Taxonomy of Emotions

Here are Plutchik's circle and cone as well as the SASHET

Kohlberg's stages of moral development

A while back I posted on the Republican view of morality. It seems Republicans are more apt to support moral views that hold society together and less those that would foster disobedience (including civil disobedience) and an unraveling of societal conventions.

Lawrence Kohlberg, a scholar of both psychology and philosophy, developed a model of the stages of moral development. He interviewed subjects and posed the following question:

In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that?

The stages are as follows:
1. Obedience and Punishment Orientation.
2. Individualism and Exchange.
3. Good Interpersonal Relationships.
4. Maintaining the Social Order.
5. Social Contract and Individual Rights.
6. Universal Principles.


I so wish I had taken more psychology courses; that might be the very thing I can do now. All I seem to know is some Freudian theory and some Maslow, so I am woefully ignorant in this area.

The Republican view of morality

Edge.org has a fascinating article by, Jonathan Haidt, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia entitled What Makes People Vote Republican? The following is an excerpt.

Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? ... morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?

...people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.

(Although I think of myself as moderately liberal —and fiscally conservative— my results on a quiz at YourMorals pegged me as more liberal than liberals.)


I also found What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank, who explores why Kansans seem to vote against their economic interests.