A recent study explored how liberals and conservatives in the United States evaluate a person’s professional attributes, personal character, and job suitability based on that person’s Facebook posts. The results indicated that both groups tended to evaluate ideologically opposite individuals more negatively. However, this bias was three times stronger among liberals compared to conservatives. The research was published in the Journal of Social Psychology.
In the United States, political conservatives and liberals represent two major ideological perspectives with differing views on government, economics, social issues, and more. Conservatives, typically associated with the Republican Party, generally favor limited government intervention in the economy. They advocate for lower taxes, reduced government spending, and minimal business regulation. Conservatives also tend to prioritize traditional values, often supporting policies that uphold conservative interpretations of family, religion, and national identity. They emphasize personal responsibility and self-reliance.
Liberals, often linked with the Democratic Party, usually support a more active role for government in society and the economy. They advocate for policies addressing economic inequality, such as higher taxes on the wealthy, increased social welfare programs, and greater business regulation. Liberals also push for social policies that promote civil rights, environmental protection, and equality in areas like gender and race.
Some authors suggest that conservatives might have dispositional traits making them more prone to prejudice and a greater inclination towards authoritarianism than liberals. This view is known as ideological asymmetry. However, other studies have shown that liberals are as likely as conservatives to engage in activities such as science denial when scientific findings conflict with their political attitudes, and they are equally likely to dehumanize their opponents.
Study author Robert D. Ridge and his colleagues wanted to test the assumptions of political asymmetry and to also see if there are differences between the two groups in their proneness to ideologically motivated aggression. The authors reasoned that U.S. political groups are unlikely to engage in physical aggression against each other. However, political differences might induce them to engage in indirect aggression, such as actions that sabotage their ideological opponents’ social relationships and undermine their inclusion in groups.
“It has become clear that the ideological divide in the United States is growing and that people are becoming more polarized in their beliefs,” explained Ridge, an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. “Ideological asymmetry is the notion that conservatives are more prejudicial than liberals, but the worldview conflict hypothesis suggests that conservatives and liberals can be equally prejudiced toward those with different worldviews and values.”
“I wanted to pit these two theories against each other to see who would be more likely to aggress indirectly against a person who held an ideology different than theirs. I wanted to see if simply posting support on social media for a conservative or liberal position would be sufficient to elicit indirect aggression from a person with a different ideology in a domain that is completely unrelated to politics.”
The researchers conducted a study in which they explored how political meme’s published on social media affect a perceiver’s impression of the person who shared them. They also wanted to determine the degree to which the person viewing the memes would indirectly aggress against the person that posted them based on an assumption about the political views of that person. These authors hypothesized that people would evaluate a person more negatively if they perceive it as an ideological opponent.
The participants were 679 U.S. Amazon MTurk workers with an average age of 39 years, and 78% were Caucasian. Of these, 383 self-identified as conservative, while 299 viewed themselves as liberal.
The researchers created four Facebook pages, two presenting a person with a conservative ideological attitude and two with a liberal ideological attitude. In each pair, one page featured memes, and the other contained text. The conservative pages included pro-Donald Trump and anti-socialism content, while the liberal pages featured anti-Trump and pro-socialism content.
The conservative and liberal memes and texts were crafted to be as similar as possible, reflecting opposing political views (e.g., “I’m just going to say it: I HATE Trump!” (angry-face emoji) vs “I’m just going to say it: I LOVE Trump!” (happy-face emoji)).
Participants read a cover story presenting the study authors as industrial/organizational psychologists developing a machine-learning algorithm to assist employers in hiring new employees for an entry-level white-collar position. The participants were asked to help collect materials to train the algorithm to automatically review potential employees’ social media for job suitability.
The system then randomly selected one of the four Facebook pages to show to the study participant, presenting it as allegedly belonging to one of the applicants, and asked the participant to review it and assess the applicant’s skills, character, and suitability for a job.
Results showed that the participants spent an average of 65 seconds looking at their assigned page before responding. Fewer than 10% of participants gave their assessments after spending less than 10 seconds on the page.
As expected, both liberals and conservatives assessed targets whose ideology aligns with their own more favorably and those with opposite ideologies less favorably. This was the case for all characteristics they were assessing—professional attributes (both desirable and undesirable), personal character, and suitability for a job.
“People are quick to form impressions from social media posts, and those impressions can have important consequences for the poster,” Ridge told PsyPost. “Many people post information on social media and never imagine that a potential employer could be looking at the information and using it to decide whether to hire the person. Whether a funny meme or a clever quote is posted, the message could result in unintended consequences. If the post is political, it could affect the poster’s reputation in other domains whether the post is politically conservative or liberal.”
However, contrary to the expectations of the ideological asymmetry hypothesis, this difference in evaluations was much more pronounced in liberal participants, compared to conservatives. The difference between assessments given to liberal and conservative applicants based on their alleged Facebook pages was three times higher on average when liberals were doing the assessments compared to assessments made by conservatives.
“I was very surprised that the level of liberal bias against conservatives was nearly three times greater than was conservative bias toward liberals,” Ridge said. “This is directly the opposite of what ideological asymmetry would predict. I was also surprised that given this result, liberal participants claimed that conservatives were much more prejudiced than liberals, whereas conservatives did not attribute any more prejudice to liberals than to conservatives. This is contrary to much popular opinion about liberals and conservatives in popular media and in the empirical literature.”
The study sheds light on the links on how political ideology affects assessments of other people. However, it also has limitations that need to be taken into account. Notably, study participants evaluated pages that only contained memes and political slogans. Findings might have been more complex if data more relevant for job suitability or more personalized information were available.
“We studied a form of aggression where perceivers could ‘torpedo’ a person’s professional reputation in a very indirect way,” Ridge noted. “It is a single study, but the results are not inconsistent with emerging research on political aggression.”
“The next step is to test this finding in a more direct way,” the researcher said. “We just completed a study in which subjects believed their evaluations of a target person could actually affect their chances to get a plum professional opportunity. They evaluated résumés and personal statements that included relatively subtle cues as to their political orientations. As in our published study, we obtained the same pattern of results that are consistent with the worldview conflict hypothesis.”
The paper, “To meme or not to meme? Political social media posts and ideologically motivated aggression in job recommendations,” was authored by Robert D. Ridge, Christopher E. Hawk, Luke D. Hartvigsen, and Logan D. McCombs.
