On my two Published Studies

In today's post, I'm going to briefly explain and summarize the two studies I have published, "Bad News for Conservatives? Moral Judgments and the Dark Triad Personality Traits: A Correlational Study", and, "A Lot More Bad News for Conservatives, and a Little Bit of Bad News for Liberals? Moral Judgments and the Dark Triad Personality Traits: A Follow-up Study." In particular, I want to focus on what I do and do not claim that either study shows.

In "Bad News", 567 participants were presented with three surveys: a 17-item moral judgment survey, the ShortD3 Dark Triad Survey (which measures Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy), and demographic survey. Several items on the 17-item moral judgment survey on issues tha span traditional "liberal/conservative" divides -- e.g. support for the death penalty is a traditionally "conservative" view -- were found to be strongly correlated with self-reported social or economic conservativism on the demographic survey. Judgments on these items were thus identified in the paper as "conservative" judgments, and their converse "liberal" judgments.  The results of the study were essentially these: after Bonferroni corrections for multiple comparisons, 11 significan positive correlations were found between conservative judgments and members of the Dark Triad, compared to 0 for liberal judgments.  Specifically, members of the Dark Triad were found to correlate with conservative judgments on the following issues:

1. capital punishment
2. indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without trial
3. the right of government to intervene in free markets
4. gay marriage
5. the right of government to wage war in violation of UN resolutions.

Further, some of the correlations were quite strong (p-values between .2 and .3), at least relative to standards in the social sciences (in general, p-values of .2 and .3 are considered "moderate" relationships).  Finally, relationships were also found between members of the Dark Triad and utilitarian judgments regarding lying and "trolley cases."

My second study, "A Lot More Bad News...?", presented 1154 participants with a different 15-item moral intuition survey and a 28-item Short Dark Triad measure.  To make a long story short, after Bonferroni corrections, this study found 22 significant positive correlations between Dark Triad members and conservative moral judgments, and 7 significant positive correlations with liberal judgments.  Conservative correlated with one or more members of the Dark Triad members on all of the following issues:

1. The government ought to do more about illegal immigration.
2. The United States ought to build a fence along the US-Mexico border.
3. The government ought to seek out and deport illegal immigrants.
4. English ought to be the official language of the United States.
5. Illegal immigrants ought (not) to be provided with emergency medical care.
6. The government ought to provide public education to children of illegal immigrants.
7. The government ought to use ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (including waterboarding).
8. The theory of ‘intelligent design ought to be taught in public schools.
9. The government ought (not) to work within the rules of the United Nations. 
10. The government ought (not) to do more to protect the environment.
11. The government ought (not) to do more to prevent climate change.
12. The government ought to define marriage as the union between one man and one woman.

Liberal judgments were found to correlate with one or more members of the Dark Triad on the following issues:

1. The government ought to work within the rules of the United Nations.
2. The government ought to do what is in its own national interests in foreign and international relations.
3. The government ought to do more to prevent climate change.
4. The government ought to do more to protect the environment.

I would like to conclude this post with a few remarks on what I did and did not claim these results to show in the two respective papers (as this has been the subject of some confusion). In both studies, I explicitly stated that I did not purport to measure any kind of underlying psychological construct, such as "liberalism" or "conservatism." Rather, I was merely interested in examining whether there were any relationships between the Dark Triad and particular moral judgments on particular issues. Whether or not there is some underlying construct -- for instance, "conservativism" or "liberalism" -- that accounts for the relationships is something I explicitly left for another place and time.  At the time of the study, I did not feel proficient enough at statistical matters to attempt to measure or interpret underlying constructs. Accordingly, no where in either article did I claim that the results are "bad news" for conservatives. All I did was point to the correlational relationships I found and ask the question: are the results "bad news" for conservatives? This is crucial because if I had intended to measure some underlying construct (such as conservatism), then some more advanced statistics -- such as multiple regressions -- would have been called for in my studies (as some of my critics have held). But this is expressly not what the studies purported to do. Because all I was interested in was relationships between the Dark Triad and specific moral judgments, simple correlational analyses were perfectly fit for my (admittedly exploratory) purposes. But more on these issues later...