Political Ideology and Morality: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

The first lesson one learns in Statistics 101 is that correlation does not imply causation; that is, if two events seem to follow each other, that doesn't mean they are directly related.  For example, for many years it was believed that children who slept with the light on were more likely to develop myopia later in life.  This correlation seemed to make sense logically, but many years of rigorous study confirmed that myopic children tended to have myopic parents who were more prone to use bright lights across the board.  In this case, bright lights did not cause myopia: it was the other way around.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, fond himself of correlating opposing political ideologies with unpleasant psychological problems, recently wrote a column on research linking conservatism to vulnerability and low tolerance for disgust.  Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to slap their own fathers.  Kristof references a new database for this sort of psychological research: www.yourmorals.org, which I went to, and there I submitted myself to several psychological tests.  

There are, of course, many huge problems with the site and this sort of research in general.  When registering for the site, one must assign himself a political-ideological label, which violates almost every standard of experiment.  Political labels are obviously arbitrary: notice that the word "liberal" in the United States and the United Kingdom have almost exact opposite meanings.  Essentially, the work of the database amounts to correlating arbitrary labels with arbitrary labels and reporting obvious tautologies, such as "conservatives are less likely to embrace change" as scientific results to be published in the New York Times alongside the latest Human Genome Project developments.

The yourmorals.org experiments - which range from watching a 6-year-old girl sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" on Britain's Got Talent and then rating how "happy", "fearful", "jealous", etc. one feels afterwards to matching appropriate shades of gray from a spectrum to arbitrarily assigned "good", "bad", and "neutral" words rendered in shades of gray - are followed by explanations of exactly what the researchers hope to acheive by them and remind me of the scene in Donny Darko where Donny calls Patrick Swayze's character Jim Cunningham the Antichrist.  

Further complicating matters is the fact that there are virtually limitless and unaccounted-for mitigating factors in each experiment: in the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" clip, Simon Cowell's scowling face is shown throughout: I kept thinking that Cowell was going to trash the cute, little six-year old girl, so afterwards, I had to rate "fearful", and "concerned" pretty high or else I'd be misreporting my own results.  Are my results interpreted as "Libertarians are aware of Simon Cowell's personality and history of candid abuse directed towards any and all contestants," or "Libertarians hate and fear little girls."?  Another test subject might be disgusted that Britain's Got Talent is exploiting six-year-olds.  

With the shades of gray experiment, I figured (correctly) that the testers would expect respondents to describe "negative" words like "erase" as darker than they actually appeared (even though white is supposedly the color of death, right psychologists?); I accordingly overcompensated, and my test results were that I consistently described negative words as lighter than they actually were.  Nevertheless, I'm convinced Nicholas Kristof et al. will use these results sometime in the near future to describe "libertarians" as masochistic sociopaths (when in actually, "Libertarians think outside the box." may be a more appropriate tautology).   

Giving what essentially amounts to gross stereotype the force of science does a disservice to humankind.  Are Stanford and UVA Professors really designing these incredibly worthless and unscientific experiments?  A better explanation for why liberals are more likely to slap their own fathers and conservatives have lower tolerance for disgust is the obvious: people who identify with the in-group of American society labeling itself "conservative" tend to live disproportionately in the country, and people who identify with the in-group of American society that calls itself "liberal" tend to live disproportionately in cities.  

In cities, you often see things like AIDS-infected junkies sleeping in plastic bags on the sidewalk, dead bodies, toothless, methhead prostitutes soliciting drunken businessmen, homeless children cowering from rain, etc..  Being shown a picture of a man eating worms doesn't quite stack up.  Seeing real problems also tends to confer a disappointment with traditional hierarchies of authority, which might make angry, liberal members of Generation Y more okay with slapping their own fathers.