Individualism revisited: Moral worldviews and civic engagement

Abstract This paper investigates whether substantively distinct moral worldviews can help explain why certain people engage in different types of civic actions. Based on an analysis of survey data from a nationally representative sample of American adults, we find that, controlling for other important factors, a moral worldview emphasizing civic responsibility is more likely to encourage volunteer efforts that benefit the larger community than is one emphasizing personal fulfillment. Furthermore, we also find that a worldview emphasizing religious duty is less likely to promote involvement in civic activity that helps those in the larger community relative to a worldview emphasizing civic responsibility. But a religious worldview increases the probability of in-group volunteering relative to an individualist worldview. The implications of these findings for the broader scholarship on civic engagement and social capital and the role of culture in action are discussed.

[1]  Paul DiMaggio.  Culture and cognition , 1997 .

[2]  Patrick Royston,et al.  Multiple Imputation of Missing Values: Update , 2005 .

[3]  J. Schafer.  Multiple imputation: a primer , 1999, Statistical methods in medical research.

[4]  Christian A. Smith,et al.  What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up , 2010 .

[5]  Arthur A. Stukas,et al.  PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Understanding and Assessing the Motivations of Volunteers: A Functional Approach , 2004 .

[6]  H. Boshuizen,et al.  Multiple imputation of missing blood pressure covariates in survival analysis. , 1999, Statistics in medicine.

[7]  Christian Smith.  Moral, Believing Animals , 2003 .

[8]  L. Jensen.  Habits of the heart revisited: Autonomy, community, and divinity in adults' moral language , 1995 .

[9]  Mark Regnerus,et al.  The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art , 2000 .

[10]  Gabe Ignatow,et al.  Theories of Embodied Knowledge: New Directions for Cultural and Cognitive Sociology? , 2007 .

[11]  Ann Swidler.  Talk of Love: How Culture Matters , 2000 .

[12]  J. Haidt.  The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. , 2001, Psychological review.

[13]  Stephen Vaisey.  What People Want: Rethinking Poverty, Culture, and Educational Attainment , 2010 .

[14]  Samuel P. Huntington,et al.  Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-American Illustration , 2001 .

[15]  M. Finkelstein,et al.  Dispositional and structural determinants of volunteerism , 1998 .

[16]  Ann Swidler,et al.  Habits of the Heart , 1986 .

[17]  D. Rubin.  Multiple imputation for nonresponse in surveys , 1989 .

[18]  Omar Lizardo,et al.  Can Cultural Worldviews Influence Network Composition? , 2010, Social Forces.

[19]  Francesca Polletta,et al.  COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS , 2001 .

[20]  Christopher Winship,et al.  Sampling Weights and Regression Analysis , 1994 .

[21]  Stephen Vaisey.  Motivation and Justification: A Dual‐Process Model of Culture in Action1 , 2009, American Journal of Sociology.

[22]  Ann Swidler.  CULTURE IN ACTION: SYMBOLS AND STRATEGIES* , 1986 .

[23]  Doug McAdam.  Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer , 1986, American Journal of Sociology.

[24]  Gabe Ignatow.  Why the Sociology of Morality Needs Bourdieu's Habitus* , 2009 .

[25]  J. Kaufman.  Endogenous Explanation in the Sociology of Culture , 2004 .

[26]  Brian A. Nosek,et al.  Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. , 2009, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[27]  E. Singer,et al.  Experiments with incentives in telephone surveys. , 2000, Public opinion quarterly.

[28]  Tony Lachenbruch.  Memories of Stata , 2005 .

[29]  Robert V. Robinson,et al.  The Egalitarian Face of Islamic Orthodoxy: Support for Islamic Law and Economic Justice in Seven Muslim-Majority Nations , 2006 .

[30]  F. Passy,et al.  Socialization, Connection, and The Structure/Agency Gap: A Specification of The Impact of Networks on Participation in Social Movements , 2001 .

[31]  Richard A. Shweder,et al.  Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology , 2003 .

[32]  C. Campbell.  The myth of social action , 1997 .

[33]  Darcia Narvaez,et al.  Moral Schemas and Tacit Judgement or How the Defining Issues Test is Supported by Cognitive Science , 2002 .

[34]  E. Singer,et al.  Leverage-saliency theory of survey participation: description and an illustration. , 2000, Public opinion quarterly.

[35]  Charles Taylor.  The Ethics of Authenticity , 1992 .

[36]  John Wilson,et al.  Who cares? Toward an integrated theory of volunteer work , 1997 .

[37]  R. D'Andrade.  The Development of Cognitive Anthropology , 1995 .

[38]  J. Graham,et al.  When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize , 2007 .

[39]  Joseph L Schafer,et al.  Analysis of Incomplete Multivariate Data , 1997 .

[40]  W. DuMouchel,et al.  Using Sample Survey Weights in Multiple Regression Analyses of Stratified Samples , 1983 .

[41]  R. Collins.  On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology , 1981, American Journal of Sociology.

[42]  Robert V. Robinson,et al.  Who Values the Obedient Child Now? The Religious Factor in Adult Values for Children, 1986-2002 , 2005 .

[43]  Ram A. Cnaan,et al.  Measuring Motivation to Volunteer in Human Services , 1991 .

[44]  Kraig Beyerlein,et al.  From Pews to Participation: The Effect of Congregation Activity and Context on Bridging Civic Engagement , 2006 .

[45]  Paul R. Lichterman,et al.  The search for political community , 1996 .

[46]  Stephen Vaisey,et al.  Socrates, Skinner, and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking About Culture in Action1 , 2008 .

[47]  Steven Hitlin.  Moral selves, evil selves : the social psychology of conscience , 2008 .

[48]  J. Schafer,et al.  Missing data: our view of the state of the art. , 2002, Psychological methods.

[49]  R. Groves,et al.  The Role of Topic Interest in Survey Participation Decisions , 2004 .

[50]  Kraig Beyerlein,et al.  A Two-Stage Model for a Two-Stage Process: How Biographical Availability Matters for Social Movement Mobilization , 2006 .

[51]  J L Schafer,et al.  Multiple Imputation for Multivariate Missing-Data Problems: A Data Analyst's Perspective. , 1998, Multivariate behavioral research.

[52]  Paul R. Lichterman.  Beyond the Seesaw Model: Public Commitment in a Culture of Self-Fulfillment , 1995 .

[53]  Robert V. Robinson,et al.  Ideology, Moral Cosmology, and Community in the United States , 2006 .

[54]  Daniel Winchester.  Embodying the Faith: Religious Practice and the Making of a Muslim Moral Habitus , 2008 .

[55]  The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil , 2000 .

[56]  Mahzarin R. Banaji,et al.  Culture, Cognition, and Collaborative Networks in Organizations , 2011 .

[57]  Hans C. Jessen,et al.  Applied Logistic Regression Analysis , 1996 .