Moral foundations theorists propose that the moral domain should include not only ''liberal'' ethics of justice and care but also ostensibly ''conservative'' concerns about the virtues of ingroup loyalty, obedience to authority, and enforcement of purity standards. This proposal clashes with decades of research in political psychology connecting the latter set of characteristics to ''the authoritarian personality.'' We demonstrate that liberal-conservative differences in moral intuitions are statistically mediated by authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, so that conservatives' greater valuation of ingroup, authority, and purity concerns is attributable to higher levels of authoritarianism, whereas liberals' greater valuation of fairness and harm avoidance is attributable to lower levels of social dominance. We also find that ingroup, authority, and purity concerns are positively associated with intergroup hostility and support for discrimination, whereas concerns about fairness and harm avoidance are negatively associated with these variables. These findings might lead some to question the wisdom and appropriateness of efforts to ''broaden'' scientific conceptions of morality in such a way that preferences based on authoritarianism and social dominance are treated as Some of the ideas pursued in this research were first suggested by the second author at the
Social Dominance Orientation, one of the most popular individual differences measures in the study of generalized prejudice, can be understood as having two components: Opposition to Equality (OEQ) and support for GroupBased Dominance (GBD). We consider these components in terms of system justification theory and social identity theory. We find that each component best explains different kinds of political views, consistent with the theory that they arise from different motivations. OEQ reflects system justification motives. It better predicts attitudes towards redistributive social policy, political conservatism, and a lack of humanitarian compassion for the disadvantaged. GBD reflects social identity motives. It is more associated with hostility toward outgroups and concerns about intergroup competition. GBD and OEQ have different personality and demographic correlates, exhibit distinctive relations with explicit and implicit attitudinal preferences, and differentially predict a variety of policy attitudes. Use of GBD and OEQ as separate constructs enriches the understanding of prejudice, policy attitudes, and political ideology.
Four experiments identify a tendency for people to believe that their own lives are more guided by the tenets of free will than are the lives of their peers. These tenets involve the a priori unpredictability of personal action, the presence of multiple possible paths in a person's future, and the causal power of one's personal desires and intentions in guiding one's actions. In experiment 1, participants viewed their own pasts and futures as less predictable a priori than those of their peers. In experiments 2 and 3, participants thought there were more possible paths (whether good or bad) in their own futures than their peers' futures. In experiment 4, participants viewed their own future behavior, compared with that of their peers, as uniquely driven by intentions and desires (rather than personality, random features of the situation, or history). Implications for the classic actor-observer bias, for debates about free will, and for perceptions of personal responsibility are discussed.
Four experiments investigated the extent to which judgments of candidate performance in presidential debates could be influenced by the mere knowledge of others' reactions. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants watched an intact version of a debate or an edited version in which either "soundbite" one-liners or the audience reaction to those soundbites were removed. In Experiment 3 participants saw what was supposedly the reaction of their fellow participants on screen during the debate. Participants in Experiment 4 were exposed to the reactions of live confederates as they watched the last debate of an active presidential campaign. In all studies, audience reactions produced large shifts in participants' judgments of performance. The results illustrate the power of social context to strongly influence individuals' judgments of even large amounts of relevant, important information, and they support the categorization of presidential debates as ambiguous stimuli, fertile ground for informational social influence.
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