Liberals hope to change the world for the better, while conservatives are trying to prevent the world from falling apart. It is a gross caricature, but research published in the September issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests it has more than a grain of truth.
Research based on the moral foundations theory has found that liberals and conservatives tend to endorse and use different aspects of morality. Liberal individuals base their morality on intuitions of fairness and caring, while downplaying intuitions of loyalty, obedience, and purity. Conservative individuals, in contrast, based their morality on all five intuitions more equally.
James F. M. Cornwell and E. Tory Higgins of Columbia University sought to build on this research by investigating the motivational underpinnings laying behind these differences in moral foundations.
Their two part study, which included about 250 individuals, found liberals tended to be more motivated by ideals, while conservatives tended to be more motivated by duties.
“Overall, the studies link moral liberalism with the promotion focus and moral conservatism with the prevention focus,” Cornwell explained to PsyPost. “According to Regulatory Focus Theory, the promotion focus tends to be motivated more by hopes and aspirations (‘ideals’), whereas the prevention focus tends to be motivated more by duties and obligations (‘oughts’). Our results were consistent with the idea that liberals tend to be more morally idealistic, whereas conservatives tend to emphasize the moral imperatives of the current state of affairs.”
“As far as saying something new, this research does suggest two important things,” Cornwell said. “First, it suggests that both liberals and conservatives are motivated to believe the things they believe. That is, their world views are both colored to some extent by ‘motivated cognition.’”
These differences, however, do not appear to run very deep. Focusing on ideals rather than duties – or vice versa – can by influenced by a simple task.
“The second major take-away point is that the participants were pretty flexible when it came to adopting the views of one side or the other,” Cornwell told PsyPost. “The second study involved participants writing an essay about either their ideals (promotion) or obligations (prevention) in order to frame their reading of the questions in the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, and what we found was that this essay impacted how they responded to the questions regardless of their political ideology.”
“Put another way: those who wrote about their ideals responded in a more liberal way, and those who wrote about their obligations responded in a more conservative way, even after controlling for their political ideology.”
Cornwell acknowledged that his research has some limitations.
“I’d say some important caveats to keep in mind with these studies are first that we’re only looking at one kind of expression of differences between liberals and conservatives, i.e., their responses to the Moral Foundations Questionnaire,” he told PsyPost. “The MFQ has proven very reliable and valid in showing differences between these groups, but they don’t account for everything.”
“Second, though the effects of our induction method were significant, it’s hard to tell if they were large enough to have a real impact on something like a political debate. More research will have to be conducted to determine whether the impact of regulatory focus is strong enough to bridge the gaps between liberals and conservatives on the various issues of today, but this is a promising first step.”
