Do liberals and conservatives apply morals to different groups?
Liberals cared more than conservatives about harm and fairness when the questions were about outgroups such as immigrants, while conservatives cared more about loyalty, authority and purity when the questions were about their own group, and these differences helped explain attitudes toward immigrants.
Source
Moving Morality Beyond the In-Group: Liberals and Conservatives Show Differences on Group-Framed Moral Foundations and These Differences Mediate the Relationships to Perceived Bias and Threat
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Online surveys in which each participant completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire framed about an ingroup and, separately, an outgroup (within-subject, counterbalanced); political ideology measured, then regressions and mediation models predicting attitudes, perceived threat and an Affective Misattribution Procedure measure of implicit bias toward Pakistani immigrants
- N
- N=397 · Study 3 final sample of UK-born Prolific participants after exclusions (451 recruited; 41 removed for inattention; 383 kept for the implicit-bias analyses). Sample sizes and methods for Studies 1 and 2 are not included in the available text.
- Population
- UK adult online participants (Prolific), mostly White and female, spanning liberal to conservative ideology
- Outcome
- Endorsement of individualizing (harm, fairness) and binding (loyalty, authority, purity) foundations when framed about ingroups vs outgroups; explicit attitude bias, negative bias, perceived threat and implicit bias toward immigrants
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The authors rewrote the Moral Foundations Questionnaire so that each item referred either to an ingroup or to an outgroup, and participants completed both versions. Study 1 used abstract 'ingroups' and 'outgroups'; Studies 2 and 3 used British people as the ingroup and Pakistani immigrants as the outgroup. In Study 3, participants also rated their attitudes toward and perceived threat from immigrants and completed an implicit bias task in which faces briefly flashed before ambiguous symbols they judged as pleasant or unpleasant.
What they found
Across studies, more liberal participants endorsed harm and fairness more for outgroups, whereas more conservative participants endorsed loyalty, authority and purity more for the ingroup; conservatives did not differ much from liberals on harm and fairness for the ingroup. In Study 3, more liberal ideology predicted less explicit bias, less negative bias, less perceived threat and less implicit bias toward immigrants. Outgroup harm/fairness endorsement and ingroup loyalty/authority/purity endorsement both statistically mediated the link between ideology and these attitudes.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Ideology was measured, not manipulated, and the mediation models are correlational, so they cannot show that moral foundations cause bias toward immigrants. The samples were online volunteers who were mostly White and female, and the outgroup was a single low-status immigrant group, so it is unclear whether the pattern holds for higher-status outgroups. The authors note some questionnaire items stayed ambiguous about who the 'someone' in the item was. The available text lacks the methods and sample sizes for Studies 1 and 2, so those studies cannot be evaluated here.
Key terms
- Moral Foundations Theory
- A theory proposing that moral judgements draw on several intuitive foundations, including harm/care, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity.
- Individualizing foundations
- Harm and fairness, the foundations focused on protecting individuals' rights and welfare.
- Binding foundations
- Loyalty, authority and purity, the foundations focused on holding groups together through duty, hierarchy and sanctity.
- Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP)
- An implicit measure in which a briefly shown prime (such as a face) colours how pleasant people judge a neutral symbol, revealing automatic attitudes toward the prime.
- Mediation analysis
- A statistical test of whether the association between two variables runs partly through a third variable; on its own it does not prove causation.
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Quiz yourself
What was the key manipulation in these studies?
Common questions
Doesn't earlier research already show liberals care more about harm and fairness?
Yes, but the standard questionnaire never says who is being harmed. This study shows that the liberal advantage on harm and fairness appears specifically for outgroups, not for one's own group.
Why include an implicit measure?
Explicit ratings could be distorted by people presenting themselves well. The AMP showed the same ideology pattern, which makes self-presentation a less likely explanation.
Could this help reduce polarisation over immigration?
The authors suggest framing messages around fairness to outgroups for liberals and around reducing threats to ingroup values for conservatives, but this was not tested in the study.
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