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A new study published in the journal Kyklos suggests that individuals who place a high value on free speech also tend to exhibit greater racial and ethnic tolerance. These findings provide evidence that the societal benefits of protecting free expression extend beyond legal rights to foster broader norms of open-mindedness and acceptance.
Claudia Williamson Kramer, the Probasco Distinguished Chair of Free Enterprise and a professor of economics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, designed the study to explore the intersection of two competing perspectives on the social effects of open communication. On one side of the debate, critics argue that unrestricted speech can harm marginalized minorities by allowing hateful rhetoric and misinformation to spread. This perspective suggests that placing limits on expression might be necessary to prevent social exclusion and psychological distress.
On the other side of the issue, defenders of open expression propose that free speech serves as a social safety valve. This view suggests that allowing people to voice their prejudices publicly creates opportunities for counterspeech, which is the act of challenging and correcting hateful ideas through open debate. By bringing biases into the open, a free speech environment tends to reduce prejudice over time through social learning and peaceful disagreement.
Kramer initiated this research to address a specific gap in the existing scientific literature. Past studies have largely focused on the broad, country-level effects of press freedom and legal protections for speech. Kramer wanted to understand how holding free speech as a personal, individual value influences a person’s attitudes toward people of different backgrounds.
“Free speech is under real pressure right now, and not only in autocracies,” Kramer said. “Established democracies are prosecuting people for what they post online. The usual argument for restricting speech is that it protects vulnerable groups from hate. I wanted to test whether that tradeoff actually holds at the level of individual attitudes.”
She added that this specific dynamic needed closer examination. “Do people who value free speech turn out to be less tolerant of others, or more?” Kramer asked. “The question had been studied at the level of national institutions, but not at the level of what individual people value. That gap is what I set out to fill.”
The researcher hypothesized three potential mechanisms linking these two specific values. First, people who support free expression might believe in the power of open debate to expose and challenge false stereotypes. Second, placing a high priority on free speech typically includes supporting an independent press, which can amplify marginalized voices and expose discrimination. Third, prioritizing free speech might simply reflect a broader cultural worldview rooted in classical liberal ideals, which emphasize individual autonomy and equal treatment.
To test these ideas, Kramer analyzed data from the Integrated Values Survey. This massive database combined survey responses from 609,552 individuals across 115 different countries. The data spanned seven different survey waves conducted between the years 1981 and 2022. This rich dataset allowed the author to look at individual variations while accounting for the different political and institutional environments of each specific country.
In this portion of the study, Kramer measured free speech prioritization by looking at how respondents ranked four competing national goals. Participants had to choose between protecting freedom of speech, maintaining order in the nation, giving people more say in government decisions, and fighting rising prices. People who selected protecting freedom of speech as their top priority were categorized as highly valuing free expression.
To measure racial tolerance, the survey asked participants to point out groups of people they would not want to have as neighbors. If a respondent did not select people of a different race from the options provided, they were mathematically coded as holding racially tolerant attitudes. Overall, about 84 percent of the respondents in the global survey expressed racially tolerant views, while roughly 12 percent indicated that protecting free speech was their absolute top priority.
The results show that prioritizing free speech is positively associated with racial tolerance. “People who prioritize free speech are more racially tolerant, not less,” Kramer told PsyPost. “In the data, individuals who rank protecting free speech as their top national priority are 2.3 percentage points more likely to accept a neighbor of a different race.”
While this percentage might initially seem modest, it represents a substantial shift when applied to a larger population. “The individual effect looks small, and it is worth explaining why,” Kramer said. “My analysis compares people within the same country and year, which strips out the large differences in tolerance that exist between nations.”
She noted that the mathematical controls leave only the localized differences between individuals. “What remains is the difference between two neighbors, and at that level a 2.3 point shift is meaningful,” Kramer said. “For comparison, it is close to half the tolerance gap between people with lower versus middle education, and it sits in the same range as effects from well-known studies on contact and media exposure.”
This statistical difference carries real-world weight. “Scaled up, it matters,” she explained. “In a country of 10 million adults, moving from no one to half the population prioritizing free speech implies roughly 115,000 more people expressing racial tolerance.”
This pattern remained stable even after the author adjusted the statistical models to account for a wide range of individual characteristics. These specific controls included the respondent’s age, gender, marital status, education level, employment status, income, urban or rural residence, religious habits, and political ideology. Education level proved to be a particularly strong predictor of tolerance, with highly educated respondents exhibiting tolerance rates roughly 6.4 percentage points higher than those with the lowest education levels. Yet, even when factoring in this strong educational effect, the mathematical link between valuing free speech and holding tolerant views remained significant.
Kramer also looked at other forms of social acceptance within the survey data. She found that respondents who prioritized free speech were significantly more tolerant toward several other marginalized groups. “The same pattern holds for tolerance toward immigrants, religious minorities, Muslims, and Jews,” Kramer noted. “Valuing open expression and accepting people unlike yourself tend to travel together. That should make us cautious about the assumption that restricting speech protects minorities. It may erode the very disposition that supports tolerance.”
Interestingly, the author found a negative association between free speech values and tolerance toward right-wing political extremists. “The most striking result was where the pattern broke,” Kramer said. “People who value free speech are more tolerant of almost every group I tested, but they are significantly less tolerant of right-wing extremists.”
This detail provides evidence that the respondents were not simply giving socially desirable answers to every question. “That is the opposite of what you would expect if the result were just people giving socially approved answers,” she added. “It lines up with Popper’s paradox of tolerance,” she explained, referring to the philosophical concept that a tolerant society must sometimes refuse to tolerate those who wish to destroy it. “A commitment to open discourse does not mean accepting those who would shut it down.”
The survey options also revealed another specific connection. “The other surprise was specificity,” Kramer said. “Of the four national priorities people could choose, only free speech showed a large positive link to tolerance. Choosing order or lower prices went the other way.”
To verify that these findings were not isolated to one specific dataset, Kramer conducted a second analysis using the Afrobarometer survey. This survey included responses from 48,206 individuals across 33 countries in sub-Saharan and North Africa, collected between 2014 and 2015. The African survey presented a unique setting characterized by high ethnic diversity and a wide variety of democratic institutions. In this context, ethnic divisions are often the primary boundary along which social conflict occurs, making ethnic tolerance an especially relevant measure.
In this second study, the measure of free expression focused on media freedom. Participants were asked if they agreed that the media should have the right to publish any views without government control. The outcome measure focused on ethnic tolerance, asking respondents if they would object to having neighbors of a different ethnicity.
The African survey data mirrored the primary findings. Individuals who supported media freedom were 0.9 percentage points more likely to hold ethnically tolerant attitudes. This provided supporting evidence from a completely different geographic and cultural context, using slightly different measures of both speech values and tolerance.
“The result holds up across very different settings,” Kramer said. “The main analysis covers more than 600,000 people in 115 countries over four decades. I then checked it against the Afrobarometer, covering 33 African countries with a different measure of free speech and a different measure of tolerance, and the association still appeared.” She noted that a relationship showing up across such a diverse range of data provides strong evidence of a genuine connection.
The author notes some limitations. The study relies on observational data, meaning it can only show an association between two variables rather than a direct cause-and-effect relationship. “This is correlational work,” Kramer explained. “I use within-country comparisons, omitted variable bounds, and a long list of controls, and the result survives all of them, but I cannot call it causal.”
She acknowledged that human values are complex to untangle. “It is possible that tolerant people come to value free speech rather than the reverse,” Kramer said. “I also measure what people say they prioritize, which is an imperfect stand-in for what they truly value.”
Additionally, she wants to ensure the public understands the specific scope of her findings. “The misreading I most want to head off is that this says speech has no costs,” Kramer emphasized. “It does. Propaganda fueled the Nazi rise and the Rwandan genocide, and I discuss both in the paper.”
She clarified that her research highlights the broader cultural benefits of free expression. “The finding is not that anything goes,” Kramer said. “It is that a culture which values open expression tends to be a more tolerant one, and that the right-wing extremist result shows these people are not indiscriminate about it.”
Future research might explore these dynamics using different experimental designs to establish cause and effect. “The clear next step is causal identification,” Kramer noted. “I would like to use settings where free speech conditions changed for reasons unrelated to people’s prior attitudes, which would let me separate cause from correlation more cleanly.”
Exploring exactly how open discourse successfully counters prejudice also remains an active area of interest for social scientists. “I am also interested in the mechanisms,” Kramer said. “The paper lays out three, including counter-speech, support for independent media, and a broader liberal culture, but it cannot yet say which one does the work. Sorting that out is where this goes next.”
The study, “Does Valuing Free Speech Affect Norms of Tolerance? Evidence From Individual Preferences,” was authored by Claudia Williamson Kramer.
