Haidt and Altemeyer

So now, back to Jonathan Haidt and his theory that liberalism lacks popular appeal because it sees morality only in terms of fairness and harm avoidance and is tone deaf to most people's concerns about in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and the sacred. A liberal seeking to answer [and another of those damn links I can't find] proposed that fairness and harm avoidance can be universalized to everyone. Group loyalty, respect for authority, and sense of the sacred are particular -- people disagree on what is sacred and what authority deserves our respect, and, of course, belong to different in-groups. In fact, it seems fair to me to say that Haidt misses an important liberal value -- universalism. He may respond that universalism just isn't the way humans innately operate. But to leave it out of the picture is to ignore an important question -- does expanding the range values you apply mean narrowing the range of people you consider morally worthy. I intend to explore the tradeoff in a series of posts.

In this post, I want to bring in Robert Altemeyer and his book, The Authoritarians as a perfect example of both tendencies -- liberal tone deafness and the advantages of liberal universalism.

In fact, I have been critical of Altemeyer's obvious tone deafness before. He describes conservative views (on the whole) as authoritarian. Consider his judgments of them refracted through Haidt's lens. Authoritarians (conservatives) are illogical (morally intuitive rather than purely rational). They are ethnocentric (value in-group loyalty), conventional (respectful of authority and tradition) and dogmatic (see the importance of the sacred). And above all, their values are highly compartmentalized, hypocritical, and prone to double standards (they value things that liberals don't understand).

Some of his examples clearly tell us more about Altemeyer's prejudices than anything else. Christian conservatives supported teaching Christianity in American public schools and responded to objections by religious minorities by appealing to majority rule. They opposed Arab countries teaching Islam in public schools, urging respect for minority rights. If a Christian child ran away from home and sought refuge with atheists, they believed the atheists should respect the child's parents' authority and not try to convert the child. If an atheist child ran away from home and sought refuge with Christians, they thought the Christians should try to convert the child.

Altemeyer claims they are being hypocritical and applying double standards. But that is nonsense, of course. They are being perfectly consistent. They favor promoting Christianity over rival religions and non-religions. There is no reason whatever why people can't genuinely value majority rule, minority rights and parental authority yet believe that promoting Christianity should trump all other values. But promoting Christianity (the sacred) just doesn't register on Altemeyer's scale of legitimate values. He doesn't seem to realize that just because Altemeyer does not consider promoting Christianity a legitimate value does not mean that other people have to agree.

Conservatives/authoritarians were more likely than liberals to favor censorship of undesirable ideas, including ideas offensive to liberals like racism, sexism and Holocaust denial. Altemeyer describes this as "hostility" and the wish to "clamp right down on lots and lots of people." He contrasts this unfavorably with liberals who did not want to censor, no matter how odious the ideas. More realistically, it means that some people value promoting true ideas over false ones more than a value-neutral concept of free speech. Yes, you can argue that value-neutral free speech is the best way to promote truth over falsehood. You can even argue that free speech is a good in its own right even if falsehood wins. But Altemeyer does nothing of the kind. He simply assumes the importance of value neutral free speech.

If a fight broke out between pro- and anti-gay demonstrators, conservatives/ authoritarians would impose a more or less severe sentence on the person who started it, depending on which side he belonged to. Altemeyer sees this as a double standard. But one could equally well see it as viewing violence as more or less culpable depending on whether it is done in a just or unjust cause. And really, who doesn't agree with that

But if Altemeyer is maddenly blind to what matters to conservatives, he does make the case for liberal superiority in at least one instance, when he compares however different groups play the Global Change Game.

The Global Change Game is a complex, multi-player (as in 50 to 70 player) international role playing game. It differs from other international role playing games in its strong focus on environmental issues; indeed, Altemeyer says it is designed to promote environmental awareness rather than as a typical war and diplomacy game. As in other international role playing games, people are assigned to represent countries. In this case, the number of people representing each country was in proportion to its real world population. Leaders stepped forward to represent their countries to the outside world, but each country had plenty of environmental problems to deal with at home apart from international relations. Since environmentalism had not yet emerged as a culture war issue, conservatives were perfectly willing to volunteer for a role playing game designed to promote environmental awareness.

Altemeyer sorted his players by high and low authoritarian scores. He describes four iterations of the game, one with low authoritarian players and three with high authoritarian ones. One of the high authoritarian versions had only authoritarian followers and no leaders. One assigned on authoritarian leader to each country in the game. The earliest version made no distinction between authoritarian leaders and followers. Needless to say, with a game this complex, it would take a good many more than four rounds to achieve any sort of scientific validity, but his results are revealing.

People with low authoritarian scores had little sense of in-group loyalty and cohesion, but considerable ability to cooperate beyond the boundaries of their countries. The first act of the leaders was to establish an international conference to handle any problems too big to be dealt with at the national level. The game facilitators threw plenty at them, like depletion of the ozone layer. Although there were significant deaths from starvation and disease, they were able to cooperate well to fend off worse disasters and generally ran things for everyone's benefit.

When authoritarian followers with no leaders played, their sense of in-group loyalty proved a handicap. Even though (as Altemeyer points out) everyone in the room actually belonged to the same in-group, and even though their in-groups for the game were arbitrarily assigned for a few hours only, people immediately clustered into tightly-knit in-groups and turned their back on everyone else. Each group cooperated well in addressing its own problems. They showed no interest in working with other groups, but neither were they hostile. They just wanted to be left alone and were perfectly willing to leave other groups alone. Unfortunately, the problems thrown at them were too big to be solved within their groups; greater international cooperation was needed. And people with intense in-group loyalty lacked the capacity to cooperate beyond their group and were overwhelmed by huge, intractable problems.

When authoritarian leaders were added (or at least not screened out), they showed greater capacity for cooperative international trades, but no real commitment to the world as a whole. And levels of international hostility went up fast. In one iteration of the game, the world was first wiped out by nuclear war. The game facilitators then reset it, and the second time around the players were able to limit themselves to a bloody conventional war. In the other iteration, there were no wars, but one aggressive power threatened others into submission, an arms race was on, and the game was, quite possibly, saved by the bell, i.e., it was fast escalating toward nuclear war when time ran out.

Of course, it may be the game was intentionally rigged to penalize in-group loyalty and reward universalism. But then again, the real world does face problems that require international cooperation to address. And any large country faces problems bigger than any one in-group can handle. Altemeyer's experiments show that placing universalism above in-group loyalty is a valuable trait when facing problems too big for one's in-group to handle. They do not show what to do when most people do not think that way.