It might seem all too evident that conservatives and liberals have different concerns in life, but new research from New York University highlights just how fundamental these differences are, even in such crucial areas as morality.

“Psychological research on the different motives underlying support for liberal versus conservative leaders and agendas, such as those separating Biden and Trump supporters, can help to explain why, for instance, one group is much more focused on promoting equality and social justice than the other,” the researchers say.

Moral foundations

The work centered on what the researchers refer to as our “moral foundations”, and the connection between this and our political ideology. Our moral foundations are concerned with things such as the importance we attach to conforming to the traditions of society or whether we should care for the weak and vulnerable.

Previous research has suggested that liberals tend to have an impoverished sense of morality, with an emphasis on things such as harm avoidance and fairness. They would view these things view an individualistic lens, whereas conservatives would often have a slightly broader “moral palette” whereby ingroup loyalty and obedience to authority are more important. For conservatives, the enforcement of purity sanctions helps to provide binding foundations of society.

The researchers found that the moral foundations believed to be important to liberals tend to be linked to empathic motivation, whereas those for conservatives don’t tend to be.  Indeed, the supposedly broad moral palette previous studies have associated with conservatives tends to have its roots in social dominance, authoritarianism, and economic system justification.  Morality doesn’t really play a role.  What’s more, the researchers also found a strong desire to reduce uncertainty and threat.

“All of this may help to explain why the endorsement of ‘binding foundations’ is associated with prejudice, outgroup hostility, and other antisocial outcomes, whereas the endorsement of ‘individualizing foundations’ is negatively associated with prejudice, outgroup hostility, and other antisocial outcomes,” they explain.

The motivational basis of conservative preferences for “binding” intuitions has for years been assumed to be independent of needs to reduce uncertainty and threat and to represent a broad, prosocial sense of morality. However, the new findings indicate that the endorsement of “binding foundations” is linked to the very same motives associated with many other conservative preferences, including authoritarianism, social dominance, system justification, and underlying psychological needs to reduce uncertainty and threat.