A moral house divided: How idealized family models impact political cognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
People's political attitudes tend to fall into two groups: progressive and conservative. Moral Politics Theory asserts that this ideological divide is the product of two contrasting moral worldviews, which are conceptually anchored in individuals' cognitive models about ideal parenting and family life. These models, here labeled the strict and nurturant models, serve as conceptual templates for how society should function, and dictate whether one will endorse more conservative or progressive positions. According to Moral Politics Theory, individuals map their parenting ideals onto the societal domain by engaging the nation-as-family metaphor, which facilitates reasoning about the abstract social world (the nation) in terms of more concrete world experience (family life). In the present research, we conduct an empirical examination of these core assertions of Moral Politics Theory. In Studies 1-3, we experimentally test whether family ideals directly map onto political attitudes while ruling out alternative explanations. In Studies 4-5, we use both correlational and experimental methods to examine the nation-as-family metaphor's role in facilitating the translation of family beliefs into societal beliefs and, ultimately, political attitudes. Overall, we found consistent support for Moral Politics Theory's assertions that family ideals directly impact political judgment, and that the nation-as-family metaphor serves a mediating role in this phenomenon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".