From Moscow With a Mushroom Cloud? Russian Public Attitudes to the Use of Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict With NATO

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Abstract

This article presents findings of an original survey experiment on public attitudes toward nuclear use conducted on a representative sample of Russian citizens. We randomly assigned our participants to experimental treatments with vignettes describing a military conflict between Russia and NATO in the Baltics, where Moscow considered a limited nuclear “escalate-to-deescalate” strike to avert defeat. Our findings show that Russians are significantly more averse to nuclear strikes than to the corresponding use of conventional missiles. The participants disapproved similarly of a demonstrative nuclear explosion in an unpopulated area and of nuclear strikes in a more escalated scenario. We also found associations between the moral values of individuals and strike support corresponding to earlier studies in the United States. Finally, our participants reported similar concerns about both nuclear and conventional strikes, with the worry about civilian casualties and the suffering of victims at the top of the list across experimental treatments.

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Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations.

Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, Brian A Nosek (2009)

How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people's use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally. This difference was observed in abstract assessments of the moral relevance of foundation-related concerns such as violence or loyalty (Study 1), moral judgments of statements and scenarios (Study 2), "sacredness" reactions to taboo trade-offs (Study 3), and use of foundation-related words in the moral texts of religious sermons (Study 4). These findings help to illuminate the nature and intractability of moral disagreements in the American "culture war." Copyright (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

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Mapping the moral domain.

P Ditto, Simon J. Graham, Jonathan Haidt … (2011)

The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: (a) Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; (b) convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and (c) we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality.