Meta-analysis contacts

For those who I have contacted recently regarding the meta-analysis, I’m writing it on the topic of the relationship between Moral Foundations and political orientation. The relationship is widely assumed to follow the results of YourMorals.org data, by Graham, Haidt, and others (especially Graham et al. 2011, Mapping the Moral Domain), where conservatives endorse all five foundations equally and liberals endorse the care and fairness foundations more than the loyalty, authority, and sanctity foundations. Yet this result may be biased by the sampling method, with self-selected, English-speaking, mainly liberal WEIRD people – even in the YourMorals non-US samples the respondents, with their access to internet, capability to respond in English, and interest in moral questionnaires, are likely to be more like Western liberals than their non-English speaking compatriots (cf. Haidt, 2012, The Righteous Mind, where he describes how (IIRC) South-American university people are more like US university people, while less educated South-American rural people are more like less educated US rural people). A meta-analysis with more diverse independent studies should illuminate this question.

My co-writers are Simo Järvelä (who is also doing the fieldwork), and professors Jan-Erik Lönnqvist and Niklas Ravaja, from University of Helsinki. We are now collecting data, which in most cases is in the form of secondary variables in studies that have focused on something else. We hopefully can move to analyzing data in March. I started the work in late 2015, when I was writing a paper on political orientation and MFT (published later as Kivikangas et al. 2017) and wondered how generalizable the typical assumptions are. I first contacted many authors in 2016, but I have been busy with other things from late 2016 to the end of last year.