Of course, evil is in the eye of the beholder, and liberal and conservative eyes seem to be tuned to different wavelengths of immorality. These stereotypes go far beyond clichés about latte liberals and gun-rack conservatives as the quotations above show, they often include the claim that the other side is immoral or downright evil. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't.”įor as long as there have been political rivalries there have been unflattering stereotypes painted by each side about the other. “Republicans don't believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. They are crusaders for perversion, for licentiousness, for nihilism and worse.” The leaders of this party are severely out of touch with mainstream, traditional American values. Any American who would vote for Democrats is guilty of fostering the worst kind of degeneracy. “The national Democratic Party is immoral to the core. Liberals were least accurate about both groups.
Both liberals and conservatives exaggerated the ideological extremity of moral concerns for the ingroup as well as the outgroup. Contrary to common theories of stereotyping, the moral stereotypes were not simple underestimations of the political outgroup's morality. Across the political spectrum, moral stereotypes about “typical” liberals and conservatives correctly reflected the direction of actual differences in foundation endorsement but exaggerated the magnitude of these differences. participants filled out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire with their own answers, or as a typical liberal or conservative would answer. In reality, liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity more than liberals do.
We investigated the moral stereotypes political liberals and conservatives have of themselves and each other.