Jennifer Lin

Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Cottrell, Catherine

Area of Concentration

Psychology and Political Science

Abstract

In every civilization lies a set of morals, ethics, and values that people respect. These systems build customs and traditions that makes each culture unique. Through five foundations of Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority and Purity, the Moral Foundations Theory was constructed to explain the universal human values shared by diverse cultures. The Harm and Fairness foundations are focused on the individual while the Ingroup, Authority and Purity foundations are based on the community. Despite these foundations’ goal to explain the morals and values surrounding different cultures, the Moral Foundations Theory can also be used to explain the moral differences between liberals and conservatives in the United States. This is because the differences between the political cultures surrounding these ideologies have become so distinct that they resemble unique civilizations on their own. A seminal paper in this field was published by Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt and Brian Nosek (2009) which uses four distinct methods to make the assertion that liberals are more likely to use the individualizing foundations of Harm and Fairness while conservatives are more likely to use the binding foundations of Ingroup, Authority and Purity. While this thesis is a replication of (Graham et al., 2009) at core, it also aims to expand its scope using more representative datasets. In this project, data originates from respondents in the general public and political elites. By using these sources, I hope to compare the differences in the conceptualization of morality between liberals and conservatives, and see how these patterns differ between political elites and the public. This project utilizes the Cooperative Congressional Elections Study (CCES), The American Panel Study (TAPS), Measuring Morality, and data from YourMorals.org that represents the opinions from the mass public. Additionally, this project utilizes speeches from the 2016 Democrat and Republican National Convention to represent an image of the moral appeals and mindset in partisan elites. This is another expansion from Graham et al. (2009) as a way to study a case that is more center to political discourse. The results of this project show that liberals and conservatives, as observed in a more representative sample, generally, have a moral framework that follows the conclusions established by Graham et al. (2009). Liberals tend to be more likely to value the individualizing foundations and conservatives tend to value the binding foundations. The results also show that people in the same party, both elites and the general public, utilize the same moral frameworks. Ultimately, I conclude that the moral values embodied by the politicians are also reflected in the views of the people, especially those who most strongly identify with the party’s ideology.

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