Moral Circles & The Conservative Brain

In this episode, we delve into the famous 'moral circle' chart from the study 'Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle.' We discuss common misinterpretations of the study, highlighting errors made by the researchers that led to widespread confusion. We explore how conservatives and progressives allocate their moral concern across different layers, from immediate family to the entire universe. We also examine neurological and psychological differences between these groups, touching on aspects such as threat sensitivity, cognitive processing, and brain structure. This comprehensive discussion aims to shed light on the fundamental ideological divide and how both sides perceive and value their moral priorities.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be chatting with you today. Today, we are going to go in to the famous circles or charts of interest. It comes from a study titled Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle. And so this is a moral circle chart that everybody loves to show. And I wanted to go into this in an episode because one, what the study actually says, Versus what people think it says is hugely misinterpreted, mostly because the people who wrote the study made a mistake in the way they described the procedure of the experiment, which led people to completely misunderstand what was being shown in the graph because the graph is intuitively not what you would expect it to be.

So there is actually data that looks at what people think this is, which is on average what conservatives and progressives care about. But it's not the graph that you think you're looking at. Okay, so what a lot of people think that this graph shows that I have shown you is [00:01:00] sort of moral expanses of what people care about.

Where do they put their intention with each layer of this circle, representing moving out from like yourself to your family. To out out out. So let's go over what the the various rings mean. The innermost layers include categories like immediate family, closest friends, et cetera.

Simone Collins: Okay,

Malcolm Collins: then you have the innermost layers, layers, sort of the middling layers, all people you've ever met, all people in your community, all people in your country which reflects sort of a broader sense of community.

Then you have the outer layers. These encompass all humans, all mammals, all living things in the universe, including plants and trees. And then you have the very outermost layer, which is all things in existence, like rocks and everything like that, okay? And what a lot of people interpret this chart as meaning is the average of what conservatives and progressives care about.

And in a way, it's telling, because not a lot of people pushed back against this interpretation. I. e., you see here, conservatives care about things like family. [00:02:00] their countrymen, whereas progressives in this interpretation cared the most about things like rocks and plants and stuff like that. And, well, I mean, people intuitively hear this and they're like, yeah, that sounds like the type of brain dead thing a progressive would care about.

The problem is, is they did ask that question. Okay. It's just the data that they collected from asking that question was shown in a separate chart. Which I will show you in a second. And this chart shows data around the question of what is the furthest extent of the things you care about.

Simone Collins: Which makes

Malcolm Collins: progressives look a little less crazy.

IE conservatives often do not really, it actually makes the conservatives look a little sociopathic with many conservatives not really caring much outside of their family, their friends, etc. And with, and I, and progressives being like [00:03:00] almost sort of sociopathic in the other extreme. I care about the universe and everything.

I care about all things.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so let's look at the real graph that that actually looked at the answers to this rating and you'll see why nobody shares it because it's done terribly and it's hard to interpret.

Now,

if you saw this graph, you'd think that the first graph was the, what do you care about most? Not the extent of your beliefs. And right. This graph was the extent of your beliefs question, but no, they did it oppositely because they were bad at their jobs. It was great for memes and they haven't really gone back and commented on it much because They're scientists and they don't like that it's become like a meme thing and they feel kind of bad about messing it up to begin with.

It's sort of like my read of what's going on here. But what you can see from this chart is this took the thing that you care about most on average basically gave people a number of tokens. And you can slot them into different categories. You can put like all your tokens on family and only like one or two on country and stuff like that.

Or you can distribute [00:04:00] your tokens more evenly. And so when you divided people into human versus non human categories, what you see here is that generally the more progressive somebody was, the less they cared about human things. More plants, animals, space, rocks. Or more,

Simone Collins: I, I would argue the more equally you care about all things.

Malcolm Collins: Well, including non human things. Yes, including non human things. This is assigning value to non human things, which I think is weird, but okay. And then I'll put another graph on screen here, which will give you a bit more, because it shows like the error bars on each of these. Or the, the margins so you can get an idea of how much they separate from each other.

And what you'll notice here, is some interesting things. But in general, the broad trend is that, yes, liberals actually do care about non human things more. Now I want to, now suppose you're like, okay, but what if we did like a heat map of what people were caring about? [00:05:00] Graph what people are caring about.

And then we're going to go into the neuroscience of this because the conservative and progressive brain are actually a little different.

Simone Collins: Okay. Oh.

Malcolm Collins: So here, here you can see like a depth map or heat map of where people were actually clicking and it does show that yes, the conservatives largely viewed their loyalty in tranches, i. e. a lot of them were really loyal to family, a lot of them were really loyal to country and then you have a smaller like out there group, whereas progressives are much more unified in their beliefs with sort of a out there, probably all plants and animals.

Yeah, like it's

Simone Collins: very, it's much more outwardly focused with. Very little emphasis put on the nearest circle.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I I'd say that I also understand this conservative idea of okay. I'm distributing tokens. What do I care about? It's gonna be Family a lot in country a lot. Yeah, or when I think of country, I've been like wider cultural System that I'm a part of right maybe not necessarily exactly like just a country for arbitrary like countryman's sake [00:06:00] Yeah, and I think that's the way a lot of people would interpret that and then the second graph here that I'm showing what you can see is Approximate distance from center aggressive versus conservative, and you can see that what you actually get is progressives actually care about almost everything more except for family, where the conservatives

Simone Collins: beat you a little bit more.

That makes so much sense that you a