Do values have anything to do with politics?

I should probably start today’s post with a warning.  My sense of political reality may have been really skewed by House of Cards and Scandal.  Politics can’t be that corrupt...I hope!  And yet, it often seems as if political processes are quite House of Cards-like – a lot of talk about values and a quite a bit of jostling for power and spinning of facts to justify it.    

An interesting psychological perspective on how politics works - and might work better - is presented by Johnathan Haidt in the book The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion.  He has a TED talk based on these ideas https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind?language=en. Haidt says that moral reasoning is after-the-fact (Haidt, 2001). When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, you see that we reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later to justify what we have already decided.  What we decide is based on our moral intuitions. These come about the same way we acquire food preferences, we start with what we’re fed as children.  If liberal values taste good to me, I have them often.  If not, I may choose more conservative fare.   My liberal or conservative moral intuitions will tend to blind me to the virtues of other with different views.  

If I am a liberal, instead of listening to the reasoning of a conservative, I will be are busy looking for the arguments will allow me to influence her.   So when politicians spin a story, they are using their moral intuitions.  Haidt has studied moral systems worldwide and come up with six moral values that are part of our fundamental nature: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.  Liberals emphasize caring and fairness; conservatives have a broader palate and can taste across the values spectrum.  I tend to have liberal views so it was a bit of a shock to read that conservatives are more broad-valued than me.  However, Haidt is coming not from a place that supports any one group.  Rather, he is making a plea for the idea that the world needs all of these values and asking for more openness and a more civil political discourse.  I like the idea and I liked his book - but I doubt that Frank Underwood will be swayed.  

References

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814-834. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814

Haidt, J.  (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York: Vintage Books.

I am a news addict. Is the news like values junk-food?

Every once in a while I am struck by what an odd habit it is to constantly check the news.  The daily media diet on which I feed seems to have very little good news.  I am regularly exposed to stories about war, racial violence, climate disaster, financial deceit, and child pornography – often several times a day.  It makes me wonder what kind of an impact this has on how I understand the world What does the news do to my values? 

 One idea that psychologists have contributed to this question comes from research that looks at what happens when values other than the ones we endorse are activated or “primed” in us.  Chilton and colleagues (2012) surveyed over 300 adults in the UK and selected those who scored in the top 10% on “extrinsic” values – values like image, popularity, and success.  The top 10%participants then did a brief writing exercise focusing on either the importance of things the already valued (image, wealth, popularity) or on the importance of pro-social values like being accepting and broad-minded.  After the writing task, the researchers interviewed them about social and ecological issues.  And they found something very interesting.  The people who really valued image but wrote about social issues endorsed highly pro-social ideas when they were interviewed after writing.  For example when asked about child mortality, one person who had written about social issues said, “It’s really unfair the injustice of how some people have loads and other people have absolutely nothing and yeah it’s terrible.”  So even those who care most about preserving their image, wealth and popularity can be “primed” to value other things.

It seems we can be primed to alter our values, even very strong ones.  I am not aware of any research that specifically looks at how the news activates (or fails to activate) our values.  But priming research does make me wonder if I am feeding myself a diet of values junk-food.  I have been looking for alternatives and have come upon places that focus on reporting good news – for example: http://abcnews.go.com/us/good_news ; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-news/ ). Maybe reading these sites is like priming myself to pay attention to what is good in the world.  What do you think?

Reference

Chilton, P, Crompton, T, Kasser, T. Maio, G., & Nolan, A (2012).  Communicating bigger-than-self problems to extrinsically oriented audiences.  Retrieved from http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/extrinsically_oriented_audiences1.pdf

Can I help the world and still be okay?

I would like to pick up where I left off yesterday and give attention to the idea that we should be taking care of the people with self-transcendent values – the people who want to take care of the world.  I have been looking for research that would offer some science-based insight into this dilemma and came up with a study that investigated the relationships among self-affirmation, pro-social behaviours, and self-compassion (Lindsay & Creswell, 2014).  To define the terms for you, self-affirmation refers to tasks that affirm our personal values, and pro-social behaviors are things we would expect people with self-transcendent values to do.  Self-compassion means not only what the name suggests – being kind to yourself – but also being mindfully aware, and recognizing that you are part of the bigger world (referred to as common humanity). These are the ideas they investigated

The researchers brought people into a room individually and gave them a self-affirming or a neutral writing task.  People in the self-affirming condition were asked to write for three minutes about a value that they had chosen as important to them.  Others were asked to write for three minutes about a value that was unimportant to them but might be important to someone else.  Then the researcher would leave the room for a moment and a shelf would “accidentally” fall down.  The researcher watched through a hidden camera and rated how helpful people were in picking up the shelf. When they analysed the data comparing those who had affirmed a personal value to those who had written about an unimportant value, they found that those who affirmed their own value were more helpful in picking up the shelf than those who had not affirmed a personal value.  They also measured changes in self-compassion (before and after the writing task) and found that self-compassion in the affirming group accounted for the differences in helpfulness.  In other words, self-affirmation increased self-compassionate feelings, and that those feelings fostered more pro-social behaviour.

While this is only one study and I know that the participants were only picking up a shelf not changing the world,  I find it hopeful.  It tells me that paying attention to my personal values - reflecting on them - will tend to increase my self-compassion.  I know that self-compassion is related to well-being http://self-compassion.org/the-research/ so this is good news for me.  Now I  also know that self-compassion can help me act generously – good news for the world.

Reference

Lindsay, E.K., & Creswell, J.D. (2014). Helping the self help others: self-affirmation increases self-compassion and pro-social behaviors. Frontiers in Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology, 12, http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00421

If values are just one more thing to worry about, who needs it!

I worry quite a lot but I only about things that are important to me.  The more I pay attention to something and make it important, the more I worry about it.  So if I make my values important (exactly what I am writing this blog to help you to do) won’t that make me even more worried?  Who needs it! 

Some things are important but don’t worry me.  For example, I want to stay healthy so I go to the gym.  But I don’t worry about it - I just go. That's because my ability to go to the gym is not threatened.  So it seems to be a combination of finding something important and not being able to do anything that will worry me.

Researchers Schwartz, Sagiv, and Boehnke (2000) studied how different kinds of worries relate to different values and which values are more worrisome.  Just like me, they reasoned that worries would increase when we pay more attention to values-related goals and when we perceive that those goals are threatened.  They grouped worries into two categories.  Worries about me and things or people that are close to me they called “micro” worries.  Worries about society and the world (those self-transcendent values again!) were named “macro” worries.  As you would expect, giving priority to self-transcendent values like universalism or benevolence was related to higher macro and lower micro-worries.  Prioritizing values that are close to me (power, pleasure and to a lesser extent achievement) was related to higher micro and lower macro-worries.  In other words, what is important is to me will be what I worry about – not surprising.  A more surprising finding was that values predicted almost twice much as variance in macro worries as in micro worries.  Why should having values related to the broader world be almost twice as worrisome as valuing things that are close to me?  This may be because I have less direct experience and less ability to assess threat in the bigger world.  If I feel threatened at the office, there are things I can do.  If I feel threatened by ISIS there is not much I can do. 

I find this troublesome (I told you I was a worrier!).  I would not like to be saying to you that you should not care about the world because it will worry you.  And yet that is what this research might suggest. Rather I hope that what this finding should inspire more focused efforts to help people who care about the world deal with uncertainties.  I think we need to care for the people who want to care about the world.  Psychology needs to offer ways to help them be true to their values and still be well.  I want to be part of that effort.  So I am going to try to find topics for the coming days that address being well as we pursue values. 

Reference

Schwartz, S. H., Sagiv, L., & Boehnke, K. (2000). Worries and values. Journal of Personality, 68(2), 309-346. doi:10.1111/1467-6494.00099

If I have faith, why do I need values?

Yesterday I wrote about how we all seek to be part of something beyond ourselves.  That something may be a church or synagogue or mosque or other religious group.  I have been putting off writing about faith or religion because it is a topic where it is really easy to offend people.  Atheists are wary that others are suggesting that they are that they are not good people because they are not religious and believers are wary that their faith may be under attack.  I will try to do neither of those things.  But if we are going to talk about values, it is important consider faith because religious beliefs are where many people locate the source of their values.

Researchers have looked at the question of how strength of faith and life purpose relate to our sense of wellness (Byron & Miller-Perrin, 2009).  The participants in this study were students at a Christian liberal arts university in California.  They were surveyed about their life purpose (pursuit of meaningful life goals), about their wellness (psychological, emotional, social, physical, spiritual, and intellectual), and about the strength of their religious faith.  The researchers found that life purpose fully mediated the relationship between faith and well-being.  In everyday language, that means that the impact of faith on well-being was explained having a life purpose.  Of course this was a sample of Christian students and these results might not hold for everyone.  But they do suggest, that one of the contributions that that religious faith makes to the quality of our lives is to foster a sense of life purpose.  

Reference

Byron, K. & Miller-Perrin, C. (2009) The value of life purpose: Purpose as a mediator of faith and well-being, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4:1, 64-70, DOI: 10.1080/17439760802357867

You talk a lot about self-transcendence. Aren’t people basically selfish?

Yesterday’s post talked about how people with values that transcend their self-interest could be motivated to help the environment.  Today, I want to focus on this idea of self-transcendence and ask the question “Is our basic nature selfish?”  Jonathan Haidt, a professor who studies the psychology of morality, has a great TED talk on this question.  His talk - Stairway to Self-Transcendence - brings insights from sociology religion, biology and history to this question. https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_humanity_s_stairway_to_self_transcendence?language=en

 

Haidt makes the argument that the capacity for self-transcendence is a part of being human.  We all have it.  He notes that much of our day-to-day life happens on the level of the “profane” meaning every-day level, but sacred or ecstatic experiences of losing ourselves occur in many place – in religious rites, in raves, and on battlefields - and those experiences feel wonderful. The staircase metaphor refers to the process of climbing out of the everyday and moving into the sacred realm in which self-interest fades and we unite into a team or a community or a nation.    Haidt goes on to challenge the idea that we are all basically selfish and argues that nature’s solution to the problem of selfishness is to favor groups that co-operate – likes wasps in hives.  He concludes that while we spend much of our lives on this level of the profane,  we long to climb to the stars and be part of something larger.  

Data from the recent Common Cause Foundation survey examined selfish and compassionate values among of 1000 UK adults.  The results indicated that 74% of the participants attached greater importance to compassionate values than to selfish values. They did want to be part of something outside themselves.  Interestingly however, 77 believed that others had selfish values http://valuesandframes.org/survey/.  This idea that people are basically selfish is more perceptions than reality.  Haidt could be right that we long to be part of something bigger than ourselves.  Maybe that is why you are reading this.