Ideology and Moral Judgment
Some have referred to highly moralized states of partisan disagreement as “culture wars” (Hunter, 1991) between liberals and conservatives, on diverse issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and immigration. These culture wars are characterized by high levels of moral conviction on both sides (Skitka & Bauman, 2008). How can morality mean such different things to people of differing political ideologies? How deeply-rooted are these differences, and how can this explain the intractability of debates when they become moralized? My research aims to answer these questions, beginning with a theoretical view of human morality that allows us to conceptualize how moral concerns may conflict.

Conflicting visions and the foundations of morality. With Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, I developed Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007, SJR; Haidt, Graham, & Joseph, in press, Psych Inquiry; Graham & Haidt, in press, PSPR), which specifies five basic psychological systems upon which cultures and individuals construct a wide variety of values, virtues and vices. I developed the first instruments to measure reliance on these five foundations, including abstract assessments of moral relevance, self-reported moral judgments, willingness to violate the foundations for money, and foundation-related word use in sermons of liberal and conservative churches. Across these measures we found a very consistent pattern: liberal morality is built primarily upon individual-focused concerns of Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity, while conservative morality is also built on group-level moral concerns related to Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009, JPSP). These findings help to explain how ideological debates can be fueled by conflicting moral concerns, and begin to show how moral foundation differences correspond to different visions of society: on the left, a vision of individuals treating other individuals with compassion and fairness; and on the right, a vision of individual selfishness reigned in by moral obligations to groups, teams, and institutions such as the family or the church.

The moral foundations work has been done in collaboration with Jon Haidt, Brian Nosek, Craig Joseph, Ravi Iyer, Sena Koleva, and Pete Ditto. You can test your own reliance on the moral foundations at YourMorals.

Ideology’s influence on moral decision-making. In another line of research, I am investigating how ideological differences can impact not only the content of moral concerns, but the processes of moral decision-making as well. For example, using moral dilemmas that force a trade-off between an aversive action and its positive consequence (e.g., killing one person in order to save five people from being killed by a runaway trolley), we found that conservatives were more likely to focus on the aversiveness of the action, and liberals more likely to deliberate about the consequences (Graham, Sherman, Hawkins, Iyer, Nosek, & Haidt, in prep). Furthermore, conservatives showed a stronger “gut carryover” effect, whereby making a moral decision about an intuitively aversive action makes one more likely to morally reject non-aversive actions in subsequent decisions. These initial findings add to our picture of conflicting moral visions, from a relativistic willingness to make exceptions to moral rules in order to maximize utility (liberal extreme) to an absolutist refusal to violate gut reactions of wrongness, regardless of the circumstances (conservative extreme). In follow-up studies of the mechanisms of this difference, I am experimentally manipulating self-control resources to see if liberals are engaging in more controlled suppression of their initial aversive reactions in order to attain the most favorable consequences.

These moral decision-making studies have been done in collaboration with Gary Sherman, Carlee Hawkins, Ravi Iyer, Brian Nosek, and Jon Haidt.

Cultural influences on ideology and morality. In online studies we have found evidence of a consistent pattern of moral foundation endorsement across ideology (more left-wing predicting more preferencing of Harm and Fairness concerns over other moral concerns) in dozens of  countries and world areas. I have initiated a variety of cross-cultural collaborations to further expand this investigation across linguistic and cultural contexts, made possible in part by translations of our materials (available at MoralFoundations.org to encourage international research). With these tools we are beginning to reach populations that were previously unavailable. For example, data collection was just completed assessing the moral concerns of several different social groups in Nicaragua, from upper-class students to sex workers to residents of the Managua city dump (Graham & Cox, 2009). I am also beginning to explore how macro-level factors such as residential mobility and average income affect individual morality, supplementing my focus on cultural practices with a socio-ecological approach (Oishi & Graham, under revision).

These cross-cultural collaborations include Shige Oishi, Keith Cox, Leah Borovoi, Paula Bedregal & Tomás León, Florian van Leeuwen, Agata Basek & Anna Hoszcz, Andrea Bobbio, Alessio Nencini & Mauro Sarrica, and Wenwei Guan, Ludan Zhang, Emma E. Buchtel, & Benjamin Cheung.

Implicit Political Cognition
Political psychologists are just beginning to make use of recent theoretical and methodological advances in implicit social cognition (Nosek, Graham, & Hawkins, in press), and I predict that this approach will have a transformative impact on the field. I am contributing to this process by leveraging unique measurement opportunities online and in the lab, developing new methods for testing questions about how ideology and morality operate outside of conscious awareness and control.

The implicit and explicit structure of ideology. To provide a rigorous and comprehensive picture of the automatic and controlled aspects of ideological attitudes, I am leading a long-term project at ProjectImplicit.org called “Ideology 1.0” (Graham, Hawkins, Jost, & Nosek, in prep). Ideology 1.0 is a massive, multivariate, planned missing data design, with both implicit and explicit measures of 50 different theory-derived ideological contrasts (e.g., progress vs. preserve), 25 individual difference questionnaires related to ideological constructs (e.g., RWA, SDO), and dozens of individual self-report items. For a given session, participants are randomly assigned to complete a small subset of the measures. Complementing my experimental, laboratory-based research on similar questions, the primary goal of Ideology 1.0 is to improve the construct validity of ideology. This will be accomplished by (a) investigating the structural relations among a wide variety of measurement scales, all designed to capture an aspect of ideology; (b) investigating implicit-explicit relations among a wide variety of ideology-relevant concepts; (c) testing theoretical predictions of ideology theories; (d) investigating convergent and discriminant validity of concepts related and unrelated to ideology, and (e) investigating known-groups, individual differences, and predictive validity among the wide variety of measures, demographics, and items in the dataset. A secondary goal of Ideology 1.0 is to include very simple measures (e.g., single item) of a wide variety of psychological constructs to test how they relate to each other and to ideologically-relevant measures. We are currently halfway to our target sample of 200,000 participants; once this target is reached, we hope to make this data set available and usable for researchers in psychology and political science.

The Ideology 1.0 project has been done in collaboration with Brian Nosek and Carlee Hawkins, with lots of input from John Jost, Margarita Krochik, Irina Feygina, Chris Federico, and John Hanson.

Ideological differences in implicit morality. How deeply ingrained are the moral differences we’ve found between ideological opponents? In order to expand moral foundations research beyond self-reported value endorsements and controlled behaviors, for my dissertation research I am conducting a multi-method investigation of automatic reactions to moral foundation-relevant stimuli. It is possible that liberals and conservatives differ in their automatic reactions the same way they differ in explicitly-endorsed values (e.g., liberals more reactive to Harm and Fairness violations than conservatives, conservatives more reactive to Ingroup, Authority, and Purity violations than liberals). But it is also possible that ideological opponents share the same intuitive reactions to signs of virtue or vice, suppressing those reactions that conflict with their ideologies. Using evaluative priming with vice words and an Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne et al., 2005) with virtue and vice pictures, I found that liberals and conservatives share automatic reactions in line with all five foundations, even when their explicit ratings of the same stimuli differ. I am now using cognitive load manipulations and other methods to further investigate the intriguing possibility that different ideologies correspond to different “motivated corrections” of the same automatic moral intuitions. With neuroscientist Jamie Morris I am also beginning to use event-related potentials (ERPs) to gauge automatic reactions to statements supporting or violating foundation-related values, and with Kate Ranganath I'm investigating how foundation-related information influences the formation and transfer of explicit and implicit attitudes.

Measurement and Method Development
In addition to theory development, I am also interested in methodological innovation and validation. With four colleagues at three universities I created YourMorals.org, an online source for interactive education in moral psychology research that in its first two years has already collected data from over 150,000 participants in dozens of countries. I have developed two scales – the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer, Koleva, & Ditto, under review) and the Moral Sacredness Scale (Graham & Haidt, in prep) – designed to gauge the full range of moral concerns and involve intuitive as well as deliberate moral judgments. Combining quantitative and qualitative text analysis techniques, I also developed a method for gauging moral concerns expressed in written texts (see Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009, JPSP, Study 4), allowing for the testing of a wide range of cross-cultural and historical hypotheses (e.g., Graham & Pasanek, in prep, on the explicit and implicit moral conflicts between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine). Finally, the Ideology 1.0 project described above is pushing the boundaries of study design methodology, for instance giving just a few items from several different scales in a study session to make possible large-scale structural models and factor analyses of dozens of ideologically-relevant scales. In future work I hope to continue this development and use of cutting-edge methodology, expanding the domain of what can be empirically studied by expanding the range of possible empirical approaches. I will also continue to make these innovations available to the public (via educational websites like YourMorals.org and ProjectImplicit.org) and to the scientific community (materials available at MoralFoundations.org, datasets available by request).

Other Projects
Aesthetics/ethics/metaphysics of emotional life. We are studying how emotion and cognition interact in aesthetic, moral and religious experience, using Clore's ideas of cognitive restructuring and mental travel. We are starting with the aesthetic experiences of humor and profundity. This line of research is being done in collaboration with Jerry Clore and Patrick Seder.

Humor and laughter in cross-cultural interactions. When I lived in Japan I was even more clownish than I usually am, constantly laughing and joking in an attempt to bridge the linguistic and cultural divides between me and my students and coworkers. I've been fascinated by humor for years (it was the topic of my undergraduate thesis) – laughter is omnipresent in our everyday social lives, too rarely studied by social psychologists, and hugely important as a domain in which to observe and study morality. We've begun to study humor and laughter in stranger dyads across cultures, using a high/low-chair status manipulation. We are also looking into how the concept of happiness has changed over time (using historical text analysis) and across cultures. These studies are being done in collaboration with Shige Oishi.

Linking prosocial goals to actions. We're convinced that social psychology can make the world a better place, so we've begun a series of studies trying to determine the optimal conditions for linking prosocial goals to specific actions. In one such study, we gave students different kinds of feedback based on their driving habits over a two-week period, to see if multiple kinds of feedback (financial, environmental) would have additive or disruptive effects. We found that multiple kinds of feedback have additive effects in getting students to drive less, and that simply recording the number of times one avoids driving has a positive effect (Graham, Koo, & Wilson, in press, JASP). To encourage people to keep track of their own driving habits, we created an excel file that gives feedback about money saved and pollutants avoided; this file can be downloaded here. These "save the world" studies are being done in collaboration with Tim Wilson and Minkyung Koo.

Disgust and acceptance of rights violations. Along with most genocides and large-scale atrocities, the group perpetrating the atrocity tends to portray the victimized group as disgusting, comparing them to vermin or cockroaches. We're interested in the role physical and moral disgust play in this dehumanization process. In different vignettes we are manipulating the disgustingness of an individual or group and manipulating the severity of a rights violation perpetrated on that group. We want to know the conditions under which associating disgust with someone will make you more accepting of that person's rights being violated.
This research is done in collaboration with Dan Kuckuck, Bobbie Spellman, and Jon Haidt.

Press Coverage
“A Community Divided,” interview on MiND-TV (WYBE, Philadelphia), September 17, 2009.
“Your Moral High Ground,” Utne Reader, September-October 2009.
“Liberals and Conservatives,” interview on the Ron Reagan Show, Air America, May 29, 2009.
“Human Nature: The Remix” by Dan Jones, Nature, February 12, 2009.
“A New Direction in Psychology and Politics” by Evan R. Goldstein, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 15, 2008.
“The Emerging Moral Psychology” by Dan Jones, Prospect, April 12, 2008.
“The Moral Instinct” by Steven Pinker, The New York Times, January 13, 2008.
“Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?” by Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, September 18, 2007.
“The Depths of Disgust” by Dan Jones, Nature, July 14, 2007.
“Original Spin,” interview on The Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC (New York City public radio), February 23, 2007.
“Across the Great Divide: Investigating Links Between Personality and Politics” by Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, February 12, 2007.