik, Matt Motyl, Gary Sherman, Jesse Graham, Sena Koleva, and Pete Ditto. 

It’s called Moral Foundations Theory. So these psychologists were studying morals, to try to find the roots of morals, to learn where our morals come from. And one of the striking things about their work is that it highlights the political divide, and explains in a moral sense how people come to hold their political convictions. 

Now, there’s this platitude out there you may have come across. I believe it to be true, and it’s a big lesson to learn because a bunch of people out there get it backwards. The platitude is, “politics is downstream from culture,” first really popularized by Andrew Breitbart. The idea is, politics does not drive our culture, but the other way around. Our culture shapes our politics. And I definitely believe that’s true, but here with Moral Foundations we have an even deeper root. Morals shape our cultures, which in turn shape our politics. 

So by understanding our morals, we can understand our politics in a much clearer way. Which is a really big deal I think, because like me you’ve probably wondered a lot, how it is that what seems like the most important stuff -- at least to some people -- is the stuff that people have the hardest time coming to agreement on. Or how it is that so many people come to hold these political convictions that match a conservative or progressive pattern, rather than some eclectic mix. 

And what I think is really the most fun about this exercise, is how much it can really teach you about yourself. And I think some of you out there will be a bit surprised. 

So I’ve found the best way to learn about Moral Foundations is to take it in quiz form, to explore your personal convictions that help you make sense about the world around us, so that’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to use the 5-category model the Haidt team first produced, because it illustrates the political divide so clearly. There’s another version that I’ll explore in more detail at another time. 

And lastly before I give you the quiz, since we’re dealing with morals, another big lesson to take away is morals aren’t falsifiable. These are not things that can be proven true or false. We can criticize each other’s morals, but ultimately they are just value judgments. So there’s no way to say what’s right & wrong or true & false, and that’s not the point here. The point is, your morals are about what matters to you, and that shapes what in politics matters to you. 

OK, so this quiz is just 5 questions long. And your answer to each one shapes your moral profile, and also your political profile. Think of it like 5 sliders on a mix board. 

Let’s get to it.

The Quiz

So first, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you care about justice? About whether things are fair? How important is justice to you? 

Next, scale of 1 to 10, how much do you care about human suffering? How important to you is preventing harm?

Next, scale of 1 to 10, how important is purity to you? Like, bodily purity, what you put into your body, what you do with your body. But also notions of sanctity; there’s also a lot of moralizing about the purity of food these days. How important is this to you in a moral sense? 

Next, same scale of 1 to 10: how important is respect for authority? 

Lastly, same scale, how important is loyalty? How important is it to let your group know they can count on you? 

Scoring

There’s no pass or fail, of course, but let’s dive into your results to see what they say. My first guess is you scored high in Justice. 

Justice & Harm

That’s because almost everyone cares about justice. We may not all agree on what **is** just, but we all care about justice. Surprised? 

One thing that’s rarely recognized, but a big part of the political divide, is that many people perceive that the folks holding the opposite political ideology don’t care about justice, or don’t care about harm. That they just don’t care about other people or what happens to them. 

This perception is especially common with leftist or progressive folks regarding how much right-wing or conservative people care. Very many lefties think righties don’t care. 

But it’s not true. The academic literature consistently shows everyone cares quite a bit about both justice & harm. In Haidt's book The Righteous Mind, he describes how this isn't the case. It also shows progressives score slightly higher than conservatives. The difference is small, and the differences elsewhere are actually rather large. We’ll get to those soon, and it’s another surprise. 

So everyone cares about Justice & Harm even though it appears differently, especially for the left looking rightward. And this is one of the causes of partisan strife. 

But you likely scored relatively high in both categories, just like everyone else, so this doesn’t tell you too much about yourself just yet. Let’s keep going. The remaining three categories pose a partisan split that’s much more stark.

Purity/Sanctity

Did you score low on this one? If so, you’re likely to be progressive. A majority of conservatives score high in this category, but progs are likely to contend that purity is not a moral issue. Rather they see the pursuit of morality -- say, for example, emphasizing chaste sexual norms, and moralizing against sexual promiscuity -- as harmful to people with differing proclivities or cultural norms. 

This is the beginning of a pattern we will see continue in the remaining categories. 

But let’s explain purity & sanctity’s moral value since it’s not as self-apparent as justice or preventing human suffering. We see a lot of various ways that people pursue sanctification or religious purification of body, food, sex, but I think the best example I can find that explains why societies would develop with at least one group moralizing purity, is single motherhood. 

An academic paper from 2012 describes the robust and inextricable link between single motherhood and poverty. A site exploring family inequality graphed its data here. 

A site gathering single mother statistics reports, “The poverty rate for single-mother families in 2018 was 34%, nearly five times more than the rate (6%) for married-couple families. 16 Among children living with mother only, 40% lived in poverty. In contrast, only 12% of children in two parent families were counted as poor.”

So when some conservative groups moralize sexual chastity, and emphasize marriage and commitment, it reflects a natural and reasonable strategy to abate single motherhood. There is a harm-reduction purpose behind it. Progressives may take contention in the method or the efficacy, but we should all find the pursuit and intentions of such mores to be understandable. 

Meanwhile, progressive groups find the same moral pursuits stigmatizing to LGBT or polyamorous relationships that don’t appear to harm anyone. It’s the moral rejection of such stigma that leads progressives to score low in purity/sanctity, but that’s not to say progressives are less moral than conservatives. Not intrinsically. It is rather that pattern I mentioned, that we’ll see continue in a moment here, of low-scoring progressive attitudes that constitute a rejection of conservative morals for the sake of defending & advocating for minority groups that don’t conform to the conservative traditions. 

Respect/Authority

Scoring low here, again, makes you more likely to be progressive. 

(BTW, I try to avoid using the term “liberal” because on the political left there are two main subgroups, one of which is more properly described as “illiberal,” prone to support infringement of individual liberties for the sake of what they see as what is better for groups. Active support for individual liberty is endemic among right-wing subgroups, as well. So “liberal” isn’t a useful term when discussing ideological divides.)

Conservatives scoring higher here reflects that they are also more likely to have authoritarian leanings. Sometimes that’s viewed as sort of a dirty word, but it needn’t mean dictator and it needn’t mean malevolent. In the US, we’re well-steeped in the awareness of the problems brought by a monarch or other type of hegemonic rule over the populace, and those are real problems. But venerating authority can just mean a preference for law & order, social stability, and respect toward authority figures from the police & military up to the commander-in-chief. 

Progressives, again, tend to moralize against conforming to tradition or being overly obsequious toward fallible authorities who make mistakes, sometimes egregiously, which can harm innocent people. 

Loyalty

In our last category, here, we see the same pattern: if you scored low, you’re more likely a progressive. 

So conservatives score highly in all 5 categories. Progressives tend to only care about the first two, Justice & Harm, while basically rejecting the other three categories as not moral, because, they reason, pursuing those morals causes some people harm. 

So let me explain loyalty before we explore this pattern more, because the utility of loyalty is another one of those subtle things that can be hard to catch. Loyalty is a moral stand against individuals (or smaller group) putting their own interests before that of the (larger) group. The people in the group don’t want to suffer. They don’t want others to suffer, and ostensibly don’t mind all that much when others prosper. But it’s when others prosper at the direct expense of the group that loyalty is triggered. So we have all these moral standards and cultural customs that have built up, to basically punish people for disloyalty, who pose a threat to the well-being of the broader group. 

And so just like respect for authority, progressives could argue this pressure to conform and defer to the broader group puts individuals out, and so progressives reject this. They don’t score highly in loyalty. And of course I’m not here to say one side is right and the other wrong, but I’m trying to explain both viewpoints with as much validity as I can, because they are not falsifiable facts, they are value judgments. 

The Divide

So the overall pattern we see for progressives, is 2 high-scoring categories in Justice & Harm, but low-scoring in the other three, Purity, Authority & Loyalty. And conservatives score highly in all five categories. Here’s Haidt’s slide illustrating this (from a time when Haidt referred to Justice as “Fairness” and Loyalty as “Ingroup”).

As I mentioned, we also see progressives scoring slightly higher in Justice & Harm, and I think that’s just a symptom of the same broader split in Purity/Authority/Loyalty, because progressives care about the purported injustice & harm that comes about in group-level pursuit of the other three. So one moral difference between the two sides is manifesting in two patterns in the data. 

That one moral difference really boils down to progressives objecting to the marginalization of smaller groups who don’t fit the moral structures that purportedly benefit the broader group. 

Why just progressive & conservative? Why are there only two?

In reality our political profiles are highly complex. Even just using this Moral Foundations Model, we have five “sliders” that could easily produce dozens and dozens of archetypes that don’t match the progressive or conservative profiles we’ve explored. So why do we talk about politics as though it’s a one-dimensional, left-right spectrum? 

First, a useful adage here is, “all models are wrong, some are useful.” Another is, “don’t mistake the map for the territory.” No model is actual reality, and especially not when dealing with political morality. Models are exactly what they are: models of reality. It’s important to keep in mind that they are flawed, incomplete, and not the real thing. 

The left-right spectrum is a wrong model, as well. But it’s useful enough for some purposes. It certainly doesn’t leave you or I feeling like we’re represented correctly! And I think this Moral Foundations Model represents many of us much more faithfully. But it, too, is wrong, and has its limits of accuracy. 

The progressive and conservative profiles are more common than outlier profiles, and that’s one reason why in politics we tend to just talk about left/right. 

But another big reason is the dynamics of opposition politics. A lot of politics in a Democracy is essentially zero-sum: there will be a winner and a loser. So the natural response for a lot of people is to partner with the groups that are nearer to their political profile, for the purpose of outnumbering and defeating the groups that are further away. The effect is like a political gravity that pulls most people into one of the two groups. And as a result we have more people voting against someone/something, than for someone/something. 

So opposition politics shapes a lot, but doesn’t represent the interests or values of most people very well. It simply reflects what represents us better than the worst realistic alternative. 

But for us, who are complex creatures with complex and balanced value judgments, hopefully we can now understand our political opponents better -- that they aren’t stupid or evil, but just people with reasonable values -- and all the more, hopefully we can understand ourselves.