People tend to exaggerate the immorality of their political opponents, suggest 8 studies in the US. This tendency to exaggerate the immorality of political opponents was observed not only in discussions of hot political topics but also regarding fundamental moral values.
People tend to exaggerate the immorality of their political opponents
8 Comments
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/7/pgae244/7712370
From the linked article:
People tend to exaggerate the immorality of their political opponents
A series of eight studies conducted in the United States found that people generally tend to overestimate their political opponents’ willingness to accept basic moral wrongs. This tendency to exaggerate the immorality of political opponents was observed not only in discussions of hot political topics but also regarding fundamental moral values. Many people believe that the opposing political side finds blatant wrongs acceptable. The research was published in PNAS Nexus.
“The United States is witnessing historic levels of political hostility and gridlock. This animosity is partly grounded in misperceptions of opponents’ political beliefs, but we find many Americans overestimate political opponents’ willingness to accept even the most basic moral wrongs. These findings suggest individuals and practitioners working to foster cross-partisan interaction might first correct this basic morality bias. Specifically, we show that learning a single opponent condemns basic moral wrongs increases behavioral engagement with political opponents and decreases dehumanization of the entire political outgroup,” the study authors concluded.
people are are biased against the people they dislike, science confirms the obvious
But like, what if the leader of a major political party has been publicly convicted of doing immoral things? Doesn’t that cast a pall of immorality on all those who support them?
It’s okay if my side exaggerate the other side’s immorality though because they are more immoral than us so it is important that we win in November.
It’s been going on for centuries.
Duels have been fought, people have been killed over it.
If they are openly immoral while the media minimizes it and engages in bothsiderism, does that count as exaggeration?
What would be a moderate, unexaggerated amount of immorality to attribute to someone whose world view and values is contradictory to your own? Like, what would be an appropriate quantity of criticism to levy against someone who, let’s say, is racist?
The implications are hard to measure and potentially big.
It obviously leads to more polarization, which reduces a person’s ability to have an objective view on both old and new topics.
It would have been fantastic if the study was also conducted on members of other countries, for comparison.