Moral psychology
Do liberals and conservatives apply morals to different groups?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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