Right‐ and left‐wing prejudice toward dissimilar groups in cultural and economic domains

Abstract

According to recent studies, people on both the political right and left show prejudice toward groups whose beliefs are in conflict with their own. This prediction applies to both cultural and economic dimensions of political beliefs. In three studies (N = 499) we demonstrate that people on both the cultural and economic right and left show negative attitudes toward groups on the other side of the given spectrum and that underlying this effect is the perception of value violation. In two out of three studies, we manipulated the extremity of target worldviews to further explore the causal chain between political beliefs, the perception of value violation, and prejudice. Our results showed a high degree of symmetry between the political left and right in their attitudes toward groups with dissimilar beliefs. However, although people on both sides of the political spectrum show prejudice toward each other, people on the cultural and economic right seem to be more sensitive to value violations than people on the left.

Worldview conflict and prejudice

“…On the social dimension, social conservatism was associated with prejudice towards groups perceived to be socially liberal, whereas social liberalism was associated with prejudice towards groups perceived to be social conservative. On the economic dimension, economic conservatism was associated with prejudice towards groups perceived to be economic liberals, whereas economic liberalism was associated with prejudice towards groups perceived to be economic conservatives (Crawford et al, 2017;Czarnek et al, 2019). These effects were exacerbated when the targets were described as extreme, suggesting the perceived worldview conflict (sometimes measured in these studies as value violations) accounts for the effects (Czarnek et al, 2019).…”

“…hypotheses have now been tested in 10 samples from the United States and Poland using several different measures of prejudice, including feeling thermometers, the implicit association test, and the dictator game (Crawford et al, 2017;Czarnek, Szwed, & Kossowska, 2019). People's positions on social and economic dimensions of political ideology were measured using people's self-identification as liberal or conservative on social and economic dimensions, or with people's support for various social and economic political policies.…”

“…On the economic dimension, economic conservatism was associated with prejudice towards groups perceived to be economic liberals, whereas economic liberalism was associated with prejudice towards groups perceived to be economic conservatives (Crawford et al, 2017;Czarnek et al, 2019). These effects were exacerbated when the targets were described as extreme, suggesting the perceived worldview conflict (sometimes measured in these studies as value violations) accounts for the effects (Czarnek et al, 2019). The interaction effects on the opposing dimension (e.g., participants' social ideology interacting with economic ideology) were substantially weaker and inconsistent across studies, if they emerged at all.…”

Studying a Heterogeneous Array of Target Groups Can Help Us Understand Prejudice

“…However, using heterogeneous target groups, we found that the relationship between conservatism and prejudice reversed depending on the perceived ideology of the target group (see Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, & Wetherell, 2014, for an initial review). These findings have been extended to different dimensions of political ideology (i.e., social and economic; Crawford et al, 2017; Czarnek, Szwed, & Kossowska, 2018), ideological worldviews (i.e., right-wing authoritarianism and social-dominance orientation; Crawford et al, 2015), and religious fundamentalism (Brandt & Van Tongeren, 2017; Kossowska, Czernatowicz-Kukuczka, & Sekerdej, 2017) and held when using representative target groups (Brandt, 2017). In each case, people on the political left express prejudice toward people perceived to be on the political right, and people on the political right express prejudice toward people perceived to be on the political left.…”

Political beliefs and the acceptance of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic restrictions. The case of Poland

“…The researchers search for the reasons for this incoherence mainly at the macro level, referring to specific socio-historical, cultural or political conditions that may have shaped the attitudes and political orientations of citizens [ 75 ]. For example, as Poland was under communism for many years, maintaining the status quo (traditionally: conservatism/rightism) consists precisely in preserving the situation in which the state looks after the economy and the citizens (i.e., left-wing views) rather than introducing free market principles (right-wing, neoliberal views in the Western sense) [ 76 ]. Some studies have also sought the sources of the incoherence at the micro level.…”