Not so conservative: Suppression effects between social and economic ideology on moral foundations and moral absolutism

Abstract

Recent research outcomes suggest that social and economic conservatism show divergent associations with external criteria. In this article, we present a quantitative study with 534 Colombian participants. We found that, although positively correlated, these two dimensions of conservative ideology also exhibit suppression effects and differentiated psychological profiles regarding moral foundations and moral absolutism. Specifically, controlling for economic conservatism increased the positive association between social conservatism and the binding moral foundations and moral absolutism, while controlling for social conservatism changed the signs of the initial positive associations between economic conservatism and these variables. Our results suggest the need to use independent measures for each dimension of ideology and test for suppression when evaluating their respective interaction with other psychological constructs.