Templeton Religion Trust
We think it’s an interesting question.
Ask people why they get behind the moral thought leaders of today – be they environmentalists, populists, civil rights campaigners, religious figures or influencers – and very different people will often give you very similar reasons: they’ll say “these leaders have fresh ideas, they’re authentic and courageous, they care about people like me.”
But what does care look like from the perspective of all these different moral frames? What does courage look like? What does empathy look like? How do we learn the meanings of these terms? From what kinds of examples? What does it mean to put them into practice?
One of the challenges of finding the answer to this question is how to get behind language, how to get on the inside of people’s moral reasons. So, to get the answer to a difficult question, we are using something smart: a smartphone-enabled daily survey method, that asks young people simple questions about their actions and emotions, twice daily over four weeks.
It’s sometimes hard to ask people about their moral values, because social desirability bias creeps in. People will always tell you that they are generous, empathetic, kind etc. But by asking at the level of day-to-day experience – have you helped someone today, have you shared with someone, if so, who? – we hope to get behind their language.
We’ll be able to find out whether these very different moral frames have a bearing on the ways people live and understand their lives in relation to friends, strangers, and the wider world around them.
We’ll also be able to see whether caring about the feelings of others is something that varies depending on what has happened to us that day or is more of a stable trait. It will tell us what we can do to encourage more consistent empathetic traits that we can apply to everyone around us.
Maybe, by finding this out, we’ll be better able to see what we have in common, despite an ever more fractured rhetoric of competing value systems. Hopefully, we’ll better understand the common traits, emotions and desired behaviours that we all share.
By shedding light on these questions, we hope to help educators to better speak to young people about their values in a language that is understood and effective.
