Second, Sinn draws on a larger repertory of evolutionary processes — based on life history theory, signaling theory, parent-offspring conflict and more — to account for greater refinement of ideological differences, and strengthen the perspective of seeing ideologies change over time. In doing so, he lays out significant foundations for a much more robust analytical response to the experience of Trumpism.

Trump’s emergence doesn’t just challenge MFT’s presumptions about conservative morality. As described by a paper just presented at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting (“The Problem of Donald Trump and the Static Spectrum Fallacy”), Trump’s

reconfiguration of conservatism (not historically unique, by any means) exposes an even more fundamental problem: how to account for ideological coherence and differences in the face of repeated, sometimes sudden and drastic, issue-level change.

Sinn’s new paper doesn’t directly address this, but his discussion of the multiple ways ideological attitudes can evolve over time represents a more promising perspective for making sense of what’s otherwise a deeply confusing political moment. In addition, Sinn drew my attention to another paper by the aforementioned Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray, which points toward a more general evolutionary dynamic that can plausibly operate on a variety of time-scales, sometimes with great rapidity.

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To help clarify some of the most basic insights in his latest work, Salon interviewed Jeffrey Sinn by email. Our exchange has been edited for length clarity.

Your new paper is titled, “Mapping Ideology: Combining the Schwartz Value Circumplex With Evolutionary Theory to Explain Ideological Differences.” OK, so what is the “Schwartz Value Circumplex,” and why is it a promising framework for making sense of ideological differences?

The Schwartz complex offers a very useful framework for understanding value differences. Its circular composition captures both alignments and tradeoffs that show up among different value positions. Adjacent values are complementary and correlate positively (e.g., power and wealth), values positioned across from one another are in conflict and correlate negatively. I find it promising for explaining ideological differences in that it captures both these convergences and conflicts.

You write that “Considering a possible libertarian orientation helps reveal SVT’s strength as a nomological network.” What do you mean by that?

Because SVT can capture some of the psychological profile of libertarians that the rhetoric of libertarians misses. Libertarians emphasize self-direction and self-determination. So at face value, you might think that they would then want to liberate others (like liberals want to do). But libertarians aren’t typically very concerned about benevolence. They also tend to be folks who don’t back traditional values or conformity and tend toward being less empathetic and more selfish. It’s exactly the sort of profile that the Schwartz profile would suggest for them.

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However, you can’t come out and say, “I’m just not really that empathetic or concerned about others and I’m sort of a hedonist.” It sounds better, it’s more morally defensible, to present yourself as very concerned about liberty and not being constrained by authority. In short, I think SVT reveals characteristics or a flavor of libertarianism that cuts away the veneer and gets at something closer to the actual set of values motivating libertarianism.

Ideological differences seem to tap into profoundly different assumptions about the way the world should work, and most ideological positions can be located within the logic of one of these 10 values and the differences among them. For example, conservatives tend to be more deferential to authority and power, and there’s an inherent tension there with the value of universalism (i.e., egalitarianism).

By contrast, MFT doesn’t tell you how its two principal factors (i.e., binding and individualizing morality) relate to one other. With Schwartz, there’s a visual explication of the underlying logical tension between wanting to recognize some people as superior and wanting to treat everyone as equal. MFT, in contrast, suggests you can be high (or low) [in every category], and so doesn’t capture these tradeoffs.

In the next section, “SVT and Morality,” you write that “researchers might also consider whether SVT’s broader scope could actually absorb MFT’s constructs.” You argue that MFT mistakes “moralized values for moral foundations.” What’s the distinction between those things, and why does it matter?

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MFT implies that its constructs are “foundational” – that they have causal efficacy. It’s slippery, in that it doesn’t often make that claim explicitly, but you can see it clearly in the title of the 2009 flagship piece: “Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations.” Their data are correlation and don’t support this claim. A less speculative claim would be that liberals and conservatives moralize different sets of issues.

In other words, I would argue that “right-wing authoritarian” conservatives moralize deference to authority because it’s part of a broader strategy of maintaining cohesive, kin-based coalitions. It’s not as if they have a different internal moral sensor more finally attuned to authority issues. They make deference to authority a moral value because it feels right given the bigger overall strategy. You can see this in that they don’t moralize deference to scientific or professional authority as much as they do traditional sources of kin-based authority (e.g., ethnic, family or religious authorities).

What’s the larger significance of this argument?

Claiming that moralized values are instead “moral foundations” makes them part of the internal, authentic orientation of the individual in a way that suggests we need to respect those values, just as we respect immutable, inherent features like race or sexual orientation. It’s a rhetorical move unjustified by the data. You can see echoes of this in the rhetoric of the Christian right in talking about “religious freedom” – that is, the argument that I have to discriminate against Group X to authentically practice my religion.

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In the section of your paper on right-wing authoritarianism and social-dominance orientation, you write that “RWA and SDO may reflect, respectively, slow and fast life-history strategies,” and that the “slow-fast distinction may reveal another circumplex axis.” Explain what you mean by this.

In brief, the “slow-life” orientation invests for the future and doesn’t build bridges, the “fast-life” orientation is opportunistic and short-sighted. The data (from another study by me and Hayes) suggest that right-wing authoritarians don’t see themselves as mean or prejudiced. They see themselves as reliable coalition partners, as altruists. Social-dominance folk, in contrast, aren’t really conservative in the social sense of the word (e.g., a Jesus-like concern for the poor, pious, altruistic, sexually restrained). They are interested in power. I have other data showing that SDO correlates with sadism and a preference for sadistic leaders. They overlap with right-wing authoritarians in sharing security and power values, but they also endorse hedonism (and self-interest) in a way RWA does not.

The Schwartz values likely break along “fast” vs. “slow” in orientation – i.e., half of the circle tends toward slow and half tends toward fast. That is, the fast-slow distinction may help explain why we see differences in the values people endorse.

In the section “Parent-Offspring Conflict and Ethnic Nepotism,” you write that “the conflict between tradition/conformity and self-direction (or, more broadly, between social conservatives and liberals) may reflect, in part, parent-offspring conflict.” What’s the reasoning here?

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The short story is that social conservatives are very concerned about restraining sexuality, and Schwartz doesn’t really get at this. That is, the labels of “tradition” and “conformity” don’t suggest anything about sex per se. The basic strategy is to build a cohesive community that makes the kids help each other and sacrifice for the larger family in a way that favors the genetic interests of the older generations (e.g., marrying someone in the tribe who will strengthen the tribe, vs. someone who will take your daughter or son away).

The self-direction more typical of liberalism is less interested in family and maintaining cohesive family structures, and more interested in controlling one’s own sexuality to maximize one’s own genetic fitness by marrying the individual with the best genetic material.

So a classic issue is whether an adult child can marry outside the tribe. If family is less central or has fewer resources (e.g., not nearby because of labor mobility, or less a source of prestige in the modern financialized world), then the offspring maximize their genetic fitness by mating with the best genetic fitness they can find — the smartest or the healthiest — regardless of that person’s social background, religion, race, etc. Romeo and Juliet, in short, were liberals.

This paper is a theoretical overview that draws on a wide range of empirical studies to argue how they should be seen as fitting together. What’s the most significant empirical test your theory could face?

It should be able to make finer distinctions than other theories. For example, and this isn’t in the paper, we should be able to distinguish the political issue positions of different types of liberals – those more driven by benevolence and universalism and those more driven by self-direction and stimulation. I think those scoring higher on the former should be more concerned with issues like child welfare and environmentalism, whereas the latter should be more concerned with things like access to family planning and legalization of drug use. Little ideology work has gone into explaining liberalism – it’s typically taken as a kind of default.

Your previous paper argued against MFT, in part by questioning how “moral” some “foundations” really are. This new paper seems to go even further than MFT. The SVT circumplex gives us more seemingly equivalent values. So which way are we headed: Do we regard all these values as equivalent or not? As you have previously argued, right-wing authoritarianism, combining in-group altruism and strong leadership, could provide an evolutionary advantage for hunter-gatherer tribes. But combined with social-dominance orientation, it threatens to drive us into a trajectory of mass extinctions, culminating in our own. Arguably, we can only avoid such a fate by shifting our balance toward more universalist values, which now have superior survival value.

So, putting my personal cards on the table, we need universalism or we’re doomed. At the moment, I’m inclined to accept arguments by moral dyad theory, which suggests there’s a specific mechanism that recognizes an agent causing harm and that this conceptual dyad is at the heart of perceiving an issue as moral in nature. This mechanism can get extended to other domains (by argument or experience) but this is core. In this sense, it’s just descriptive.

Now, ethically and philosophically speaking, “moral” seems to have a far wider reach, where people argue about what is moral and what is not, and advance claims they think are “true.” Not being a moral relativist, I do this, and I would be willing to argue in general for “universalism” at its core being more “moral” than some other orientations.

So neither Schwartz nor I are saying that Schwartz’s 10 values are definitely “good” or moral. I would argue that keeping immigrant children in cages is immoral. One issue I have with MFT is that it claims to be purely descriptive but often slides into demanding a recognition of conservative morality as “moral” in the normative sense. I think it’s wrong there.

On this issue and others, psychology bumps up against deeper metaphysical or ontological issues and sometimes has far more confidence than it should in its empirical methods. It has to inform those things, but it can’t offer a sufficient answer on its own.