The moral foundations of occupy Wall Street: an illustrated guide to the signs at Zuccotti Park.

• Author: Haidt, Jonathan

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FROM A RATIONAL perspective, joining a protest rally is like voting: a complete waste of time. The odds that your voice or your protest sign will make a difference are no better than the odds that your vote will change an election. Yet people do join protests, and people do vote. They do these things not to advance their rational self-interest but to express moral passions and moral identifies.

In Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, home base of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a noisy, festive crowd of hundreds was doing just that when ! stopped by on October 8. In an attempt to make sense of the goals and motivations of the protesters there, I brought along a small camera and Moral Foundations Theory, which I developed with psychologists at the University of California at Irvine (Pete Ditto), the University of Chicago (Craig Joseph), and the University of Southern California (Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, and Sena Koleva). This theory, which is based on ideas from the anthropologist Richard Shweder, outlines six clusters of moral concerns--care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/ subversion, and sanctity/degradation--upon which, we argue, all political cultures and movements base their moral appeals.

The foundations are like the taste receptors on the tongue: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory. Each culinary culture creates its own unique cuisine using some combination of these tastes, including elements that lack immediate appeal on their own, such as bitterness. Similarly, each political movement bases its claims on a particular configuration of moral foundations. It would be awfully hard to rally people to your cause without making any reference to care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, or sanctity.

My colleagues and I found that political liberals tend to rely primarily on the moral foundation of care/harm, followed by fairness / cheating and liberty/oppression. They are very concerned about victims of oppression, but they rarely make moral appeals based on loyalty/betrayal, authority/ subversion, or sanctity/degradation. Social conservatives, in contrast, use all six foundations. They are less concerned than liberals about harm but much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups and nations together, i.e., loyalty (patriotism), authority (law and order, traditional families), and sanctity (the Bible, God, the flag as a sacred object). Libertarians, true...