Conservative and liberal world views

George Lakoff's book Moral PoliticsOne of the theorists to be considered in greater detail in later posts is George Lakoff.

We introduce several of his main ideas here because they are relevant to how readers are likely to respond to this blog; specifically, Lakoff has provided a brilliant analysis of moral reasoning in liberals and conservatives.

In his book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Lakoff argues that liberals and conservatives hold different values.

Specifically, liberals value:

  • Empathetic behavior and promoting fairness
  • Helping those who cannot help themselves
  • Protecting those who cannot protect themselves
  • Promoting fulfillment in life
  • Nurturing and strengthening oneself in order to help others.

By contrast, conservatives value:

  • A “strict father” morality (using punishment to establish respect for authority)
  • Self-discipline, responsibility, and self-reliance
  • The morality of reward and punishment
  • Protecting moral people from external evils
  • Upholding the established moral order.

Traditionally, liberals have been viewed as doves and conservatives as hawks; however, within both sectors there are pro-war and anti-war activists who differ primarily in their moral reasoning:

  • Pro-war conservatives often refer to the evilness and moral inferiority of the identified “enemy” and view protestors against war as unpatriotic.
  • Pro-war liberals are more likely to use the rhetoric of helping others.

In regard to this blog, it is the liberals who are more likely to be sympathetic to advocacy of peace activism. Would you agree? Why is this likely to be so?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Ecological approach to studying peace and war

It is unlikely that the human capacity for inhumanity can ever be adequately explained by any one theory. We believe that all behavior is multi-determined—that is, many forces at a variety of levels contribute to any one type of behavior, including aggression.

We subscribe to what has been called an ecological approach to understanding complex behaviors. This approach involves constructs reflecting different contexts that influence individuals and are in turn influenced by those individuals. That set of constructs includes: the macrosystem, the exosystem, the microsystem, and the individual.

For example, an individual’s concerns about “national security” are influenced by:

  • The values and mass media positions of the society at large (the macrosystem)
  • The views expressed in places of worship, neighborhood, and more local media (the exosystem)
  • Lessons promulgated within the home and family (the microsystem)

Moreover, individuals bring to all of their interactions their own genetic heritage and the results of their personal experiences, beginning in the womb. Sometimes that heritage and those experiences can lead individuals to behave in ways that change the microsystem, or the exosystem, or the macrosystem. Think of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King.

Consider also your own views on national security, on torture, on terrorism. How many influences on those views, at what levels of experience, can you identify?

In our next post, we start considering psychological theories that focus on thoughts and emotions that individuals bring to their interactions, as well as the thoughts and emotions they carry away from those interactions.

Individuals’ tendencies to incorporate ideas from the different environments in which they grow and to which they adapt can lead to a great deal of ingroup and outgroup thinking that can provide a basis for enduring conflict.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology