Ideology and moral framing effects on the reaction to different social threats

Left-wing and right-wing individuals generally present different attitudes and opinions towards various socio-political issues. For instance, right-wing (and Right-Wing Authoritarian - RWA and Social Dominant Oriented - SDO) individuals tend to support more gender and economic inequalities, be more suspicious about the environmental crisis and show higher levels of intolerance towards immigrants. In recent years, the ideological divide between the two political factions have reached extreme levels of polarisation, leaving no space for constructive discussion. However, according to some authors, the cultural war that is firing up between left-wing and right-wing people, may be in part explained by different moral values endorsed by the two political groups. Indeed, the Moral Foundations Theory (Graham et al., 2009) states that leftists rely more on the moral values aimed at preserving individuals’ rights (i.e., Care and Fairness), whereas rightists tend to rely more on the moral values aimed at protecting the in-group (i.e., Authority, Loyalty and Purity). For this reason, previous literature showed that re-framing certain issues with moral values more coherent with the target group’s morality may lead to attitude change. In the present project, five studies are presented aimed at testing the effect of the moral framing of different socio-political issues on participants’ explicit and implicit attitude change. In each study, after completing a self-reported measure of the political orientation, the RWA and SDO scales, participants watched a video (or read a text in Study 4) dealing with a specific social issue (i.e., gender inequalities in Study 1, economic inequalities in Study 2 and Study 3, environmental crisis in Study 4, and immigration in Study 5). The message was framed differently according to the manipulation condition (i.e., individualising frame, binding frame or control condition). Thereafter, participants completed some measures of explicit and implicit attitude toward the problem. In Study 1 (N = 261), the binding moral frame of gender inequalities led right-wing participants to show lower support for the unfair gender system. Similarly, in Study 2 (N = 307) and Study 3 (N = 248), right-wing participants assigned to the binding moral frame condition of the economic inequalities reported lower levels of support for the unfair economic system and lower levels of implicit preference for approaching inequalities compared to other right-wing participants in the control condition. In Study 4 (N = 108), the survey was administered to Singaporean participants. However, in this specific socio-economic context, the moral framing did not lead to significant effects of the moral framing of the environmental crisis. Finally, in Study 5 (N = 230), right-wing participants assigned to the binding moral frame showed lower intolerance toward the immigrants and less fear of the consequences of the immigration compared to other right-wing participants in the control condition. Similarly, high SDO participants reported lower levels of implicit negative attitudes towards immigrants compared to other high SDO participants in the control condition. Taken together, the studies suggest that, although the effects were small and not stable across different measures of political orientation, the moral framing may be an effective technique aimed at bridging the ideological gap between left-wing and right-wing individuals.