#1308 Stephen Vaisey: The Sociology of Morality and Political Beliefs

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. Steven Vasey. He's professor of sociology and political science at Duke University. And today we're going to talk about the sociology of morality, cultural change, people's political beliefs, and some other related topics. So Dr. Vazi, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to

00:25 Stephen Vaisey: everyone. Hey, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:28 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so look, it's interesting because I've already talked on the show about the psychology of morality, about moral philosophy, I mean, about many different takes on morality, but this is the first time on the show. That I'm going to ask someone about a sociological perspective on morality. So, uh, uh, tell us first, what is the sociology of morality and uh in what ways does it differ from other approaches to morality?

01:03 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, I think it's, um, I might disappoint you here because I think it's a little more coterminous with the uh with, with uh, with moral psychology and sort of classic cultural psychology than um, than, I mean, I, the world is the world is the world, and we have different disciplines, and I think we're all sort of approaching things in different ways, but the phenomenon is what it is. I think if there's A distinctive character to the study of sociology of morality, it's really sort of an attentiveness to the, the constructiveness of it. So rather than, you know, focusing on, on universals, so, you know, deontological, utilitarian, you know, things like that, there's definitely more of a focus on diversity, and then there's more of a uh more of a focus on how those things sort of map on to, to group boundaries. So, differences between You know, countries, differences between, especially like class in the US. I mean, that's one of the things that, and, you know, uh, the US and, and comparatively as well. So, uh, you know, a classic work here would be Michelle Lamont's, uh, money, morals and manners that talked about, you know, differences between the French and American sort of middle and working, or, you know, more, uh, upper middle class and, and working class, uh, folks. And, uh, yeah, so there's a, um, yeah, so there's a, so there's a, there's a focus on diversity rather than sort of looking for universal, um, looking for more universal patterns, I would say.

02:27 Ricardo Lopes: And I mean, how do you approach the study of moral and political beliefs from the perspective of sociology, I mean, and do you look at moral and political beliefs as being related to one another or?

02:44 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, I think they're, I think they're definitely related to each other in the sense that, you know, it's very often the case that, uh, political differences and moral differences are sort of grounded in each other in kind of both directions. Um, THAT, you know, so, so the classic way of thinking of this would be that political beliefs are sort of grounded in, in, in more moral principles. But that's, you know, in, in reality, it's not always the case. I mean, sometimes, you know, people are trying to solve the problem of, you know, what do I believe about this particular issue, and they use politics as a heuristic to think about morality. And then sometimes people use, you know, morality as a, as a way of thinking about and processing, you know, what is, what is acceptable in, in the, in the political domain. I mean, the problem here fundamentally, you know, is a problem of sort of dimension reduction in the sense that, you know, we can have views on tons of different things. Uh, THERE, you know, we can ask a bunch of different questions. A friend of mine once said that, you know, you can ask a You can ask a random sample of people, but you can't ask a random sample of questions. And that's like haunted me my whole, uh, my whole, my whole career, uh, because, um, you know, that it's, it's a, there's a profound truth in this, which is that, you know, there are infinite, potentially infinite number of things that we could ask about. And then the question is not just saying like, oh, what's your view on this? What's your view on this? What's your view on this? What's your view on this? What's your view on this? It's thinking about, well, what is the sort of Deeper structure and, and not be, and I think there has to be because we have to have some capacity to project these sorts of problems into like a lower dimensional space in order to make comparisons. I mean, essentially, we have to be able to analogize this sort of problem is like this sort of problem. And that's why I think you see this, this formation of um uh of, of, uh, of sort of like lower dimensionality representations. And the, the simplest one of that would be something like left to right. Um, BUT I think there is, um, but I think there, uh, there also are there, you know, there are, there, there are probably many dimensions. I mean, one of the things, um, One of the things that, uh, that was interesting when, when word embeddings and things, you know, sort of first came out, now we're way, we're way past the word embeddings. But when word embeddings came out, and, you know, people were talking about how to represent, you know, language in this sort of 300 dimensional space, it got me sort of thinking about like, what is the right level? Like, what is the right, you know, we would like to have things be, you know, 3 dimensions or 4 dimensions, you know, like, you know, there's Osgood's classic work from the 1950s and 1960s in psychology, you know, with um evaluation, potency and activity. You know, those sort of three dimensions of characterizing things. I don't think we're going to get the whole thing done in 3 dimensions, but, um, in our, in our sort of political work, it does seem like there are kind of maybe 2, you know, 22 main dimensions. Uh, YOU know, one is, you know, how much do you care about people who aren't related to you? I think that's a huge, that's a huge difference. So, like, how much do you care about basically fairness? I mean, everybody cares about people who are, like, related to them. I mean, essentially. Um, YOU know, so your family, your kids, there aren't too many people out there who just like hate their kids or whatever. So, you know, that part is fixed. And then there's like, how much do you care about, you know, sort of abstract, uh, others. And, uh, and then, you know, how much do you prioritize the sort of existence of social order? And I think, you know, from our analysis that we did, um, you know, uh, on the measuring morality project that we did, uh, in the mid, uh, the mid teens, um, We, we found that's probably an important distinction. So, but, but all this is, all this is implicated with issues of the sort of like, what is the person, what kinds of things are right, what kinds of things are wrong? Our morals, you know, sort of relative or absolute. And, and some of these things are more abstract, some of these things are more concrete, and it's a, it's a, it's a mess, basically, but we're trying to make a little bit of a sense of the mess, um, without oversimplifying, without oversimplifying.

06:38 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, BUT I mean, when it comes to the relationship between our moral values and our political beliefs, is it that, Uh, one derives from the other, I mean that for example, our political beliefs derive from our moral values and our morality is more basil than our political beliefs. Is it the other way around? I mean, is, is it a sort of dynamic, uh, relationship where, uh, er, there's a back and forth between them, or, uh, I mean, how, how, what do we know about that?

07:12 Stephen Vaisey: I mean, one of the reasons that we've moved on to studying kids, I mean, like we're doing, we have a project that we're, that we're writing up now, basically, where we're interviewing, where we interviewed, uh, uh, children between the ages of, you know, um, roughly between the ages of 9 and 11, or, you know, 8 and 12, a few, but, um, and one of the reasons we did that is because once we, because to answer your kind of question, The problem is when you study adults, which is what most of these sort of surveys do, um, most of these studies do is study adults, all that stuff is already sort of fused together. So, like, you can talk about the correlations, uh, you know, between things, you can talk about how, you know, you know, the, these kind of moral beliefs are correlated with these kind of political commitments and, and, and in issue positions and things like that. You can talk about all that. Um, BUT it's really hard to tell how things sort of grow together and One of the things that people have tried to do with adults is they've tried to, to, to study this issue of what's called dynamic constraint. And the idea being, well, when this thing moves, does this other thing move with it? And that would be one way of sort of answering your question, which would be to say, when somebody's views on like, I don't know, uh, you know, a moral relativism, you know, changes or someone's view on, um, you know, like the care Foundation or whatever changes. Um, DOES it change their, their political views? And, and there are two problems with that. Number one is, In adults, we don't actually see a tremendous amount of change. And so, like the idea that this thing would change and then this thing would follow, that actually doesn't, it doesn't happen very much. Uh, A lot of what looks like change, and this is what my, a lot of my work has been on recently, is a lot of what looks like change is actually just measurement error. I mean, in the sense that we, you know, people's responses will fluctuate just because of the question, because of what they had for breakfast that morning, you know, so even if you follow people over time, there's gonna be noise in those responses that's not like real signal. So that's the problem. Problem number 1 is a lot of things that look like apparent change are actually noise, and it doesn't seem that a lot of people are changing. The second, the second part of that is that even when people change on one thing, there's actually remarkably little evidence, and I would even say at this point, there's like, I would say there's a lot of evidence against. This issue of dynamic constraint in adults, um, meaning that like, oh, you know, I changed my view on this, and therefore it has this sort of logical implication or psychological implication with this other set of beliefs. I think people are remarkably good at holding sort of contradictory positions, because they don't think about this very much. And so that's why we felt like we had to go back and, and study kids. Because, um, and this is something we just started over the past couple of years, because we, because I, that's a period where we can start to see formation. I mean, essentially what we've been doing the whole time is we've been looking at like a totally baked cake, and we're like trying to figure out how the cake is made. You know what I mean? And we can cut, you can cut the cake open, you can like do lots of things, but, you know, you get, you don't see the process of the cake getting sort of mixed and baked and everything, and you can't, like, you just cool the cake off and have the ingredients fall back out. And so I think we have to go back further into this sort of cake baking process to see how this works. And so, um, what it looks like, so, so what it looks like based on, you know, what we've done so far. IS that it is like this kind of dynamic process where maybe, and this is, this is tentative, but, but maybe people start with, so, number one, kids have a lot more issue positions than you think. They can answer questions about that, and they really can answer questions about um things like, oh, should taxes be higher or lower, and things about immigration. And, and their responses are structured in a sort of similar, um, in a similar left-right dimension to their, their parents. But the thing that comes across the most clearly is that I think there's a dynamic, what we're seeing is a sort of emerging dynamic where maybe what happens is the kids sort of identify with um people they like or don't like. So, the thing, the signals that are coming through most clearly from like parents to kids look like things about, like, what do you think about Trump? What do you think about, and I think, so it's possible that other things will, um, like, sort of grow around that, if that makes sense. So, like, so some of these basic evaluations, like, that's a good guy, that's a bad guy. You know, like, you know, Kamala Harris is the, you know, in the, in the election was when we started this project, is, you know, she's the sort of good one, and Trump's the bad one. And I think, like, for, for younger people, I think that stuff can sort of grow around that, but then by the time you're an adult, all that growing has more or less taken place. So that's, that's how I think about that, that process, that sort of dynamic process. But we, but without studying kids more, it's gonna be very, very hard to really disentangle that.

11:59 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, you know, I mean, it's interesting because this might just be some strong intuitions of mine, but it doesn't seem to me that, for example, the way that political scientists, when they distinguish between different sets of political ideologies and also moral and political philosophers when they try to come up with completely Coherent systems of belief. I don't think that that's really how things work in people's minds, at least most of the time. I think that what you see in terms of the coherence that is demanded from people in the context of philosophy, political science, of course, if you approach political science as if you're trying to. Established perfectly delineated political beliefs, political systems, I think that that only works and only to a certain extent for people who are trained to do that, and I agree with that, and I don't think that that really happens very often in quote unquote real life and even I would even go. As far as to say that even the philosophers and the political scientists themselves, if you prove them enough, you get to learn that even what they think are perfectly coherent systems of belief that they hold are really not that coherent and and most of it, or at least big parts of it is basically ad hoc or post hoc rationalization.

13:55 Stephen Vaisey: No, I, I agree with that. And I mean, I, I, I know less about the sort of um the philosophical coherence, although my position, uh, my, my reaction is very similar to yours on that, on that dimension. I think, um, I mean, this is one of the sort of this, you know, big discoveries, which is totally common sense now, but in the 1960s, Philip Converse, you know, who did this work on uh belief constraint. You know, I think people expected to find much more, um, much more structure in political beliefs. Like, oh, if you believe this, you believe that. And it's, and it turns out that it's a mess. I mean, a lot of what, you know, he, you know, what he concluded, and this was, you know, 60 years ago, was that people were what he Uh, innocent of ideology. I mean, basically, most people essentially didn't have any sort of ideology. And what you can see now is like people who are more educated, people who are, you know, who are more likely to pay attention to politics, their views are more constrained. And what constrained means here is that, like, we can predict. What they believe about other things based on what we know about one thing. So, you know, you know that this person, you know, uh, supports abortion rights, then you know that they are a Democrat, then you know that they're gonna support gay rights, then you know they're gonna support sort of civil rights, you know, uh, sort of, uh, civil rights, things like that. So, um, so, so yeah, so that, so that thing of constraint that way. Uh, IT'S, it's actually not, it's, it's number one, it's not as big as you would think, and, but, but it does, the, the more people are paying attention, the more they seem to like lock into this, to that structure. But, um, but most people are not remotely close to, uh, to having a coherent view, absolutely.

15:31 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so, uh, before we move on to other specific topics, let me just ask you a more general question about the framework you bring into your work for the uh for us then to talk about cultural change. In your work you combine sociology with cultural evolution. So how do you go about doing that and what kinds of insights do you think we can get from combining those two approaches?

16:04 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, I think, um, so the cultural evolution thing for me started maybe, I'm bad at time, but maybe something like only 5 or 6 years ago, one of my PhD students uh got me reading in that, uh, in that area. And um it's great because, you know, I've been studying culture for a long time, uh, in, in this sort of sociological tradition, uh, which has its roots. I mean, you can think about it a lot of different ways, but, you know, in Parsons, Anne Swidler, Michelle Lamontt, A Paul DiMaggio, um, And, uh, and, uh, there's, there hasn't been a whole lot of connection with the sort of Boyd and Richardson, um, you know, type, uh, world of, of, of culture. And so, you know, I got into this, um, yeah, like about 5 years ago, and I think, um, it seemed to be like really fruitful because they're interested in some core mechanisms that I think sociology has not thought about a ton for a while. I mean, sociologists sort of do like hand waving at the issue of socialization. It's one of those topics, like, uh, in, in the domain of socialization that will show up, um, like in a, in like in a sociology textbook, like an intro sociology textbook, but like, until very recently, you know, people weren't actually talking about it, like professional sociologists weren't talking about socialization anymore. Um, AND so, uh, so sort of getting back to thinking about socialization, uh, with these sort of concepts of, of social learning, prestige biassocial learning, or other kinds of biased social learning where people are paying, you know, more attention to certain kinds of, uh, cons specifics in their environment and, you know, trying to figure out who they could copy, and there's some, some natural affinities. You know, between that and other things that sociologists are really comfortable with, like, like social network analysis. So thinking about like, you know, not only, you know, are things sort of diffusing in my network, like a, like a disease might, but, you know, but I'm, oh, I'm who, who's, who am I paying attention to? So, are, are people paying attention to higher status others? Are they paying Attention to more similar others. So I think that brings a set of tools that is very compatible with the way that sociologists tend to think of that, tend to think about that. And then, I, I think, um, there's a fit, there's a sort of natural fit, um, with the issue of demography, which is very adjacent to sociology. I, I went to the University of North Carolina and, you know, I've, uh, For my PhD and there's a, there are a lot of demographers there. Um, AND so, you know, I, I have been thinking for many, many years about like age period cohort type, uh, problems, which are like bread and butter for demographers, you know, trying to understand how, you know, other kinds of population change. And, uh, and the cultural evolution folks are, you know, very used to sort of population, population thinking. So I think there was a sort of, once I, once I became aware of the fact that that stuff was there, it became sort of a natural fit to think about, like, you know, sort of cultural demography. Um, YOU know, sort of putting these things together with the sort of demographic tools that I was aware of already, and, uh, and, and, uh, and, and cultural evolution, and then to think at the micro level, these processes of, uh, of, of, of social learning, um, and, uh, and things like that.

19:05 Ricardo Lopes: So when it comes to cultural evolution, you tend to adhere more to the Californian school of cultural evolutionary theory. I mean, the Dwight Richardson, Enrich school. Well,

19:18 Stephen Vaisey: you know what's interesting about, it's interesting you should say that actually because, um, so, um, Uh, the short answer, I guess would be yes. Although from the outside, when I first kind of got into this, I wasn't aware that there was this sort of like, you know, the France version and the California version. Like when I first got into this, I wasn't aware, but the first conference that I got invited to, uh, that was cultural evolution related. It was, was the French folks, it was the Dan Sperber, um, yeah, yeah, exactly, yep. And so that was the first, that was in like 2022, I think, uh, and, uh, right after the sort of pandemic, you know, when people were starting to travel again, uh, we did this, uh, it was like a small conference in, in, uh, in France, where I met, uh, Dan and, and Hugo and, and stuff, uh, for the first time. And, uh, and so at that time, I really wasn't aware that there was a difference. So I sort of just walked in, oh, hey, interesting. And it seems to me like the main, um, the, the main difference, and, and this, and the reason that this is important is the, I think the main difference is this issue of like cultural attractors and whether some things are sort of naturally more, um, naturally sort of uh more um likely to, to, to be the sort of focus of an equilibrium. Um, AND I think, uh, the more that I've gotten into this, the more I think, so, so I, so here's my view. I just, you know, I went to the Cultural Evolution Society. I think there's a lot of efforts for people as the sort of cultural evolution space grows to like smooth over that distinction, you know, to, to, you know, so I, one of my good friends, Helena Mitan, who's a, who's a professor, she's cultural evolution, you know, she's in the more French tradition, she's French, and she's in the sort of more Paris traditional work with Dan Sperber at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Um, YOU know, so I, so, so I, I talked to her, and I, you know, and I have the, the, the sort of more California folks that I talked to, like Brett Boeheim and Paul and, and Paul Smolino, although he's not in that pure lineage or whatever, but, but anyway, you have this, um, you have the, there's an attempt that I noticed at the Cultural Revolution meeting. To kind of smooth some of this stuff over, like, ah, you know, we're all, I, and I don't think that fighting for fighting's sake is a good idea, but I do think this issue actually of cultural attraction is, is, is really important. Um, I think it's a really important thing, and I think, um, I think there's, there's something to it, and I think if I had to say, I would say that, um, there, that the cultural attraction issues is important because As somebody who's who's been studying sort of socialization, I don't know that, like, a sort of pure arbitrariness, if that makes sense. I don't know if the idea of sort of like, you know, arbitrary transmission makes a lot of sense. I think there are some, you know, I've done some work uh with uh affect control theory, which is this theory in sociology that derives from Osgood's work in the 1950s and 1960s on, uh, this, on, on the universal aspects of cultural meaning. I won't go into too much into that, but the idea being that there are some sort of more, um, you know, natural, you know, like, so the classic example of this would be something not from Af Control, there would be something like, Uh, you know, man bites dog is a lot more surprising than dog bites man. You know what I mean? You know, that there's something to, you know, there's something to, you know, unusual, uh, things, or, um, that, you know, that, that are, that are more natural, or some things that are a little bit more natural. And so I think there's a, um, I think the, the issue of, uh, the issue of, of Cultural attraction is going to be something that I hope we can talk about in a, in a, I hope we can move forward on that in a reasonable way, because I think there are two, there's sort of two dumb ways to do this. One would be just to smooth everything over and say it doesn't matter. And I think that is a problem, actually. I think when, when there's a, when there are actual theoretical differences, I think we should engage with them. I think, and this is a tangent, but In sociology, one of the, I think one of the problems in sociology is people don't do this. Everybody sort of goes around it's like, oh, your work is so great, and your work is so great, and your work is so great. My work is so great. Everybody's work is so great. And we don't spend a lot of time thinking about like, oh, like, actually, what the way that I'm thinking about this isn't actually really compatible with the way that you're thinking about. There's a tension here. And I think, you know, so we don't want to be, so I don't think smoothing everything over is a good idea. Yeah. And I, and just be pretending that the differences between us and sort of theory is not important. I think that's a huge mistake from an intellectual point of view. It's, it's socially very comfortable. To just not have to like, oh, I just wrote a thing that's critical of your work, you know, I mean, like, I, obviously, that's socially uncomfortable for people. I mean, it's not a huge, you know, these are, these worlds are fairly small. Um, BUT the other problem would be just, the other issue would be like, oh, we're gonna go into like our sort of separate camps. So that's, you know, here's a group over here that's just gonna work on its thing, and here's a group over here that's just gonna work on this thing, and they're not gonna talk to each other, or they're gonna, you know, sort of even worse, you know, mutually just sort of insult each other or make fun of each other or whatever for their, you know, simplicity. Um. I, so I hope that we can sort of respectfully engage, but actually engage, you know, not turn up the respect dial too much, you know, but, but actually engage on these things, but I think they're important.

24:24 Ricardo Lopes: No, you know, on my show I tend to be very intellectually promiscuous, and I don't, and I, I, I, I don't think that I owe any loyalty to any school out there. So I've interviewed Boyd, I've interviewed Richardson twice, I've interviewed Eric 3 times, I've interviewed Hugo Garcia twice, Ben Sperber. I interviewed Cecilia Hayes, who basically criticized criticized. EVERYONE, everyone, including what she calls high, high church evolutionary psychology. I mean, the only thing that for me just simply doesn't work at all, and I think it's very much a a failed scientific endeavor is memetics. I mean, memetics. Oh, I,

25:13 Stephen Vaisey: I agree with that. No, no, I totally agree with that. I think that the, the discreteness property is the sort of downfall of that. I mean, I, I understand the analogy, and I think for a time. It made sense as an it was useful as an analogy. I would say for a time it was useful as an analogy to sort of get people thinking in this domain, but I, I, yeah, I totally agree with you. I totally agree with that. So, yeah, I mean, but I'm, I'm fairly promiscuous in this domain as well. I mean, coming back to the issue of morality, I mean, like, you know, so I've, there, there were kind of two, you know, major, um, Um, camps in the, in the, in moral psychology in the past decade or so, the sort of moral foundations, you know, folks, and then, you know, Kurt Gray, who is dyadic theory of morality. And I've published with both of those groups, you know, I've published with Jesse Graham and Morteza Dagani, and I, you know, and published with Kurt Gray as well. Um, BECAUSE I think, you know, there's some, you know, you know, there's some, there's some truth in both, and, and maybe later we'll, we'll talk about what that is. But, uh, but anyway, um, yeah, so I, I totally get it. I'm trying to be, I wanna be, yeah, so I would like to be, you know, promiscuous in that sense as well. And I do think that it's worth discussing. I think it's worth really engaging on the differences, because the thing I keep getting back to is the world. Actually works in certain ways. I don't mean that it works in like one way. There's like one law or anything like that, but the world is actually working. Like we're, like, we're doing this, like that, you know, like, we're doing this every day, like something's happening. And so, uh, trying to figure out what's actually happening is like, I think the kind of most exciting part of this job to try and to get your arms around like what's actually happening, um, is like, yeah, it's really exciting. So, and it's, it's, it's complicated, but it's, but it's, but it's interesting and important, I

26:52 Ricardo Lopes: think. Yeah, it is. So, uh, but I, I mean, in your understanding, what is cultural change and how do you approach it?

27:02 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, OK, so yeah, a lot of this, so a lot of the work that I did earlier was about sort of more cultural structure and, and motivation and like, you know, how people, how culture affected people's behavior. But then, yeah, I, I definitely started fusing this more with the demographic stuff, um, and thinking about the issue of cultural change. And, uh, so the simplest example of this would be something like, um, you know, in 1972, when the US General Social Survey started, which is sort of sociology, which I think of as the Hubble telescope of sociology, you know, basically, it's the, you know, this survey that's been going every year or two, you know, since the 1970s. It's, you know, it was in person. Uh, IT was, you know, really high response rates, uh, you know, national representatives, national representatives, like the highest quality, you know, stuff you can get. And, you know, if you look in, uh, you know, 1972, when the survey first, um, uh, was, was fielded, uh, some, about 40% of Americans thought there should be a law against interracial marriage, for example. OK. And then by, you know, 2002, so 30 years later, by 2002, Um, that was below 10%, and they stopped asking the question cause it's not worth, you know, asking the question if everybody sort of agrees or disagrees with it at that point. And so, you know, the kind of thing that I wanted to get interested in here, that I was interested in was, how does something like this happen? So, like, that would be an example of a sort of big cultural change that you can, you can approach through this one sort of survey question. How does that, um, how, how does that work? And so you have the, the way demographers think about this is, you know, there are kind of three basic processes. Like, people can change as they age. So, like, you know, people can, and, and so one way to think about this would be like in the sort of physical sense, you know, like, the amount of physical strength I have would, you know, grow up to a certain point and then go back down. Um, AND so that's, you know, that would be like a kind of age effect. And in this case, the average age of the population is not changing a ton, so that's probably not what it is. Um, YOU know, period effects, which are effects that they're sort of zeitgeist effects that affect everybody the same way, uh, at a given time. So, like, you know, fashion, things like this would be sort of zeitgeist effects or period effects. And then cohort effects, which are the, um, the sort of enduring effects of the experiences you had sort of during your early life that you carry with you for the rest. Of your life. And, you know, an example of this, you know, would be like Glenn Elder's, uh, you know, Children of the Great Depression, you know, in which he says that, you know, kids who sort of came of age during the Great Depression, you know, maintained certain attitudes, um, you know, about, you know, they, they, the way, the way they thought about the world was fundamentally structured for the rest of their lives by that experience. And that's the, that's the, that's, those are cohort effects. So when you look at, when you look at something like the change in views on interracial marriage in the US, The two sort of basic options are, you know, everybody kind of changed their minds, you know, like people were like, you know what, this isn't cool, you know, to like oppose, you know, so people, people change their minds. The the mechanism one is people changing their minds, and that would be consistent with period effects. The, the world is changing, sort of zeitgeist is changing. And people are changing their minds. Um, AND then the other, you know, possible view of this is that, you know, nobody's views changed, and there was, you know, a lot of older people who thought that there should be a law against interracial marriage. And then over the years, over those 30 years, most of those people died, and then people sort of aged into the population. They became old enough to answer questions in the general social survey, and they had different views. And so the, the, the, the sort of two, prototypical ways of thinking about this sort of change. WOULD be that people individually change their minds, or there's a sort of death and replacement process that's occurring now, talking about like why the younger cohorts are different is a slightly different question, but just descriptively talking about like, what is the process of that happening. And, and this, this, This basic problem has been, is, is, is challenging just from a statistical point of view. But, um, but the, the simplest version of this is that, um, something like 80 or 90% um of that, of that change was cohort replacement. So something like, you know, 80 or 90% of that change was like people, people dying, basically. I mean, people, you know, exiting the population. Um, AND so, so, so it, it just makes, uh, I mean, it was, it was making me sort of wonder, like, how much of public opinion change, how much of, um, and again, this comes back to the issue I mentioned at the beginning, you can ask a random sample of people, but you can't ask a random sample of questions, you know, so, so the only things that we've been able to study are these kind of questions that have been asked for, you know, long series. And, and most of these things for a long series, the, the dominant, the dominant process behind Cultural change, not the only process behind cultural change, but the dominant process behind cultural change is cohort succession. It like people, people dying and people who are younger with different, different views. And again, why those come out is a, is a, is a, is a, is a live question, you know, aging into the population who have, uh, who have different views. So that's how I kind of get into that and what the basics are.

32:13 Ricardo Lopes: So basically it's about the clash between generations and the older guard wanting to stick to the status quo and the younger generations being considered degenerates but eventually taking over the city.

32:31 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, I mean, that, no, absolutely. That's, that's definitely one way to think about it. And I think, um, I mean, part of it is, I mean, I think there are a couple of different ways to think about that, that are sort of interesting that I was thinking about with cultural evolution. There is a tension between generations, but I do think, and this is my sort of view on this, is, you know, why there, OK, so there are two basic views on this that I think are, are interesting. One would be, it's just updating in the face of new information is just expensive. Like, meaning like having to remain open to experience and changing my mind all the time is, is computationally expensive. And so, like, once you've got like a pretty good, you know, map of the world figured out, it just makes more sense to kind of shut it down and, you know, from save resources and just live your life with the stuff because that's one way to think about it. Another way to think about it is that there is an adaptive element to, um, to this, which is that you want some kind of people to remember the past. And the, the metaphor that, and this has, this has a very few, very few similarities with the kind of stuff that I studied, um, because we don't tend to ask questions about this. But, you know, I, I think about this a lot in terms of, what if you, what if you're talking about technologies for gathering food? And so, like, let's say you have a generation that grows up in an era where it's pretty, food is pretty scarce. You got to look, you know, under rocks, you gotta like fish in the pond, you gotta do all kinds of stuff. And, you know, there are techniques for those things, and they're pretty tough. And then, you know, the world, you know, kind of changes. There's a climate change or whatever, a climate cycle sort of occurring, and, oh, for this period of time, the fruit, food's just grown on the trees, food is abundant, it's kind of everywhere. Um, AND so the, the younger generations is walking around picking food off the trees, picking berries off the bush and eating it, and that, you know, the parents are like, ah, you know, you gotta work on your like hunting skills, or you gotta work on your fishing skills. They're like, yeah, don't worry about that. And the idea is that if the world sort of changed back, I think, you know, one way that I have jokingly referred to this is that, you know, the um that older people are sort of the junk drawer of uh of society, you know, they just have all this this stuff that, you know, might come in handy one day. Um, AND, uh, that, you know, that might come in handy one day. And so, and I think that, you know, if that's true from an adaptive point of view, that also that one of the side effects of that might be these sort of intergenerational, um, opinion dynamics, which is that, you know, if, if I, um, you know, so it's really valuable to have people around, especially like in, in, for almost human, for all of human history, uh, I think having, you know, older people around who knew things that we didn't know, who grew up in an environment that was different, and that might come again. Could have some adaptive value. So I, you know, I'm not, I'm not, um, I'm not a neuroscientist, you know, I'm not, I don't know which one of these sort of views is more, uh, plausible, whether it's the sort of information, you know, the, the sort of cognitive miser view, you know, is meaning it's just expensive to keep, to keep updating, or the sort of view that actually this is like for a population, for a group, it's adaptive to have people who get sort of sticky, you know, to have most people get pretty sticky at let's say age 20 or 25. Um, SO that they remember the past. I don't know which one of those views is more right, but I think, I mean, I certainly think the latter view is more interesting, um, as a possibility. So, so yeah, so I think, uh, so I think that's part of, of how that works, yeah.

35:52 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, BUT do, do people individually update their beliefs and behaviors when faced with new information that if so, uh, to what extent does that happen?

36:04 Stephen Vaisey: It's such a good question. I mean, this is like a I mean, the, I mean, the, the shortest possible answer to this is not as much as you think. I mean, that would be, that would be one way, and I, I think that would be an accurate and fair way to say it. It's not as much as you think, not as much as you would expect, um, that people don't use this sort of information around them in like a, in a sort of purely rational way, you know, whatever that means, um, you know, depending on how we define it. Um, SO, and, and it does seem like people are less sensitive. So some of the work that we've been doing lately. IS, um, is looking at, um, the amount of change. So this would, would be with, uh, my co-authors, Kevin Kiely at NC State and my, uh, and Turgate Keskin Turk, my, um, my, uh, PhD student, and Akim Edelman at Sciences Po. Um, HE, uh, we're, we're doing some of this work where we're trying to show, uh, how much does it look like people are updating, you know, over the period of their life. And we do that, we can do this with, with panel surveys. We can do this with things like, um, Um, you know, 457, 1020 year panels where we follow the same people over time. And the basic idea is, you know, we don't know what the environment is proposing to them. So this is not like a lab study where you can like give people, like, oh, give them some information about what this person said, and do they update properly, you know, that we, we, you know, for the kind of stuff that we're studying, that stuff's interesting, but we want We're studying sort of things in the wild in this way. And so we wanna know, um, you know, how much does it look like people are, are, are open to change or changing during their, their period, during their life. And, and number one, it doesn't look like they're updating a lot. I would say that, you know, between, and so one way to think about this is, what is, how big is the sort of between person difference? So let's say at age 18, how different are people from each other at age 18? And then let's follow them for the rest of their lives and see how much they change. And, and the idea is that those differences, what we're finding basically is, and again, this is on the kinds of stuff that we can measure, which is a lot of stuff, to be fair. It's hundreds and hundreds of survey questions, but it's not everything. But if you look at that, it's basically like 10 to 1. If you look at the size of the differences between people at the sort of entry to adulthood. And you compare like that amount of variation, and you compare that to how much people change over the course of their life, like how much they change. It's about 10 to 1. So people do change. They people do change. Um, BUT not very much relative to how different they are at the sort of entry to adulthood, which is one of the reasons why we're trying to study kids. Now, that it does look like that updating, it happens more in the sort of earlier years of our surveys. So like, let's say, you know, at age 18, it looks like on average, people are doing more updating than at than at say age 45. And so, so, so that's us trying to understand the sort of micro level processes. That are behind some of the more aggregate patterns that we're looking because, you know, we, you have these repeated cross sections like the GSS where we can go, like, let's take a different sample of people from 1972 to, you know, 2024, you know, and different sort of this called a repeated cross section, and you can use some statistical techniques to try and decompose that variance into the age cohort. Whereas, if you want to understand the sort of mechanisms, we have to go in, we have to follow the same people over time and sort of see like, are they changing, you know, how much is it, how much of it is measurement error, or whatever. And so, yeah, so from that point of view, it looks like um people are, are, the people are updating a little, but, but nowhere near as much as people think. I think people think that people change their minds much more than they actually do. That would be my, yeah, that would be my, my, my assessment based on that.

39:47 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I, I mean, my guess is that when people are around the age of 18 is when, uh, I mean, they're still in their teens and they're still rebel, sort of rebelling against the system, and then that's when they get across Marx or Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman or or or or Bakunin and that's. When they, when they have to decide, OK, now I either go communist or anarcho-syndicalist or anarcho-capitalist or pure or pure anarchist, and that's what's going, and that's what's going to determine the rest of my political path.

40:31 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, well, I think academic, I think academics, I think idea people are very much like that. Idea people are a lot like that. I don't know how much normal people are like that, but, but many, but many academics are like that, yeah. So, um, yeah, I think it's, um, I, I think there's probably, um, yeah, there are, there are these formative moments, uh, in, in young, in, in young people's lives where they do kind of make these sort of commitments. But again, as I talked about before, you know, I think that the formation process is a little more complicated than, um, than what, you know, than I, than what I thought because, you know, some of my original work was, you know, back in, in 2017. WAS like, you know, people just use identity as a heuristic. Basically, they, they say like, OK, what team am I on? And then they fill in the blanks based on what team they're on. So they, they think like, I'm liberal. What do liberals think about this? You know what I mean? Like, there are a million questions I can answer. So I'm a liberal, I'm a progressive, I'm on the progressive side. What, you know, what, what do people like me think about this? Or, and, and, and what it looks like is, if there's anything that holds the sort of current structure of adults together, this is my work with Andre Boudelin at University of Michigan, um, is, um, Is, um, is, is identity is, is, is sort of left, right identity. Like, am I, am I on the left or am I on the right and filling in the blanks from there. And it does look like that, that is, if, if anything's holding it together among adults, that's what it looked like. Now, what that means is Is that we thought if we went back. To looking at kids. That we would find that the kids um formed. Um, IDENTITY first. And then they would use that to fill in their beliefs, their issue positions. So, like, what are your views on taxes? What are your views on immigration? What are your views on, you know, on, uh, on, uh, on abortion? What do you mean, we, so we thought that the, the, the identities would form first, and then the other stuff would happen later. And that was, we were wrong about that. Because like I mentioned this earlier with the studying of kids, like something like 40% of kids couldn't tell you, like, what party they like better than the other. Or like what party they belong to. Um, AND, uh, you know, and so, so they're, they're not very good at talking about these sort of abstractions, but they can answer questions surprisingly about things like Uh, immigration and things like that. So the thing that they can't, and, and, and those structures are very similar to adult adult structures. They're not just guessing. The structures that come out of this are very similar to adult structures. They're weaker, like they're, they're less organized, but they're organized in the, in the right way. They're organized in the way that, so it does seem like there's some signal there. So, what it looks like, if anything, and again, we don't I don't know this fully yet. But what I would, but based on what I'm seeing now, it, and I mentioned this earlier, I think what's happening is people find people in the environment, in the political environment, like political celebrities that they like or they don't like. And like, so phenomenologically, I think that is probably one of the primary things is like the emotional experience of, of liking or not liking a person. And then the other stuff, including the sort of team memberships, grows up around that. Now, that's, that's overstating the evidence in the sense that I, I don't feel like we proved that, but it does, based on what I'm seeing, it does seem like the, the, the personal aspect, the sort of celebrity aspect of it. Now, how much of that is just about Trump and, you know, and the 2024 situation? Who knows? I can't answer that question. But I think that that's a more plausible mechanism because, you know, humans are good at judging other people, you know, like, we're really good at gossiping, we're really good at having opinions about other people's behavior, we're really good at having, you know, opinions about people's character. And so, like, psychologically, at least, right now, it seems like a kind of a plausible story that people's um views grow up around. Um, A sort of like or dislike of a particular person. And then the sort of, then the, then the sort of the more abstract things and the issue positions, the concrete issue positions sort of crystallize around that. And then what that looks like in adulthood, what that looks like in adulthood is like, I'm on the left or I'm on the right, and that, you know, I mean, that's what it looks like. But the, but as far as the ideology of that process. I think it could be more pers it could be more personal, which is, which is an interesting possibility that we're, that again, we just, we don't have the data, we, you know, we don't have the data yet to, to really say that definitively, but what we're seeing so far does seem consistent with that.

44:59 Ricardo Lopes: Oh, OK, so maybe it's because of that, that when people in their late teens or early twenties get across Ayn Rand, then later they become fans of Eckhart Tolle and Jordan Peterson and and and start and start reading self-help.

45:19 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, no, that could be, yeah, they're reading stoic, the Stoics, uh, yeah, they're, yeah, no, exactly. That's the, uh, no, I think that's, uh, I think that's, I think that's possible. There is sort of a chain. There, there does seem to be sort of a chain, uh, there. But again, we just don't have this, the kind of dynamic data that we would need. I would love to be able to look at people's like lifetime. Sort of Amazon purchases or whatever, like what books are they, you know, buying, uh, or, or,

45:42 Ricardo Lopes: or maybe check out their Goodreads accounts. Yes,

45:46 Stephen Vaisey: exactly, yeah, yeah, no, that's not, that's a, that's a, that's an interesting idea, yeah. That's uh, cause we did find some of these same basic things in like literature, in literature, for example. That's one place where you can sort of do found data where you don't have to rely on surveys. So, you know, some work with Ted Underwood and um uh uh who's a digital humanist, uh, you know, we did, we did some of these some of these period cohort type things with, with him, with, um with uh fiction, essentially English fiction over the past century, and, uh, and that looks like it has similar dynamics to opinion. Um, BUT yeah, I would love to have, but that's very in the aggregate. I would love to have, you know, I would love to have people's individual reading histories for sure.

46:24 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, because, because I mean we have to prevent the self-help plague in some way or another.

46:31 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, yes, I know it's, yeah, I know, I know what you mean. I wonder what that, I wonder if that looks more distinctively American from your point of view, cause I mean, you're, cause you're situated in Europe. I wonder if like, does it, does it look like Americans are more obsessed with uh with self-help?

46:46 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, MAYBE a little bit, but we also have those kinds of figures here and that we, uh, they also have them in Brazil, for example.

46:55 Stephen Vaisey: OK, yeah, I see. OK, OK. So it's a worldwide plague is what you're saying. Yeah.

47:01 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like, uh, a black death level of play.

47:08 Stephen Vaisey: The self-help pandemic, yeah, yeah,

47:11 Ricardo Lopes: so, OK, so, I mean, but do people actually change their political beliefs? And if so, uh, what factors play a role in that?

47:22 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, I mean, I think, OK, so, um, people change their, I, I would say this, it's very hard to distinguish. OK, let's put, so let's look at one example. Um, WE ask a survey question, um, about like, how do you support marijuana legalization? And the question is coded like, yes, no, basically. Think about it this way. So, um, and then over time, you can see like over the the course of a panel, you can see like a panel, meaning like, I'm gonna ask the same people, the same questions, 2 years apart, 3 times the 4 years apart, we can follow them and sort of see what happens. Um, THIS is, this is the, when the GSS had a panel component between 2006 and, uh, and, and, and 2014, we could do some of this, uh, some of this work, uh, in the US. OK. Um, AND what happens is you get a shift. You get people saying like, yes, like more people are saying yes. Now, If the real world was just composed of people who had a binary switch in their mind, which is like, yes and no, like about marijuana legalization, then you could just straightforwardly look at those cross tabs, look at that information, be like, yes, this percent this percentage of people changed their mind about marijuana use. But there are two issues of this. There's, there's measurement error, meaning, even if my answer is really yes, sometimes they say no, and even if my answer is really no, sometimes I say yes. And that, and that's always true with survey questions. Uh, IT, it's not a huge part of things, but it's, but it matters, you know, it matters, because people could just have a bad day, they read. An article that morning, they're, you know, they found out their kid was smoking weed, you know, two nights before, and they're like, they, they were fine with it, and now they're not, you know what I mean? It's like, like, for, for a week. You know what I mean? So, so that's not the, and that's not the kind of thing where someone being annoyed temporarily is not the kind of thing we're interested in. So, so, OK, so you see this pattern, all right. So the thing one is just the sort of measurement instability. But thing two is that in the real world, people don't have this sort of binary switch. They basically have, like, if you want to think about, I mean, some kind of distribution, meaning, like, some people are like, Never in a million years, marijuana should always be illegal. This is terrible. It's a scourge on society. And there's some people who are like, nah, I don't think, you know, and the, it's not in the best interests of society to have it be legal. And there's some people who are like, yeah, I don't love it, but probably it should be legal. And there's some people who Like, hell yeah, absolutely it should be legal. I don't know why it wasn't legal before. So there's like a spectrum of this that gets encoded in sort of survey response of like, yes, no. OK. So that's, so it gets encoded into that survey response of yes, no. And so, one of the things that's tough is we don't observe the people who are going from hell no to probably not. You know what I mean? We don't get people who go from, from me, probably yes to like definitely yes, but there's also, so there's a lot of movement, number one, that we don't get. So we really get that movement that sort of crosses the threshold. So in practice, what that means, what that means, and so like, um, Pablo Balo uh Turga Keskenturk and I did this paper in political psychology recently, where we did like sort of simulations of these sort of microprocesses. And said like, what types of actual changes are compatible with the patterns that we're seeing in the data. And so what, what's crazy about this actually, is that the kind of, um, the kind of inform that, so that, so if you look at the same exact data that we have, it's really compatible with like a very few people having like a sort of awakening about marijuana, like a very few people being like, oh, I used to think this and now I think that, like I've totally changed my mind about it. Or everybody moving like a tiny bit or kind of anywhere in between. And so that, so that, so it turns out that like you think about like studying and so we've been thinking a lot about this, that um people changing their beliefs. You think about this is, oh, I used to believe this and now I believe this. It's actually way more complicated than this, especially when you start to look at it in data. And it's, we, when we look at these patterns, we really can't tell how much of it is like a bunch, like almost everybody changing by like a tiny bit, or maybe like, you know, 5% of the population or 2% of the population or 1% of the population having a big change. So, so clearly some people do. I mean, like, if the answer is, does anyone Ever change their political beliefs. The answer to that question is obviously yes. You know, I mean, that's definitely yes. But we don't know, um, like we don't know whether that's, you know, just a few people having these sort of big changes or whether it's sort of everybody having these like, um, you know, tiny changes. But one thing I can say is that the, the, the amount of change, the amount of change in the aggregate. IS very small compared to the differences that exist on the entry to adulthood. So basically, if you look at differences in adults, like persistent differences between people are about 10 times bigger than the amount of change that we see within a person's life. So, so, so the answer could be yes, people do change. I mean I've changed a lot of my opinions in my life personally, but it's, but, but in terms of the amount of variance, In terms of like, like, there's all this difference in the world. How much of it is like, how different are people from each other in persistent ways and how much of it is individual people changing their minds over their lives. The first process is by far the, the most important one. Now, when people do change, what factors are sort of most important in that? This is really tough because it's probably question specific. I think, I mean, the most obvious thing to say is that age, like being younger makes people a little more susceptible to it. We talked about that earlier. Um, AND, but we see some, but, uh, we do see some evidence, for example, that like views on gender are, um, people do tend to change their views. A little bit on gender when they enter into, um, when they get married, um, you know, when they, when they, when they partner, people's views on gender do change a little bit. But in terms of the specific things that we're seeing, you know, like this happens and this happens, we actually don't know that much about it. And part of that is, is because I've been studying like These sort of 180 questions at a time, 200 questions at a time, 300, 500 questions at a time to look for basic patterns. And I, and I haven't like drilled down into like, oh, I really wanna understand what factors are responsible for this. But some of my students have done that and it's surprisingly difficult to find things that predict. Um, IT'S surprisingly difficult to find things that, that predict cause we, cause we have a lot of sort of stereotypes about this. Like going to college changes your views, maybe a little. My student, Andrew Miles has done some of this where, you know, changing, or he's a professor at the University of Toronto now, but But, um, you know, he's going to college has some effects on your moral views. Um, uh, BUT some of that is probably selection as well, which he addresses to some extent. So anyway, so, um, yeah, it's, we don't know the answer to, we don't really know the answer to that, to be honest.

53:56 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, you know, I, I think that the only politically relevant question which I've never changed my mind on actually since I was like 6 or 7, and I, it's a hill I'm willing to die on is whether pineapples should go on pizza or not. I mean, for, for. Meat for me should and I will never. Oh, I think,

54:21 Stephen Vaisey: oh, I didn't expect you to be in the should camp. I'm in the should camp as well. I love pineapple on pizza. So yeah, no. All right. OK. Team pineapple. All right, awesome. Um, OK.

54:34 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, uh,

54:36 Stephen Vaisey: I, I agree with you. It's there's something about the combo works. Yeah.

54:40 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, so, uh, I mean, uh, I, there's one last topic I would like to ask you about. Do liberals and conservatives actually, actually disagree about morality? I mean, and if so, what is that disagreement? Based on, and I, I want to ask you specifically whether it is based on them having different moral foundations, and I, I want to ask you that because actually, uh, I want to hear your opinion of course, but I've been very disappointed about moral foundations of theory, to be very honest, because I mean since I first read about it. When Jonathan Haidt published The Righteous Mind, I mean, I was kind of intrigued about it, but then, I mean, criticisms started coming in and also I think that he overhyped it in the sense that he even actually tried to perhaps And attach the moral foundations to evolve the adaptations of the mind and I mean and make them universal and then also the fact that he talks about liberals, conservatives, and then he had the libertarians as if those are universal politically and they just aren't so I mean what do you make of all of that?

56:13 Stephen Vaisey: Oh, that's a, that's a big topic. I mean, I, so my journey was, um, I started talking to those guys, uh, John Haidt and I did a data collection project, I think back in 2007 or 2008 where we, I collected the first nationally, nationally representative, uh, sample of the moral Foundation questionnaire, the original moral Foundation questionnaire. Cause I was, um, really interested in this stuff, you know, from the beginning as studying, you know, morality. And one thing that, um, Sociologists are generally pretty bad at, um, and psychologists are better at in, in general, is measurement. And, um, and the reason for that is because psychologists care a lot about measurement, you know, and sociologists, we do these big nationally representative surveys that are extremely expensive. And so you can't ask 30 questions about a construct. You just, you just can't. Like, you just, you can't do it, you know, you're you're, and so, so sociologists are like, oh, well I'll ask this one question or these two questions about this topic, and that's the best we're gonna get. OK. So I really started to get interested in, um, in psychology, and moral psychology, because I was like, well, if nothing else, they really have really good, you know, they're, they're at least thinking really hard about the issue of measurement. Um, AND I, and I read, um, uh, Rick Schrader's, uh, work in cultural psychology, which is the sort of big three of, actually, there's a, this is so fascinating. OK, I'll just do a quick, I'll do a quick version of this. OK. BY

57:36 Ricardo Lopes: the way, I've, I've also had. Schweder on the show. Oh, you have back in 2018. So, oh, that,

57:44 Stephen Vaisey: oh, no way, that's awesome. Yeah, it's so, so, so if you think about the sort of lineage here, there's like, I'll go as fast as I can on this. There's like the sort of Kohlberg Turiel argument. Um, WHERE Kohlberg and Turriel are like, OK, morality is really about justice. And then you have Carol Gilligan come in and, you know, there's care. OK, so you have that. And then you have, um, you know, Schroeder sort of comes in and says, well, when I talk to people about, you know, morality and Heinz and the drug and all this stuff in, uh, in India, they don't, they don't talk about it in the sort of ways that you guys, or they don't only talk about it in the ways that you guys are talking about. There's, you know, there's these other, there's this, you know, these other things. And so, so, so Shredder comes with this autonomy, community, divinity, you know, paradigm, and, and that the ideas that the US is big. OK, so you know this, this story. And then there's this discussion about whether those, those are different moralities or whether it is um what Turriel called informational assumptions. The idea being that like, well, everybody thinks harm that that harm and uh uh is the basis of morality. But some people think, so if you think your dad actually has a soul. And that like you eating meat in the two weeks after he dies are gonna harm the soul, then that's why you think it's wrong to do this, not because of some extra sort of divinity foundation or divinity, they wouldn't use the word foundations then, but that, so that was that the sort of Turriel Shredder debate, you know, was going on in the, in the 1980s and early 19990s. OK. Um, AND then, so Height comes along and he does, I think he did a postdoc, I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but he did something like a postdoc with Twitter at some point. I mean, so, and he definitely was influenced. This is, this is all, everybody knows this. I,

59:25 Ricardo Lopes: I, I, I think so because I remember talking a little bit about China. And height in my interview with research whether I, I know, I know for sure that when it comes to the sanctity, purity aspect of moral foundations, he was very much influenced by Paul Rosin, right?

59:42 Stephen Vaisey: You, know, that too, yes, with the all the disgust work and everything there, yeah. So, um, so he, so he, um, so yeah, so, so autonomy, community, divinity, and so yeah, so, so, so, um, so John, of course, uh, starts thinking about this in measurement terms. You know, cause he's a psychologist, and he's like, OK, well, autonomy, community, divinity. But then, you know, it's like, OK, you know, starts thinking about moral foundation theory. And if you look at sort of autonomy, you have the, you have the harm care, you have the fairness, and then you have the community aspects, which are the sort of loyalty and authority, and then you have, you know, purity, which is the sort of divinity, you know, aspect in, in the first version of this. And so this comes along, and so it's essentially like a psychologized measurement-based version. Of Rick, of, of Rick Schrader's autonomy, community, divinity paradigm. And then, you know, and then Kurt Gray, you know, more recently has come up and said, with the dyadic theory of morality, has said, you know what, there's not separate moral foundations, they're not sort of separate modules, that it's really um about essentially what you believe. And it's a more cognitive theory about informational assumptions, like, who do you think is vulnerable, etc. So, so the reason I wanted to point this out is because there's this cycle. That has been going on since at least the like early 1980s and probably since like the late 1970s, of like going back and forth between this issue of, like, are there different moralities, or are, is there basically one morality with different uh cognitive assumptions, different beliefs about how the world works. And I, and what I would say is, I think the moral foundation questionnaire, I think moral foundations theory as a measurement approach is useful in the sense that it's clearly tracking something. But is it like, does it, does it, is it latching on to like the correct view of, of, of, of what's actually happening? I would say sort of reluctantly, even though I, I like all this work and I, and Jesse Graham is a, is a friend of mine and I published with him and, and I think this work is really interesting. Um, I think that's probably not right, um, in the sense that I don't think there are probably foundations. Now, what they would say, and I, and I think it's reasonable, is that there is a, there's a, there's stronger and weaker versions of moral foundations there. The strongest version is, like you said, a version where there are, um, You know, like, these are like kind of modular in the strong sense. That's, that's, I think to me, that's, I would be much more comfortable saying that's wrong. Um, WHEREAS if, if we could say that these are, you know, these are adaptations that sort of that form, these are sort of characteristic approaches that people have to approach, you know, moral problems that develop over the life course, something like that. That's not as sort of strongly grounded in some sort of like neuro neuro, you know, neuroscientific, uh, you know, idea of a module. OK, maybe. Um, BUT I do think that that's, that's not a super plausible, it's not a super satisfying theory. And that's why I think, um, uh, especially because from a measurement point of view, a lot of the questions that are about purity, purity questions are really about sex. And like sex is really moralized, you know, uh, um, uh, by, especially like in by religious groups. So is it really like a question of purity? And so people have talked about like, well, you know, liberals care about purity too, mostly related to things like the environment, blah, blah, blah, you know, Rob Willer's done some work on these things too. Anyway, um, so I'm thinking about, so, so I guess what I would say is, you know, lately, I've been working a little bit. We just had a paper come out, uh, with Kurt Gray on the sort of assumptions of vulnerability, talking about liberals and conservatives. And the idea here is that, like, you know, liberals and conservatives see different victims, and that's the name of the paper. And the idea is that um in, in Kurt and, and Chelsea Shine's, you know, theory of um dyadic morality, the idea here is that the prototypical moral wrong is a sort of powerful agent hurting a vulnerable patient. And like, so like, you know, someone committing, you know, so like a, you know, sort of, You know, man murdering like a child or something, that's like the worst, that's like the moral prototype. That's like the worst thing that you can do. And so the question then is, like, how well, and my, my former student Nico Restrepo Ochoa has done some work on this too, is like, is how much does Um, moral judgment map onto how close the situation that you're judging is to like that prototypical situation of like somebody killing like a child, like a baby killing it, or a man killing a child or something. And the idea there is you have a powerful agent killing, doing something bad to a, you know, a vulnerable victim. And I think that's probably from like a scientific theory point of view, that does seem more satisfying and probably more correct in the sense that people are walking around with sort of like understandings of where people sort of fit in the space, who has the capacity for action. Who has the, who, you know, so who acts and who gets acted on, who's got power, who doesn't have power, who's powerful and powerless. And so, if you, when you look at this, it does start to shed a lot of light on some of these liberal and conservative differences where, you know, um, uh, my, my, uh, my, my current student, uh, Ana Hiltner, uh, has done some work on like how, um, Americans, uh, think about immigration, liberals and conservatives think about immigration. And so you, so people who are, so, uh, conservatives tend to think about the immigrants as being the actors. You know, they're coming here, they're doing, they're doing crime, they're stealing, and so who's vulnerable? The American people are vulnerable. The immigrants are, they're, they're, they're the agents. They're the ones who can sort of, they're gonna steal things from you. They're, they're, they have the agency, they're gonna do this, and the American people are the sort of vulnerable ones who are gonna have their stuff taken away and they're gonna get hurt. Whereas if you talk to liberals, Um, they're going to say things like, oh, well, they're sort of victims in their home country, and they're coming here, and it's our responsibility to sort of like welcome them and help them have a better life. And so it treats the, the immigrants as very vulnerable and the American people as being the ones who are sort of capable of, of, of, of being powerful and agentic in that way. And so I think there's something to that. Now, what I don't know is how much of that is, is, um, how much of that is like post hoc. Meaning that like um that harm is like the sort of lingua franca of, you know, like, so harm might be the lang harm harm might be just the language that everyone understands. It might be the lang the the language that everybody understands or the way of thinking that everybody understood. It might be the common currency of morality. Um, BUT, uh, but certainly as a, as a, as a sort of play, as a scientific theory, uh, for now, I do find the sort of dyadic theory more satisfying. And but I do think you can get all the sort of predictions, uh, all of the sort of useful measurement properties and things of the moral foundations theory, sort of out of dyadic morality. Like when you understand that if you think these things are bad for you, if you think like, you know, if you think it's like bad for your soul to do this, Like, you don't need like an extra foundation for that. You can just think that you can just use your normal sort of harm psychology for that, you know what I mean? So that, that, that would be the way that I would, that I would think about it, so.

1:06:45 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I think that very unfortunately, and I don't know if you agree with me on this point, but I think that unfortunately Jonathan Haidt, I mean, in my opinion, he should have stayed on his social and cultural psychology lane more when it comes to approaching morality and political beliefs, because I think that for some reason or another, and I'm not completely sure who exactly. Influenced him in that direction, but at a certain point, he got very influenced by, uh, evolutionary psychology ideas when it comes to approaching, uh, morality and politics and, and then he also got into that, uh, massive modularity of the human mind. He hopped onto that train, which, I mean, cog in terms of cognitive science and neuroscience, that's. VERY outdated by now, so, and they got into, and they got into it, I think in the 2000s, and it's, it's, it was already a bit late for that, and then, I mean, it was just downhill from there. I think.

1:07:57 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, I agree that the modularity, and this is the modularity thing is um a bit of a dead end in this, and, and I would say this actually, I think this is one of the reasons why um. Sociology might be more open to uh the sort of modern instantiation of cultural evolution because it's essentially a kind of evolutionary theory that allows, that is much more, much more open to social construction than something like strong evolutionary psychology with massive modularity where like, you know, everything sort of just is being generated out of this, this sort of these, these modules that people have, you know, rather than Um, you know, the mind being, this is why I think Henrik's work and, you know, the Boyd riches and stuff more generally has been like, is more palatable to people, you know, like me, or, you know, the people that I'm trying to To talk to in sociology or in political science about these things is because there's a sort of, there's more of an openness, you know, there's more of an openness to sort of like what we would think of as social construction, but basically what that means is like, yeah, like these things can go a lot of different directions, and we've learned things from other people and we try to figure things out the best we can. And, and so I think it's possible that there are basic features of human experience in the world that tend to lead to, um, sort of some themes. Uh, IN, in the domain of moral judgment, and I certainly think that like, it's not crazy to say that like disgust is an emotion that that some things get built around, you know, that has like, you know what I mean, um, or to say that like anger. Uh, IT'S something that gets, you know, we can have, you know, things that are built around that, that are sort of, but, but I, but the idea of there being like, oh, there are these modules. And I don't think, to, to be fair, I don't think the sort of current torchbearers of something like, um, a moral foundations theory would, would agree with or, or endorse this modularity view. But, but I agree that was probably a bit of a red herring, yeah, for sure.

1:09:44 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and I think that I mean just the 5 or 6, if you have the 6th moral foundation. I mean, it's, it's a very limiting framework in terms of the variability that you can find in terms of human morality across different societies. I mean, I guess that even perhaps a better way of approaching it even from an evolutionary perspective would be something like the work that that Oliver Scott Curry is doing with his moral molecules approach er or. Yeah, or, or even, I mean things that anthropologists like Harvey Whitehouse have been working on where he expands on the, I mean, he actually thinks that there are human universals in terms of morality, but his list is much more expansive than Uh, moral foundation.

1:10:45 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, I mean, I, I agree. And I think there's a, there's a real tension. I mean, I want to just, because I agree with you, but I want to flag the sort of difficulty here, which is that we want a model that we don't want models that are like the size of the world, you know, to, to use the, you know, you know what I mean? We don't want to map. Yeah, we don't want to map the size of the world. And so there are ways to oversimplify and undersimplify. And I don't think, I don't know. I don't, it's very difficult to To hit the sort of sweet spot in that domain. And so there's, you know, so we want things to be sim simplified but not oversimplified. And so, so I, I agree with you that like the moral foundation theory is a kind of simplification that's probably not the optimal form of simplification. I think something like Schwartz's values is, you know, has its strengths and weaknesses for, you know, talking about differences between and within societies. You know, there are a lot of, um, there are a lot of traditions that are sort of capturing something. Now, I personally would like to It makes me very uncomfortable to walk around knowing there are like 17 different ways to measure, like, moral differences in the world. It just seems like there should be, we should be able to do a better job. And I, I think, you know, if you look at the domain of like personality psychology, which is a place where they've really tried to sort of drill down. It's not like personality psychology doesn't have problems, but it did take a long time to kind of get to where we are now in terms of personality psychology. And then, of course, you know, somebody's like hexao scores or whatever is not going to tell you everything about that person, or like their big five scores are not going to tell you everything about what that is as a person. So, It's, yeah, so the sort of right level of generality is, is, is an important, is an important question. And I, and I hope we can do more. And, you know, I've been thinking about this issue since like 2011 when we did this measuring morality, you know, project, where we asked, I got all, I got a bunch of these people together actually in um in uh in 2011 or 2010 and uh 2011. And, um, and, and we did this national representative survey where we basically asked people sort of most of the morality questions that were kind of available at that time and just to see how they sort of map together. And, uh, yeah, I, I do think there's a, you know, if I had to say, you know, I think there's, um, if you wanted to characterize the differences between people in the moral domain, it's like, how much do I care about other people? Like, how much do I care about people that aren't my, aren't in my family? Like, is their welfare sort of relevant to me? And like, how much chaos in the environment am I willing to tolerate? You know, like, like, do I want things to be very orderly, or do, you know, and that, again, you can, you can map that onto moral foundations. You can map that onto sort of saying like, yeah, do I want like loyalty, authority. You know what I mean? Do I, you know, you know, and you have the harm and fairness, and, you know, I think there's something to that, like, the basic sort of structure of, you know, and I joke around about this, but this is like the, the Dungeons and Dragons theory of of morality, because, you know, if you ever played D&D, you know, you've got, you know, good and evil, and you've got like, law and chaos. And, uh, and I think strangely, I've talked about this in talks a couple times and on, and I think on Twitter back before Elon Musk bought it, but, but this idea that sort of This that I that like what falls out of, like, our analysis of measuring morality is um is this idea that you have sort of like the good, like, how much do I care about other people, as opposed to just being, like, caring about my my own little circle, that's sort of good evil dimension. And then how much do I care about social order, it's the like law chaos dimension. I was like, yeah, Gary Gygax, uh, you know, had it right back in the 1970s when he was with Dungeons and Dragons. I think uh the Dungeons and Dragons theory of morality is not too bad.

1:14:10 Ricardo Lopes: Oh, OK, OK, so I, I, I mean, uh, we're finishing the interview, but I just have to let you know that you lost me there with the Dungeons and Dragons analogy because, because, because, because, look, I, I, I am, I am a complete nerd, but dungeons, not that level of nerd. I mean,

1:14:30 Stephen Vaisey: I think some of your, uh, I think some of your listeners, some of your listeners will appreciate that.

1:14:34 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I, I, I, I, I, I mean, I just said the other day that I'm the being able to read a 700 page anthropology textbook kind of nerd, but not, but not the watching competitive chess kind of nerd.

1:14:53 Stephen Vaisey: OK, that's

1:14:55 Ricardo Lopes: that's too boring for me.

1:14:57 Stephen Vaisey: No, I get it. I get it. Yeah, Dungeons and Dragons definitely a cohort effect in my, in my generation, you know, in the 80s, if you were a nerd, you were definitely playing D&D 80s and 90s, yeah. So,

1:15:07 Ricardo Lopes: anyway, OK, so where can people find your work on the internet?

1:15:12 Stephen Vaisey: Uh, THEY can, yeah, just on, uh, um, uh, I think it's what Steven Baisy.com will direct to my GitHub site, um, and that has like links to all my papers, uh, on it and to my Google Scholar, so that I, I made it as easy as for people as possible. Just Google my name. I'm not the realtor, that's my dad. Um, I'm the sociologist.

1:15:36 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great. So look, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been very fun to talk with you.

1:15:42 Stephen Vaisey: Yeah, thanks, Ricardo. I, I enjoyed it.

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