⛓️💥 How the Basic Morality Bias Widens Our Political Divide
New research shows people attribute far too much evil to their political rivals—but there may be a cure
Few areas of social life are as hostile and divisive as politics. Attitudes and opinions are full of rage, in-group favoritism, out-group hate, deception, misinformation, hypocrisy, arrogance, cynicism, corruption, intolerance, self-interest, and opportunism. And that was just the last presidential debate.
One of the most common harmful habits in political disagreements is the tendency to assume bad intentions. Think of any highly contentious political issue—e.g. abortion, gun laws, immigration—and you’ll find large numbers of people on both sides assuming the other side is pure evil. Once you assume evil intentions, it’s incredibly difficult to have a conversation or make progress since nobody wants to bargain with the devil.
I’ve previously written about how even extreme conspiracy theorists can have their minds changed by rational conversations. So let’s go one level deeper here and talk about a widespread psychological bias that prevents people from having productive conversations with each other in the first place.
You’d think it would be easy to get on the same page about the most obvious moral questions like whether it’s ok to abuse children or whether wrongful imprisonment is acceptable. However, studies are showing that people heavily overestimate their political rivals’ willingness to support glaring moral wrongs, thereby assuming their opponents are far more immoral than they really are. Researchers are calling this the “basic morality bias”.
⚔️ How badly do we misjudge our political opponents?
In a paper published in July 2024, researchers ran a series of studies testing how people in the US perceive the moral positions of their political adversaries.
For their first study, the researchers analyzed tweets from 5,806 political partisans between the years of 2013-2021, looking at how often people accused political opponents of violating basic moral values. Words like “pedophile”, “rapist”, and “psychopath” were significantly more likely to come up in tweets about political opponents than they were in tweets about nonpolitical targets.
Interestingly, this wasn’t always the case: in the earliest available years of data (2013-2014), tweets about political opponents were no more likely to contain those words than any other type of tweet. This basic morality bias is a problem that has grown in prevalence in recent years.
In another study, the researchers surveyed 240 people who identified as Democrats and 106 people who identified as Republicans about seven specific moral issues including tax fraud, wrongful imprisonment, and child abuse. All they had to do was indicate whether they personally felt each of those issues was “acceptable” or “immoral” and then indicate how they felt the average person supporting the opposition party would respond.
For every single moral issue, people dramatically overestimated how much political opponents would support basic moral wrongs. Even when people were rewarded with a bonus payment if they could accurately estimate opponents’ beliefs, they continued to overestimate by a long way. For example, Democrats estimated that over 30% of Republicans would approve of tax fraud when the actual number was less than 5%. Similarly, Republicans estimated that almost 20% of Democrats would approve of wrongful imprisonment when the actual number was again less than 5%.
The researchers wanted to test how easy it would be to correct this kind of morality bias, so they recruited 202 participants and informed them about a person named “Jeff” who had political views strongly antithetical to their own political views. After learning about Jeff, half of those participants were told that Jeff opposed the basic moral wrongs listed in the previous study, while the other half were told nothing about his opinions on those moral wrongs.
When people were informed about Jeff’s opposition to basic moral wrongs, surveys showed they dehumanized him significantly less and were more willing to learn about a bipartisan political organization. In additional studies, participants also expected a political opponent who opposed basic moral wrongs to be more competent in a team problem-solving task, and participants were 50% less likely to want to switch that teammate when given the option.
Revealing that a political opponent opposes basic moral wrongs didn’t just give people a more generous view of that specific person; it reduced their overall morality bias and made them less likely to dehumanize political out-groups as a whole. In other words, when people learn the actual reality of a political out-groups’ moral opinions—i.e. that the vast majority of them oppose basic moral wrongs just as much as political in-groups do—they’re more likely to treat their opponents as humans worthy of engagement and discussion.
There will always be important disagreements between people on different sides of the political spectrum, but good resolutions to those disagreements depend on well-intentioned collaborations and conversations in good faith. When you automatically assume that political opponents hold evil intentions, you deviate from the underlying reality of their beliefs and become less likely to engage in productive teamwork and meaningful social progress.
Bipartisan cooperation and compromise help to keep politics on healthy and stable ground while cross-party dehumanization becomes a spiraling race to the bottom.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
#1. Challenge the basic morality bias
When you’re thinking about or discussing politics with other people, be aware of a tendency to exaggerate harmful intentions in opponents. Whether you find yourself attributing evil and malice to someone else or you hear a friend doing the same thing, be willing to question those assumptions and consider whether there is a more realistic and positive intention that opponents are likely to have in mind.
#2. Engage with the people who disagree with you
The best way to know what an opponent’s intentions really are is to ask them, and the question itself is straightforward: “why do you believe that?”. Whatever someone disagrees with you about—abortion, guns, immigration, the best presidential candidate, etc—try to understand the reality of what lies behind their beliefs rather than silently assuming you know it already. If you truly care about a particular cause or policy, it’s essential to know what the best available arguments are for the other side.
#3. Find the common ground
Most people have good intentions and there’s likely to be some common ground between competing perspectives. Starting with that common ground is a great way to work out which direction is the most interesting one in a conversation. Often, political opponents will start a debate at the most extreme points of a disagreement because that’s most likely to rile up passions in observers. That might be a good strategy when trying to win votes, but for the rest of us, it’s likely to lead to a draining conversation with what feels like a brick wall. Starting with a shared moral value or agreed-upon facts is a better starting point for working out the ambiguities or unknowns that ultimately lead to diverging conclusions.
“There is occasions and causes why and wherefore in all things.”
~ William Shakespeare
I want nothing to do with racists and bigots, I don't care which color they vote for.