Mapping moral motives: Approach, avoidance, and political orientation

Abstract

Recent critiques of moral psychology and the contemporary culture wars highlight the need for a better understanding of diverse moral perspectives. A model of moral motives is proposed. The fundamental approach-avoidance distinction in motivation is crossed with self-other focus to create four moral motives: Self-Restraint (avoidance-self), Social Order (avoidance-other), Self-Reliance (approach-self), and Social Justice (approach-other). Three studies explored these motives in the context of political orientation. Overall, political conservatism was associated with avoidance motives and liberalism with approach motives. Approach-avoidance motives were also associated with distinct patterns of results regarding authoritarianism, social dominance, and positions on contemporary social issues. Responses of campus political groups demonstrated the utility of the moral motives in providing a more nuanced view of politics that also takes into account the model's second dimension, for an emphasis on Self focus (personality responsibility) versus Other focus (social responsibility) further distinguished between conservative groups. Moral and political implications are discussed.

Moral Foundations Theory

“…Janoff-Bulman and Sheikh (2012) presented a 2 Â 3 matrix of moral motives, based on their work distinguishing approach-based moral prescriptions and avoidance-based moral proscriptions (Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, & Baldacci, 2008;Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, & Hepp, 2009) crossed with three contexts: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intragroup. They argue that the moral foundations cover some of the six cells in this matrix, but fail to cover others-namely, intrapersonal prescriptions and proscriptions, and the intragroup prescriptions that characterize social justice solidarity concerns.…”

Tracing the Self-Regulatory Bases of Moral Emotions

“…These include not only prosocial actions, involving acts of benevolence, charity, and generosity, but also industriousness, self-reliance, and hard-work, all of which involve the activation of behavior evaluated as good (see Janoff-Bulman et al, 2008).…”

“…The moral injunctions here are often second-order desires, those that are derived from reflecting upon and evaluating our firstorder immoral temptations. Proscriptive immorality then is characterized by giving in to those temptations, those motivations to engage in undesirable acts.Prescriptive morality, in contrast, concerns the activation of desirable behaviors.These include not only prosocial actions, involving acts of benevolence, charity, and generosity, but also industriousness, self-reliance, and hard-work, all of which involve the activation of behavior evaluated as good (see Janoff-Bulman et al, 2008).Prescriptive immorality is characterized by the absence of a desire or motivation to engage in "right" conduct. Moral injunctions may call upon second-order desires to overcome preferences for inaction, inertia or apathy; more often, however, they may actually reflect first-order desires: one may want to volunteer or be inclined to help a friend, in the absence of countervailing desires (Janoff-Bulman et al, 2009).…”

Ideological symmetries and asymmetries in political intolerance and prejudice toward political activist groups

“…Consistent with these accounts, political conservatism is related to fear of dangerous events or people (e.g., Altemeyer, 1996), increased physiological responses to threatening visual stimuli (Oxley et al, 2008), fear of loss and death (Jost et al, 2003), and other-focused prevention motives toward maintaining social order (Janoff-Bulman et al, 2008). Recent evidence has directly linked right-wing authoritarianism (which is positively correlated with political conservatism; Jost et al, 2003) to political intolerance of left-wing groups, especially under conditions of public disorder (Crawford & Pilanski, 2014).…”

“…If so, they should have different antecedents, as Skitka et al's (2013) findings suggest. Further, given that different values and motives underlie liberalism and conservatism (e.g., Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009;Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, & Baldacci, 2008;Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003;Morgan, Mullen, & Skitka, 2010), it is plausible that different antecedents would underlie liberals' and conservatives' political intolerance and prejudice toward right-wing and left-wing political activist groups, respectively. Given that perceived threat is a powerful antecedent of both political intolerance (Feldman, 2003;Gibson, 2006;Marcus et al, 1995) and prejudice (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005;Duckitt, 2006;Stephan & Stephan, 2000), the present studies examined different types of threat as predictors of political intolerance and prejudice against left-wing and right-wing activist groups.…”