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Originally Posted by abaya
... did anyone actually read that article I cited from the NY Times?... just looking for feedback on their theory here, since it's directly applicable.
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Ok a read it, but unfortunately being a piece written for the masses so to speak, it lacks the detail to see if how he came to his conclusions are valid, though its not the first time I read such ideas about an evolved morality.
On a side note I did get a kick out of one of his detractors....
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He said that he also disagreed with Dr. Haidt’s alignment of liberals with individual rights and conservatives with social cohesiveness.
“It is obvious that liberals emphasize the common good — safety laws for coal mines, health care for all, support for the poor — that are not nearly as well recognized by conservatives,” Dr. de Waal said.
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This is why I take any story that makes the popular press, even in a science section with a large grain of salt. The fact that this guy was willing to go public with such a statement as a scienist is rather astounding to me. What he said was 'His tests showed this but of course I know thats obviously wrong because I feel they are based on my own personal biases' The problem of course isn't that he questioned the ideas, thats good, but that he wrote them off with no evidednce beyond how he feels it is, thats not being a scientist.
Lately, amusingly, the trend in the liberal academia circles are to 'prove' that liberals are smarter, nicer, better, than conservatives, and predictably such studies are in LA times and the like, which when analyzed are all very flawed.
As a rule with scientific research, if its in a publication where you can find celebrity gossip, sports scores, or fashion, is going to be only a ghost of the real research at best, and nothing but fluff, often biased fluff at worst.
Recently I had two friends of mine, all well educated, tell me how they read some theory that humans developed independently and that we are all not linked by a common ancestor. This idea isn't new, and its been shot down many times, but here was my college educated (obviously not biology) friend telling me how this was fact. It must have been on slash dot, as for some reason the nerd elite seems to believe everything that makes it to slash dot.
Its frustrating, but really the only way to judge the validity of a paper (and I"ve seen a lot of bad ones over the years, in my field and others that got published) is to read the actual paper, see their methods, sample size etc. To do so you need to have access (its a pain to find some of the publications) and understand the language behind it as well as the methods.
So cutting this semi-thread jack short. Its an interesting concept, thats not new, though I haven't heard of the '5 types of morality' before, so that part was new to me. I just can't say how valid it is. The NYT science section is a bit better than most, but it still amounts to a nice summary.
I do think hes right in concept though, even if perhaps off in detail.