by Political polarization can be reduced by asking people to think about the personal relevance of issues they might not be interested in at first glance.
We, a social psychologist and an evolutionary psychologist, decided to investigate this question with two of our undergraduate students, and we recently published our findings in the scientific journal PLOS One.
Previous research has found that conservatives tend to view “disrespecting an elder” as more morally harmful behavior than liberals. But when liberals thought about how “disrespect for an elder” might be personally relevant to them – for example, someone being immoral to their own grandmother – their ratings of immorality increased, resulting in no no different than a conservative’.
When people think about how an issue relates to them personally, a neutral event seems more threatening. This, in turn, increases one’s perception of how morally reprehensible that behavior is.
The pattern was different with conservative participants, however. When conservatives looked at the personal relevance of what is typically considered a more “liberal” issue – a company lying about its contribution to pollution – there was no significant change in their judgment of how immoral that issue is.
Contrary to our expectations, conservatives and liberals alike cared about this threat even without considering its personal relevance. While some focused on the environmental aspect of the threat, as we intended, others focused more on the deception involved, which is less politically polarizing.
All participants, regardless of their politics, rated more personally relevant threats as more immoral. The closer any threat feels, the bigger – and the more wrong – one perceives it to be.
Why is it important
In the United States today, it can feel like conservatives and liberals live in different realities. Our research speaks to a possible path to reduce this gap.
People often think of moral beliefs as something relatively fixed and stable: moral values are felt in oneself. But our study suggests that moral beliefs may be more flexible than once thought, at least under certain circumstances.
To the extent that people can understand how important issues – such as climate change – may affect them personally, that may lead to better agreement from people across the political spectrum.
From a broader perspective, personal relevance is only one aspect of what is known as “psychological distance”. People may perceive things or events as close or distant to their lives in different ways: for example, whether an event happened recently or a long time ago, and whether it is real or hypothetical.
Our research suggests that psychological distance may be an important variable to consider in all types of decision-making, including financial decisions, deciding where to go to college or what job to take. Thinking more abstractly or concretely about what is at stake might lead people to different conclusions and improve the quality of their decisions.
What is not known yet
Some important questions remain. One relates to the different pattern we observed with conservative participants, who did not change their evaluations of a “liberal” perceived threat by much when they judged its relevance to their own lives. Would another threat lead to a different pattern – perhaps gun violence or increasing student loan debt? Alternatively, conservatives may tend to be more inflexible in their beliefs than liberals, as some studies have suggested.
Furthermore, how could these results contribute to solving real problems? Is the best way to help people face the personal relevance of otherwise neutral threats?
Another possibility could be to push things in the opposite direction. Looking at potential threats that are less personally relevant, and not more so, could be an effective way to bring people together to work towards a realistic solution.
The Research Brief is a brief overview of interesting academic work.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you reliable facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. Written by: Rebecca Dyer, Hamilton College and Keelah Williams, Hamilton College
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The authors do not work for, consult with, or own shares in, or receive funding from, any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
