Morality as Cooperation, Politics as Conflict

Authors

  • Florian van Leeuwen Orcid
    Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
  • Caspar J. van Lissa Orcid
    Department of Methodology & Statistics, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
  • Trisevgeni Papakonstantinou Orcid
    Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
  • Michael Bang Petersen Orcid
    Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
  • Oliver Scott Curry Orcid
    Research Affiliate, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Abstract

What is the relation between morality and politics? If morality is a collection of cooperative rules, and politics is conflict over which cooperative projects to pursue, then they should be correlated. We examined the relation between moral values and political orientation in samples of participants from the USA (N = 518), Denmark (N = 552), the Netherlands (N = 353), and an international online population (N = 1,337). Political conservatism was consistently related to deference values. We also found some support for the hypotheses that political orientation has distinct relations with family values and group values, and has distinct relations with fairness values and reciprocity values. However, for most hypotheses the results showed no support, largely due to poor model fit or measurement error associated with the political scales. The results suggest that improved measurement of political preferences will help understand the relation between morality and politics.