FACULTY NEWS

Linda Skitka

Psychology Professor Linda Skitka Considers the Role of Morality in the 2008 Presidential Election

This November the world was witness to an historic election. During a time of economic crisis, a heated race to the White House ignited the passion of many voters, and resulted in the election of the first African-American President of the United States.

Linda Skitka, professor and researcher in the Department of Psychology, hopes to shed some light on the way morality played a role in this election. She has been at UIC since 1994 and has won many awards, including the UIC Department of Psychology Graduate Mentor Award, Advisor of the Year Award, and the Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is also currently the President of the International Society for Justice Research.

Skitka’s research focuses on the way morality plays into the way people act socially and politically. In her own words, "I have three major areas of interrelated research, and each aims at understanding how people’s belief systems shape their thoughts, feelings, and behavior." We asked her for an interview to find out if her research could shed some light on the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.

Q. How does your research relate to the Presidential election that just took place?
A. I study people’s moral convictions, which often play a large role in elections. People’s convictions about issues or candidates can sometimes have different consequences depending on whether the convictions are moral or non-moral. For example, a woman might be pro-choice on abortion because she wants access to a backstop birth control method, not because she has any particular moral commitment to the issue. Another person’s position on abortion may be the result of compliance with religious authorities. Moral convictions, in contrast, are fundamental beliefs about right or wrong, moral and immoral. In summary, there are not really “moral issues” as much as there are issues about which some people have strong moral feelings.

Not surprisingly, moral convictions play particularly strong roles in politics and we’ve learned a lot from research we conducted during the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections. It seems that although liberals and conservatives often disagreed on morals, they both had equally strong moral convictions about issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and the Iraq War. We also found that voters were much higher in moral convictions than non-voters.

My students G. Scott Morgan and Dan Wisneski and I are currently collecting data from a national sample to explore how people’s moral convictions played out in the 2008 election. In this study, three surveys were collected from the same people at different periods of the election process. In part, we’re interested in whether people’s moral convictions about issues of the day or the candidates themselves rise over an election cycle, and then perhaps decline again once the election is over and people settle back into their everyday lives.

Q. How do your findings apply to this election in terms of exactly where the political left and right seemed to fall?
A. The strongest dividing lines in the 2008 election—where liberals and conservatives most sharply disagreed—were the issues of abortion, the tensions with Iraq and Iran, how to address the housing crisis, the unemployment plan, and the economic bailout plan. Although the left and the right sharply disagreed, both sides had equally strong moral convictions about their points of view.

There are some issues, however, that liberals have stronger moral convictions about than do conservatives, specifically, energy policy, the environment, and healthcare. Conversely, conservatives have stronger moral convictions about immigration and same-sex marriage than liberals.

Q. There seems to be a new spirit of patriotism in the U.S. What about this election seems to have caused this?
A. Although I don’t have evidence that can speak to the new patriotism, I sense that the Bush years have left many Americans feeling exhausted and discouraged. We have weathered being very unpopular abroad, are waging an unpopular war, and have had a President with historically low approval levels. The contrast of having the hope of change—regardless of who was ultimately elected—may have been what prompted the nearly unprecedented degree of interest in this election. Americans want to feel good about themselves, to be respected in the world, and electing a new President offered the possibility of things getting better. Obama’s election also has the distinct advantage of communicating to ourselves and others that our country has come a long, long, long way on racial issues, something that even Obama’s opponents are openly and sincerely celebrating.

Q. Has this election led to new areas of research, and if it has, could you share some of the research or results with us?
A. In addition to the on-going longitudinal survey we’re still in the process of completing, the election has certainly prompted a great deal of interest in a host of topics, both in terms of my own research as well as the research of others. For example, many scholars think that Obama’s election could signal rather dramatic changes in African-Americans’ conception of self, willingness to embrace academic achievement, and more. Scholars are scrambling to get funding to allow a study of Americans’ reactions to Obama’s leadership over time with special attention to some of the potentially positive effects it may have in the black community.