My Comments on Moral Psychology as Operating in the EU Referendum

I would like to replay a facebook conversation with a conservative friend (as this is relevant to comments on another thread), who stated:

I don't usually share things from the Mail or the Express, but this is engrossing read. I read the comments section of the Guardian main article last night with a sense of shock. The sneering and belittlement was near-total and went unchallenged for page after page. It left me thinking 'The working classes are gearing up to take an enormous dump on your lawns, and you will not and cannot understand why.' The reasons given for the support for Brexit ranged from Murdoch, innate racism, St George flags, nostalgia, ignorance, stupidity. They could not move beyond that. Why? Because that's limit and extent of the working classes of Britain in the mind of the average Guardian reader. The middle class deserve the kicking that's coming their way. For all their handwringing, for all the idealistic faux-Socialist hogwash, they hate the people of Britain. More than this they have, for too long, forgotten and ignored their ability to galvanise in their own interest. They have taken their acquiescence since the 1980s to be sign of their pliability. They have made a big mistake.

Orwell wrote of an occasion he saw a boy whipping a horse. "It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them," he wrote (Orwell, not the horse). Orwell also wrote, "If there is hope... it lies in the proles."

To which I replied:

Since you have accused me of hating British people and Britain before, and since I have been tagged in this, I presume this at least at some level this is aimed at me.

I will say what I have said a thousand times and will keep saying. Political choices are generally not rational, and are generally post hoc rationalised on top of intuitive choices. I say this because this is what much of the research suggests, from Kahneman to Haidt and Schwartz.

So you can claim, from me, belittlement and hatred of the British working classes all you like. What, for me, is going on, is quite clearly a resorting to the base drivers of political (qua moral) psychology. That, for conservatives, is generally accepted to be purity/tradition, authority and in-group. Heck, I was talking to a Leaver the other day, explaining this, who stated that what I said really rang true in terms of tradition, when he looked at his own drivers.He then stated that nothing would change his mind. In other words, no rational argument would change his mind because he was deriving his political choice from an intuitive sense of traditionalism and reverting to a sense of a bygone era of Britishness.

When you understand that liberals are psychologically defined by open to new experiences, and conservatives not open to new experiences, you see this fits in. Indeed, that is really what the word conservative means.

I mention all this waffle because THIS is the causality of what is going on. People flower it all up with lots of lovely arguments, but the conservative is driven by senses of in-group and tradition, thus immigration really is the player (my dad finally admitted as much last night in his own 'deliberations'). Liberals have their senses of fairness and harm. They see a larger in-group, so themselves in terms of humanity rather than British (see liberal charities for refugees etc, vs conservative charities that often deal with family - ie the smallest in-group you can get - this is particularly obvious in the US).

To get an academic understanding of this, one of my contributors is a moral and political psychologist who has written a nuanced series looking to even better refine this model.

Adding:

So when we talk of xenophobia, this is often an intuitive sense of in-group / out-group psychology.

Now, there are genuine issues with immigration, and these models ARE generalisations, and there will be people in between, and there will be people who are genuinely weighing up the pros and cons of the rational arguments.

BUT the vast majority of people in the country are voting on a single issue without much recourse to the arguments.

One way for me to recognise this is that Leavers almost always fail to have a nuanced approach to the EU - EVERYTHING about it is the devil incarnate. There is not one single redeeming factor. Seeing it through such an absolutist lens gives much away.

I find Remainers are more nuanced, admitting faults in the EU, but on balance saying it is worth it (usually deferring to a general sense of co-operation and fairness - workers' rights, the environment etc).

Indeed, in the debate I had in Bournemouth - 3 on each side, this was the case with the opposition and the Leavers in the audience. Only the Labour, very left, economist on the opposition panel admitted some benefits, and thought Corbyn had the best and closest arguments. I.e. his left-wing tendencies for fairness won through, but also played as his main arguments against the EU (neoliberlism creeping into the establishment).

That is why, psychologically speaking, the best arguments that ring true for me, against the EU, and the left winger ones, because they play to my sense of moral psychology.

To conclude: The EU ref says much more about our moral psychology than it does about the content and quality of the rational arguments proposed.

This is not to say that the frameworks I use are morally better than the frameworks conservatives use in an objective sense, per se. That takes a lot of philosophy. Without doing that philosophy, what we can simply say is that I give less moral value to those things that conservatives give moral value to (in-group, tradition etc.). Indeed, when I did the questionnaire on the Moral Foundations website (the models of which Alan Duval here is seeking to refine for accuracy), I came out as:

Now, these are generalisations, and there will be people who buck such trends. Perhaps I should try to place myself on the Duval-Schwartz model (perhaps Alan Duval can do that for me!). What would also be interesting is if Alan could write a short piece, or perhaps add in a comment below, on why he thinks there is a correlation between the political left (in its more traditional definition or voting behaviour) and atheism.

As ever, thoughts please!