Conservatives and Liberals are Motivated by Different Psychological Factors—New Study

According to a recent study that examines the relationship between political ideology and moral principles and motivated social cognition, liberalism and conservatism are tied to genuinely different psychological concerns, particularly those related to morality. The research provides a further psychological understanding of the nature of political division in the United States and is published in the journal?PLOS ONE.

John Jost, a professor of psychology, politics, and data science at New York University and one of the study's authors, says psychological research on the various motivations underlying support for liberal versus conservative leaders and agendas, such as those separating Biden and Trump supporters, can help to explain why, for example, one group is significantly more focused on promoting equality and social justice than the other.?

The focus of the study was on the relationship between political ideology and the idea of "moral underpinnings." Social scientists have investigated the moral significance of factors like "whether or not someone followed social norms" or "whether or not someone took care of the weak or vulnerable" in this and related studies.?

"Some have argued in the past that conservatives have a more expansive 'moral palette' that values ingroup loyalty, obedience to authority, and the enforcement of purity sanctions, which they view as "binding foundations," whereas liberals emphasize only issues of fairness and harm avoidance, which they see as 'individualistic foundations,'”?Jost says.

However, the researchers in the?PLOS ONE?article discovered something crucial that other investigations had overlooked.?

The studies by Michael Strupp-Levitsky, and colleagues, who conducted research which was published in?PLOS ONE, ?demonstrated that those moral foundations known to be more appealing to liberals than conservatives — specifically, fairness and harm avoidance — are linked to empathic motivation, whereas the moral foundations that are more appealing to conservatives –specifically ingroup loyalty and deference to authority—are not.

In actuality, authoritarianism, social dominance, and economic system justification — issues unrelated to morality — are correlated with the "binding foundations" described by earlier studies as proof of a wide "moral palette." Additionally, they are linked to psychological motivations to lessen threat and uncertainty, which is compatible with the theory of political ideology as motivated social cognition.?

“All of this may help to explain why support for ‘binding foundations’ is linked to prejudice, outgroup hostility, and other antisocial consequences while support for "individualizing foundations" is oppositely linked to these things,” according to Jost.?

In the PLOS ONE study, the researchers carried out two investigations to investigate these topics.?

They posed a series of inquiries to the participants who were Americans to elicit information about their motivations (e.g., "I have a strong fear of death" and "I only think as hard as I have to"), empathies (e.g., "After being with a friend who is sad about something, I usually feel sad"), moral intuitions (e.g., "Respect for authority is something that all children need to learn"), and beliefs about the system just The purpose of this study was to provide light on the connection between political ideology and motivated social cognition.?

Their findings confirmed prior research's suggestion that liberalism and conservatism were linked to psychological issues that were fundamentally distinct.?

For many years, it has been considered that the motivational underpinning of conservative preferences for "binding" intuitions is unrelated to requirements to lessen fear and uncertainty and instead represents a wide, prosocial sense of morality. According to this recent research published in?PLOS ONE,?however, support for "binding foundations" is linked to many of the same conservative preferences, including authoritarianism, social dominance, system justification, and underlying psychological requirements to lessen fear and uncertainty.?

Prior research by Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, and their colleagues has shown that the moral foundation patterns differ between liberals and conservatives. On average, the conservatives care?mostly about loyalty to the ingroup, deference to authority, and purity or sanctity, whereas liberals care most about doing no harm, fairness and liberty. This was based on surveys done with a huge number (> 200,000) of people from all over the world responding to their website, YourMorals.org, and the researchers concluded that this division can be considered universal.

On the whole, the research shows, conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity.?

To study how we process political information?in a 2017 paper , political psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as school prayer, Medicare and defense spending. Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare.

Haas put 58 people with diverse political views?in a brain scanner. On each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they personally agreed or disagreed with it. Framing the task that way allowed the researchers to look at neural processing as a function of whether the information was expected or unexpected—what they termed congruent or incongruent. They also considered participants’ own party identification and whether there was a relationship between ideological differences and how the subjects did the task.

Liberals proved more attentive to incongruent information, especially for Democratic candidates. When they encountered such a position, it took them longer to make a decision about whether it was good or bad. They were likely to show activation for incongruent information in two brain regions: the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, which “are involved in helping people form and think about their attitudes,” Haas says.?In contrast, conservatives were quick to make decisions, and their views were more rigid and absolute.

Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is?linked to the tendency ?to perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable. Their interpretation is that “this preference to system justify is related to these basic neurobiological predispositions to be alert to potential threats in your environment,” Nam says.