In November 2011, I published my first study in neuroethics, a paper entitled, "Bad News for Conservatives? Moral Judgments and the Dark Triad Personality Traits: A Correlational Study." As I mentioned in an earlier post, this article received some press coverage, ignited something of an online firestorm, and was later the subject of a very critical reply article -- which, while it did raise some genuine methodological problems with the study, was also (A) fundamentally incorrect in some of its most central criticisms and ultimately (B) essentially confirmed my initial results after additional statistical analysis. The reply article also did not mention that I replicated and extended the findings of "Bad News" in a second study examining different moral and political issues, which also corrected for some of the methodological problems in the first study, entitled, "A Lot More Bad News for Conservatives, and a Little Bit of Bad News for Liberals?" I will address some of these issues in more detail in a future post. Today, I would like to explain how, and why, I developed the initial "Bad News" study.
As I mentioned in my second guest post, "How I Got into Neuroethics", "Bad News" arose from a proposal I submitted to the Yale Experiment Month Initiative, a program designed to introduce philosophers to experimental methods, help them develop and execute studies, perform statistical analysis, and thus, do work in the relativel new field known as Experimental Philosophy. Experiment Month is essentially an annual contest of sorts in which philosophers interested in potentially carrying out a study submit a brief proposal. Selected participants are then (1) paired with a "experiment buddy" (basically, a philosopher with a track record of publishing work in experimental philosophy) to help them design the experiment, (2) given a crash course in sampling and statistical methods), and then (3) once their final experiment is approved and submitted, the Experiment Month people execute the study online, inviting people to participate in online surveys. Finally, the reseacher (e.g. myself) carries out the relevant statistical analyses, with some oversight from their "buddy", and is then encouraged to write up their results for publication.
Allow me, then, to begin at step 1: my initial Experiment Month proposal. Because, as I mentioned in my previous post, my main philosophical interest in the area concerns "fundamental moral and political disagreement" (i.e. what to do when two or more parties fundamentally disagree over moral or political principles), I wanted my study to focus on three major areas of disagreement:
- Disagreement between Kantians and utilitarians in moral philosophy.
- Disagreement between libertarians and liberal-egalitarians in economic moral/political philosophy
- Disagreement between "liberals" and "conservatives" in moral, social, economic, and political philosophy.
I wanted to investigate all of these issues for a couple of reasons. First, and most obviously, all are longstanding disagreements that seem to have reached something of an impasse. Kantians and utilitarians, libertarians and liberal-egalitarians, liberals and conservatives, increasingly seem incapable of agreeing upon premises with their opponents. Consequently, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I was interested in whether empirical investigations into human psychology and behavior might lend support to some sides' premises over other sides'. Second, my interest in all three disagreements is fairly personal. Unlike many philosophers (or so it seems to me from experience), I've had a notoriously hard time making my mind up about a lot of moral and political issues. Sometimes I find arguments for Kantianism persuasive, other times I find arguments for utilitarianism persuasive. Sometimes I find arguments for libertarianism persuasive, other times I find arguments for liberal-egalitarianism persuasive. And most times I find myself "pulled in both directions." I see, and appreciate, the arguments for both sides. And yet, of course, I realize that both sides cannot be right. Utilitarianism and Kantianism are mutually inconsistent. So are libertarianism and liberal-egalitarianism. And so I find myself in a difficult position. I am torn, and the arguments for both sides seem to "run out." There is little to convince me in the arguments that one side definitively "wins out" over the other -- and so (I hoped) empirical psychology might help "push me" in one direction or the other.
I find myself in a similarly difficult position when it comes to individual moral issues. Here, my body of views defies easy categorization. In some respects, I find "liberal" moral and political views attractive. At the same time, I find some traditionally conservative views attractive. And oftentimes, I find myself pulled in two directions. For instance, I strongly support the death penalty in principle (a traditionally conservative position), and have even defended it in a 2013 public lecture entitled, "The Death Penalty is Not a Human Rights Violation." At the same time, I feel uneasy about it in practice due to the possibility of the conviction and execution of innocents (a traditionally liberal position).
Here, then, was the basic thought behind my proposal. If any result of empirical psychology could potentially serve as a "tie-breaker" in cases of fundamental moral disagreement on any of the above issues, discovering that any particular side's judgments are related to "bad" personality, character, and/or behavioral traits would seem sufficient. Allow me to explain. Consider one of the most common objections to the death penalty these days: that it reflects, and in turn supports, a kind of social barbarism. Here, broadly speaking, is how the objection goes. Modern civilization has been a progressively civilizing process. We have achieved law and order, and other forms of justice, in part because we have learned to become more civilized. But, among other things, we have become more civilized by, among other things, progressively becoming people who believe in law and order more than things like vengeance. And so, if we want society to become a better, more civilized place (and surely we should, the objection goes), we should try to become more forgiving, less vengeful -- and this is precisely something that social rejection of the death penalty accomplishes.
Let me now return once again to my own personal case -- because it is really here that I most feel the force of this sort of worry. I said above that I strongly support the death penalty in principle. Why? The most obvious answer is that I find certain moral theories (e.g. Kantianism) attractive which support the death penalty. But this raises the further obvious question: why do I find Kantianism's premises attractive? Here is something that has always worried me about myself. I have a certain tendency to be "extremely hard" on people. I am disposed to hold them accountable more than I am apt to express forgiveness. And so I wondered about myself: might I find Kantianism attractive, and by extension the death penalty, partly as a result of some kind of "hard-heartedness"? I honestly wanted (and still want!) to know. For, it occurred to me that if empirical society could give me some reason to think that I am guilty of finding certain moral views attractive out of hard-heartedness, that would give me some reason to rethink my moral commitments (for I don't want to be a hard-hearted, unforgiving person!).
Anyway, this is what led me to the so-called "Dark Triad" personality traits: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy. Because all three traits are generally considered "morally disturbing", they seemed to me the perfect foil to begin investigating the issues I have described in my last two posts. The basic thought was: if any of the three realms of disagreement I mentioned above were found to be related to these three traits, that might give adherents of particular sides of those disagreements some reason to worry that perhaps (though just perhaps) some of their moral judgments may be corrupted by some particular traits of personal character. Of course, I realized from the outset that examining the relationship between these traits and different types of moral, social, political, and economic judgments would not be easy -- but it seemed to me a good place to start. And so, I will begin to explain in my next post what exactly I did in the study, what I found, and how I interpreted those findings. Then, in the post that follows, I will address some objections that have been raised.
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