Truthy
Chatbot
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2010
- Messages
- 2,209
Haidt and some others built on the line of work starting with Piaget, then Kohlberg, then Turiel on moral psychology and moral development of kids. Haidt has focused a lot more on moral intuitions as low-level, fast, system I processes, whereas the older folks emphasized psychological rationalism, which nowadays is described as a slow, system II process. It turns out moral intuitions are very system I. Haidt also did a good job showing that moral intuitions are not strictly about individual harm, as Kohlberg and Turiel thought. Across cultures, they are typically also about disrespect, disgust, and support for norms. This all strikes me as being predictable, but I don't think anyone else showed this experimentally before the late 80s and 90s, with Piaget, Kohlberg, and Turiel turning out to be wrong on several fronts.Neither my girlfriend (an aspiring Psychology PhD), nor her mother (a Psychology academic) has heard of this theory, and both were very skeptical both of the theory as-described and how Piaget’s work is supposed to factor into it. I echo some of the already-expressed problems with the way the questions are phrased and what they seemingly appear to have been asked with specific reactions in mind, and it’s frustrating when I don’t feel myself eliciting anything along the binary of expected responses. A lot of my reactions were, “I don’t like it/I wouldn’t choose to do it personally, but it’s not my place to judge the decisions of consenting, conscious adults.” So a lot of middle button results.
I also don’t like the political divide as created. Left-Liberal encompasses a wide array of moral systems, many of them wholly mutually exclusive or irreconcilable (e.g. does this category also include Leftism? Because Leftism and Liberal are literally contradictory terms), it doesn’t seem at all well-defined what Libertarian represents here, and Conservative, again, can represent a very wide-array if moral systems that are just lumped together into one broad category.
It just comes across as a vague iteration of the MBTI test, which is itself mostly bullfeathers. For as many problems as I have with the political compass test, I feel it is much better at producing results that track with my core political beliefs, and which are conveyed in a much clearer, more immediately understandable manner.
Not to be mean, but some of your criticisms strike me as missing the point. You probably didn't have strong negative reactions to a lot of the questions because you're very progressive and your moral intuitions guide you elsewhere. Critiquing the questions as "not my place to judge" is really how Haidt was expecting progressives to answer; well-educated people (especially westerners) are more likely to lack strong negative reactions to violations of norms that shame victimless wrongdoings, while more conservative types will feel negative emotions even if they're fully aware that no individual is being directly harmed. Idk the data, but my impression is that answers to questions like these, that probe at people's moral intuitions, are good predictors of people's politics. Judging by the results I'm seeing here and have seen from people I know irl, it looks about right. Some of your other criticisms are fair, but stray too far into "the quiz and idea are stupid and useless" territory for my taste. Beyond that, I think you're asking too much from one quiz.
Haidt is one of the more famous psychologists alive right now and is a pretty influential researcher, with almost 60k citations on google scholar. Idk why you, your gf, and her mom haven't heard of him or the moral foundations idea, but I'm not keen on accepting those things as grounds for denigrating it or Haidt. I've known plenty of grad students and professors who didn't know much about important things in their field. Grad students of course shouldn't be expected to know everything and professors specialize and focus on things they're interested in. My guess is that neither of them focus much on moral psychology.
I haven't actually read "The Righteous Mind," but it's on my backlog. If you, your gf, or her mom are interested in moral psychology, you/they should probably give it a read. If you're still not impressed after that, then I'd love to hear more criticism about the quiz, the book, or Haidt's work in general.