From the linked article...
Our findings, published on Thursday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, show that the more strongly you privilege loyalty, obedience and purity — as opposed to values such as care and fairness — the more likely you are to blame the victim.
...
some people privilege promoting the care of others and preventing unfair behaviors. These are “individualizing values,” ... Other people privilege loyalty, obedience and purity. These are “binding values,” as they promote the cohesion of your particular group or clan.
...
For example, the more strongly you identify with individualizing values, the more likely you are to be politically progressive; the more strongly you identify with binding values, the more likely you are to be politically conservative.
...
Throughout, we controlled for other variables and found that it was moral values — binding values, in particular — and not political orientation, gender or religiosity that determined the results.
I.e., the authors are claiming to have controlled for a variable that they admit is strongly correlated with the one they're studying. That's a hard thing to do well -- one variable is very likely to be a proxy for the other. The error bars on your measurements are amplified and tend to dash your hopes for statistical significance.
Be that as it may, the entire hypothesis is scientifically ill-conceived from the get-go. Telling people not to go on midnight strolls through mugger-infested parks is privileging
care, not
clan binding; conversely, the whole point of the authors' exercise is to reduce victim-blaming, because they see victim-blaming as
bad, because victim-blaming is perceived as
disloyal to victims.
The methods these "factor of morality" studies use to measure people's attachment to each moral factor are well-suited to help researchers recognize group-loyalty in their political opponents and well-suited to hinder them from seeing it in themselves and their political allies. Researchers discover they're individualistic and the other side are tribal because that's what they want to believe.
I agree that their labels of "binding" and "individualizing" for these categories of moral values are highly inaccurate. However, they definitely are very distinct categories.
The 5 example items they give in the paper seem validly related to their 5 sub-categories of caring, justice, authority, loyality, and purity.
(a) caring: “Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue”;
(b) fairness: “Justice is the most important requirement for a society”;
(c) ingroup loyalty: “It is more important to be a team player than to express oneself”;
(d) authority: “If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer’s orders, I would obey anyway because that is my duty”;
(e) purity: “I would call some acts wrong on the grounds that they are unnatural.”
The big problem is that there are 25 additional items they use to measure these 5 dimensions that are not so valid and correspond more to other dimensions of political ideology. (They don't provide them,
you have to go to this link to look at the full questionnaire they used)
Here are two of the items used to measure "Caring" :
"______23. One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal."
IOW, killing a chicken for dinner is immorally on par with raping, torturing, and killing children.
" ______28. It can never be right to kill a human being."
IOW, killing a person to stop them from raping, torturing, and killing children can never be morally right. There is NEVER a morally acceptable justification for war or lethal force in self defense, even when doing it to care for and protect other people.
Here is an item supposedly measuring "Loyalty":
"_____26. I am proud of my country’s history."
This is extremely subject to one's political agenda, and the accuracy of one's knowledge about the history of one's country and its larger place in history relative to political systems in general. I am not proud of many if not most military actions my country has taken in the last century. However, "My country" created a secular constitutional representative Democracy that was infinitely superior to most human societies that came before it and laid the foundation for progress in all areas that, despite its shortcomings, make it still superior in most ways to the overwhelming majority of countries on the planet. Since I take a larger and long-view of things and consider the alternatives, I would answer "Yes" to this item, despite answering "no" to most of the other items categorized as "loyalty".
If the results they found were very strong and reliable, then having some invalid items would not be a huge problem. But with the tiny and inconsistent effects they found, a couple of items on each sub-category could be what completely determine such small effects, meaning the results have no implications for the theoretical concepts (the labels like caring and loyalty) that their interpretations presume.
