Political polarization can be reduced by telling people to think about the personal importance of issues they may not initially care about.
As a social psychologist and evolutionary psychologist, we decided to investigate this topic with two of our undergraduate students and recently published our results in the scientific journal PLOS One.
Previous research has found that conservatives tend to consider “failure to respect the elderly” to be more morally objectionable than liberals. But when we got liberals to consider how “failure to respect the elderly” might concern them personally—for example, mistreating one’s own grandmother—their assessments of immorality increased and became no different than conservatives.
When people think about how an issue relates to them personally, an otherwise neutral event seems more threatening. This increases the person’s perception of how morally objectionable this behavior is.
However, the situation was different for conservative participants. When conservatives rated the personal relevance of what is generally considered a more “liberal” issue (a company lying about how much it contributes to pollution), their judgments of how immoral that issue was did not change significantly.
Contrary to what we expected, both conservatives and liberals gave relatively equal importance to this threat, even without considering its personal relevance. Some people focused, as we intended, on the environmental aspect of the threat, while others focused more on the less politically polarized hoax.
All participants, regardless of political affiliation, consistently rated more personally relevant threats as more immoral. The closer any threat is felt, the greater and more false someone sees it.
Why is it important?
In the United States today, it may feel like conservatives and liberals live in different realities. Our research shows a possible way to narrow this gap.
People often think of moral beliefs as relatively fixed and stable: Moral values are ingrained in who you are. But our study suggests that moral beliefs may be more flexible than once thought, at least under certain conditions.
To the extent that people can appreciate how important issues like climate change can affect them personally, this could lead to greater consensus among people across the political spectrum.
From a broader perspective, personal relevance is just one dimension of what is called “psychological distance.” People can perceive objects or events close or distant from their lives in various ways: for example, whether an event occurred recently or a long time ago, whether it is real or hypothetical.
Our research suggests that psychological distance may be an important variable to consider in any decision-making process, including financial decisions, deciding where to go to college or what job to take. Thinking more abstractly or concretely about what is at stake can lead people to different conclusions and improve the quality of their decisions.
What is still unknown
A few important questions remain. One concerns the distinct pattern we observed among conservative participants, whose assessments of a stereotypical “liberal” threat did not change much considering its relevance to their own lives. Would a different threat (e.g. gun violence or rising student loan debt) lead to a different pattern? Alternatively, perhaps, as some research suggests, conservatives tend to be more rigid in their beliefs than liberals.
And how can these findings contribute to real problem solving? Is increasing the personal relevance of otherwise neutral threats the best way to help people get on the same page?
Another possibility would be to push things in the opposite direction. Making potential threats seem less personally relevant, rather than more, can be an effective way to bring people together to work toward a realistic solution.
Research Summary is a concise summary of interesting academic studies.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization providing facts and authoritative analysis to help you understand 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, 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 duties.