After I posted this thread, I was given all the raw data.
So, here are the zero-sum moral circles, where the categories are explicitly non-overlapping and giving moral units to a higher category does not include a lower-level category.
Participants were instructed that the moral units to allocate were like currency they can spend on others and allocate to different moral circles, and that a higher-level circle does **not** mean allocating to a lower one.
If you pick "16" in this exercise, then you take a moral unit away from levels 1-15.
Here's how this worked out for moderates. Curious result: they're a little more family-focused than conservatives!
And finally, here's how this worked out for liberals.
Plenty of them allocated their scarce moral units to far-out categories, even though this meant taking a moral unit away from categories like immediate family members.
I also received the data from the version of this study where participants could invest in different exclusive categories as much as they wanted.
In the real world, moral allocation is scarce. The authors cited other studies to that effect, but wanted to test infinite units.
First up for infinite units are the conservatives.
They spread out quite a bit. Seems they do care about later levels, but they still put far more moral focus on the inner levels, the family and people they really know.
Moderates spread out even more with infinite units.
They didn't spread out as much as liberals with scarce moral units, but they spread out considerably nonetheless.
Finally, liberals.
Having infinite moral units actually saw them come back closer.
They were more extreme than conservatives and a bit more than moderates, too.
In the zero-sum setting, the heat map meme directionally held up.
In the infinite-sum setting, it directionally held up as well, but was far weaker.
The first study's setting is more realistic, but the second one had a larger sample.
Here's something else I just learned. It's VERY curious.
The authors don't know how to replicate the original heat map! They actually received the image from Qualtrics, and it seems Qualtrics... doesn't know how they did it either.
It can be replicated, but with weird smoothing
Anyway, there's your heat map meme.
The people who said it wasn't real didn't actually check by replotting the data in the heatmap format.
Now, hopefully people will moderate to the position
- The heat map meme was supported
- The magnitude is less than it first appeared
- Replication is warranted
-- Constructive qualitative extensions to this study are needed to understand what people really think about this task
This is the craziest one, by the way: large portions valuing rocks over family.
The #2 and #3 for weirdest were Slightly Liberal and Liberal, in that order.
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This research directly militates against modern blood libel.
If people knew, for example, that Black and White men earned the same amounts on average at the same IQs, they would likely be a lot less convinced by basically-false discrimination narratives blaming Whites.
Add in that the intelligence differences cannot be explained by discrimination—because there *is* measurement invariance—and these sorts of findings are incredibly damning for discrimination-based narratives of racial inequality.
So, said findings must be condemned, proscribed.
The above chart is from the NLSY '79, but it replicates in plenty of other datasets, because it is broadly true.
For example, here are three independent replications:
A lot of the major pieces of civil rights legislation were passed by White elites who were upset at the violence generated by the Great Migration and the riots.
Because of his association with this violence, most people at the time came to dislike MLK.
It's only *after* his death, and with his public beatification that he's come to enjoy a good reputation.
This comic from 1967 is a much better summation of how the public viewed him than what people are generally taught today.
And yes, he was viewed better by Blacks than by Whites.
But remember, at the time, Whites were almost nine-tenths of the population.
Near his death, Whites were maybe one-quarter favorable to MLK, and most of that favorability was weak.
The researcher who put together these numbers was investigated and almost charged with a crime for bringing these numbers to light when she hadn't received permission.
Greater Male Variability rarely makes for an adequate explanation of sex differences in performance.
One exception may be the number of papers published by academics.
If you remove the top 7.5% of men, there's no longer a gap!
The disciplines covered here were ones with relatively equal sex ratios: Education, Nursing & Caring Science, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology, and Social Work.
Because these are stats on professors, this means that if there's greater male variability, it's mostly right-tail
Despite this, the very highest-performing women actually outperformed the very highest-performing men on average, albeit slightly.
The percentiles in this image are for the combined group, so these findings coexist for composition reasons.