Slow Life History Strategy Predicts Six Moral Foundations - Article Review
A discussion of the relationship between adaptations to stable environments and reporting strong moral foundations
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, is the best known originator of the Moral Foundations Theory, the idea that people derive their moral views from six, but originally five, moral foundations: fairness, harm, authority, purity, loyalty and the sixth later edition liberty. Haidt studied the relationship between moral belief and political belief, finding that conservatives have stronger binding moral foundations — loyalty, authors and purity — compared to liberals which have stronger individualizing foundations — fairness and harm.
These moral foundations form the basis of many perspectives on policy but are not easily communicable. To persuade someone of the inherent morality of following tradition or the inherently unethical nature of incestual relationships is difficult because the basis of these beliefs is largely just intuitive feelings. This leads to a great deal of unproductive discussions between liberals and conservatives because they do not share the same end goals and the reason for this is foundational and not easily changed.
Paul Gladden and Anthony Cleator of Middle Georgia State University have an article entitled Slow Life History Strategy Predicts Six Moral Foundations discussing the relationship between life history strategy and moral foundations. Life history theory is an analytic framework used to describe how an organism, including humans, spends their life. Life history strategy is either fast or slow. A fast life history strategy is one in which someone produces more offspring with less investment and a slow life history strategy is one in which someone produces less offspring with more investment.
Fast life history develops evolutionarily and ontogenetically under unstable conditions. Fast life history strategies arise with evidence that it’s not wise to invest in traits that payoff in the future. It is more adaptive to “live fast and die young.” A slow life history strategy develops in environments in which large parental investment pays off.
A good reputation is valuable in a more stable environment. If you are deceptive, then you will face retribution. If things are unstable and the chance of life ending prematurely is high, it is more reasonable to engage in immoral opportunistic behavior. Organizing stable social groups is more consistent with a slow life history strategy. Group oriented moral foundations would likely be especially good for group cohesion. It makes sense that binding moral foundations are especially associated with slow life history strategy even though slow life history strategy could have a positive relationship with individualistic foundations as well.
Gladden and Cleator also hypothesized slow life history strategists might score higher than fast life history strategists on the liberty foundation, as well as the other five moral foundations. They view the liberty foundation as creating a form of social cohesion between those with binding moral foundations and those with individualizing foundations.
Gladden and Cleator conducted two studies to test they hypothesis that all moral foundations positively correlate with slow life history strategy. One consisted of two-hundred and sixty-six undergraduate students (82 males and 184 females) enrolled in a psychology course. The students answered self-report questionnaires about life history strategy, moral foundations, moral emotions and socially desirable responding. This study found that all five moral foundations were statistically significantly positively intercorrelated.
The other study consisted of one-hundred and seventy-eight undergraduate students (54 males, 123 females and 1 transgender individual) enrolled in a psychology course. The undergraduates answered questions about life-history strategy, moral foundations, political value, perceived life expectancy, age of first sexual intercourse, early life socioeconomic status and socially desirable reporting. Once again, they found each of the five original foundations were statistically significantly positively intercorrelated with one another. The liberty foundation was also positively intercorrelated with the others. And slow life history strategy individuals reported higher levels of all the moral foundations.
In conclusion, it seems logical to suspect that all moral foundations correlate positively with a slow life history strategy if moral behavior evolved as a mechanism for group cohesion and moral behavior is evolutionarily beneficial in stable environments. This study provides a theoretical framework for why this may be the case and some empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. The evidence appears far from conclusive and future research is necessary, but I found this article particularly interesting and wanted to share. I think both moral foundations and life history strategy are interesting frameworks to use to analyze the world.
Slow Life History Strategy Predicts Six Moral Foundations - Article Review
Fun idea to consider:
1. there are only three high-level moral foundations, which sounds like French slogans https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/bjso.12452
2. Schwartz Values includes values that are inherently misaligned with MFT https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620933434 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-018-0165-5
3. There are definite correlation between personality and belief systems https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202289008 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2017.04.002
4. How many dimensions are there for political beliefs? Three, four, or more? They definitely correlates to moral values. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051010-111659