#humanrightsjustifications — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #humanrightsjustifications, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: October 3, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Left-wing justifications partly shield antisemitism from liberal disapproval, study suggests
A recent study published in American Psychologist suggests that while political liberals generally harbor a strong distaste for prejudiced individuals, they tend to evaluate people expressing antisemitism more positively when those remarks are accompanied by justifications related to human rights or criticism of Israel. The research provides evidence that these specific justifications act as social signals, and liberals tended to view the speaker as a political ally who is not broadly bigoted.
Antisemitism involves prejudice or hatred directed toward Jewish people. In social psychology, researchers also study how prejudices are expressed in daily life, noting that people rarely state a prejudice outright without offering a justification. A justification is a reason or rationale provided by a speaker to make their prejudiced views seem more socially acceptable or grounded in a legitimate concern.
Hate crimes against Jewish people in the United States spiked following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, rising from 11% of all hate crimes in the year before the war to 27% in the year after. Historically, political liberals have been fiercely protective of minority groups and quick to condemn discrimination. In fact, a study covered by PsyPost in 2022 found that, before the war, agreement with overtly antisemitic statements was two to three times higher on the American far right than on the far left.
“Part of our motivation came from observing political discourse,” lead author Jordan W. Moon, a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Southampton, told PsyPost. “There has been a sharp rise in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents, but it seemed to us that the people who were otherwise most concerned about protecting minorities were somewhat unconcerned or even dismissive of this rise.”
Moon and his team wanted to investigate this apparent contradiction. “We wondered whether some types of prejudice and discrimination were more tolerated by different audiences—in this case, whether antisemitism was tolerated by political liberals,” he added. “We wanted to know, first, whether liberals indeed currently tolerated antisemitism, and second, whether there are certain ways of expressing antisemitism that are more accepted by liberal audiences.”
Antisemitism and criticism of Israel are related but distinct attitudes. A study covered by PsyPost in 2025, for example, found that antisemitic attitudes were linked to greater support for political violence, while criticism of Israel on its own was linked to legal activism but not to support for violence.
The researchers aimed to understand whether specific political rationalizations help explain why liberals might tolerate certain expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice. They noted that by 2025, 75% of Republicans but only 21% of Democrats said their sympathies lay with Israelis, which they argued may make criticism of Israel a marker of liberal identity. They proposed two potential psychological mechanisms: ingroup favoritism, where a justification signals shared political views, and alliance politics, where a justification implies the speaker is not indiscriminately hateful toward other groups.
To test these ideas, the research team conducted three preregistered online experiments between October and December of 2024 involving 979 American adults. The samples were recruited via Prolific and quota-matched to the U.S. population on age, gender, ethnicity, and political party; the number of Jewish participants was negligible. In their analyses, the researchers treated political views as a continuous scale running from 0 (extremely liberal) to 100 (extremely conservative). They then estimated each effect for someone somewhat liberal, around 17 or 18 on that scale, and someone somewhat conservative, around 79 to 81.
In the first experiment, 270 participants read profiles of individuals expressing prejudice against Jewish people, Black people, or Muslims. Each participant saw all three prejudiced profiles mixed among five unrelated distractor profiles. Participants were randomly assigned to see the prejudice stated plainly without explanation, or accompanied by a socially common justification.
For antisemitism, the justification was a strong disapproval of Israel and its war in Gaza. For anti-Black prejudice, the justification was a belief about crime rates, and for anti-Muslim prejudice, it was a belief about conflicting cultural values. After reading the profiles, participants rated how much they liked or disliked the individual on a 7-point scale, and estimated the speaker’s likely political orientation and how likely they were to be a bigot.
The results showed that without any justification, liberal participants disliked all prejudiced individuals more than conservative participants did. But when the anti-Jewish prejudice was justified by a disapproval of Israel, liberals liked the speaker 1.1 points more on the 7-point scale. This particular justification did not have an effect on how conservative participants evaluated the speaker. The justifications used for anti-Black and anti-Muslim prejudices did not increase liking among liberals.
The researchers emphasized that this relative increase in liking did not mean these participants suddenly endorsed prejudice. “On a scale of ‘Dislike Extremely’ toward ‘Like Extremely’, the prejudiced targets were largely disliked by both liberals and conservatives, regardless of which prejudice they expressed and how it was justified,” Moon noted. “That is, liberals did not ‘like’ antisemites, but certain justifications did make them feel relatively more positively toward them.”
To test if left-leaning justifications work for other types of prejudices, the scientists conducted a second experiment with 277 participants. They expanded the targets of prejudice to include Jewish, Black, Muslim, Chinese, and Russian Americans. This time, they tested justifications appealing to liberal values, such as accusing the targeted group’s ancestral home country of human rights violations. They compared these to justifications appealing to conservative values, such as claiming the targeted group threatens traditional American values.
Once again, liberals strongly disliked all prejudiced individuals when no justification was provided. However, when prejudices against any of the five groups were justified by citing human rights violations, liberals evaluated the speakers more positively, by roughly half a point to a full point on the 7-point scale.
Conservatives also liked some of these speakers more, including those prejudiced against Muslim and Chinese Americans, so only for the anti-Jewish speaker did the effect differ reliably between liberals and conservatives. Justifications centered on traditional American values mostly had no effect for either group, raising liberals’ liking only for the speaker prejudiced against Russian Americans and conservatives’ liking only for the speaker prejudiced against Chinese Americans.
The authors pointed out that this finding addresses a common misperception that their results only apply to antisemitism. “Although we focused our writeup on antisemitism, we found similar effects for other prejudices,” Moon clarified. “A person who expresses prejudice toward Black Americans or Chinese Americans was liked a bit more by politically liberal observers when they appealed to human rights abuses by African countries or China. This process seems to be a general notion of ‘prejudice is more acceptable when expressed by someone in my group’ than something that is unique to a single type of prejudice.”
A third experiment with 432 participants focused exclusively on anti-Jewish prejudice but tested a wider variety of rationalizations. These included disapproval of Israel, conspiracies about Jewish power and influence, historical beliefs about genetic inferiority, and religious blame. Each participant saw only one profile.
As in the earlier experiments, liberals disliked the unjustified antisemitic speaker more than conservatives did. When the speaker justified their prejudice using a disapproval of Israel or conspiracies about Jewish power, the negative social penalty for expressing the prejudice was reduced relative to when no reason was given. Unlike in the first two experiments, however, these two effects did not differ between liberals and conservatives, and neither reached statistical significance when the researchers examined liberals and conservatives separately. The authors say they are cautious about treating these results as definitive.
Justifying the prejudice with claims that Jews are genetically inferior lowered liking overall, and both liberals and conservatives saw that speaker as more likely to be a bigot. The religious justification had no statistically significant effect.
Moon said the team was surprised by how participants responded to a conspiracy trope long associated with the political right. “One of the justifications we included was the trope that Jews hold too much power and influence over financial markets, governments, and the media,” he explained. “Historically in the U.S., this has been a right-coded justification. However, in our experiment, participants thought the profile uttering this trope was more politically liberal than the profile expressing unjustified antisemitism, and this trope had a similar effect in licensing antisemitism as the disapproval of Israel and the war in Gaza justification.”
Across the experiments, the authors found evidence for two psychological processes that statistically accounted for why liberals liked speakers who used left-leaning justifications. First, liberals viewed these speakers as being politically closer to themselves, indicating a type of ingroup favoritism. Second, liberals inferred that a speaker focusing on human rights was less likely to be generally bigoted, which the authors interpret as making them less of a threat to the broader liberal political coalition.
Dylan Selterman, director of research and resource development at Heterodox Academy and an SNF Agora Faculty Affiliate at Johns Hopkins University, was not involved in the research. (He noted that these views are his own and do not represent his employer, Heterodox Academy.) He told PsyPost that “this research shows how people who in some cases eschew group-based ethnic prejudice may yet condone it in other cases, if such prejudice is accompanied by a moral justification.”
“This is an important fact because many people believe that they are immune to negative prejudices,” Selterman added. “However, this is not always the case.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The specific justifications tested across different marginalized groups in the first two experiments were not perfectly identical, which makes direct comparisons between prejudices somewhat difficult. The study also relied on statistical models to test the psychological mechanisms, meaning future experimental designs would be needed to establish exact cause and effect. Additionally, the research measured how people react to brief written profiles, which might not fully capture the complexities of real-world social interactions.
“My confidence is high,” Selterman said. “The authors appear to have done some elegant experiments, with sound statistical tests. Experiment 3 was somewhat inconsistent with the results of Experiments 1 and 2 but the authors reported it anyway,” he noted. “That makes me feel more confident in the results that did emerge.”
“Condoning prejudice is not the same as expressing prejudice,” Selterman explained. “The authors did not find that respondents held prejudice; rather, they studied how people view others who hold prejudices. These studies highlight how third-party judgment works. However, even though these studies did not examine prejudicial feelings directly, the findings are still very important because they show how prejudice can become more socially acceptable, which can lead to increases in discrimination and even violence.”
The authors suggest that efforts to combat antisemitism should consider not just the underlying prejudice but the language used to package it. They speculate that a prejudiced statement made in the service of a social cause might signal especially strong commitment to that cause, and to the political group associated with it.
“This kind of justification communicates that one is part of the liberal political coalition,” Moon said. “Because of ingroup favoritism, liberals were more tolerant of the person expressing antisemitism in this way. If we want to understand why some prejudices become socially acceptable, we should consider the guises they take, and what information they communicate to others.”
As for next steps, Selterman said he would want to better understand “(a) whether people are aware that they are using a justification to morally license bigoted attitudes, (b) what specific political attitudes (beyond simply being liberal or conservative) are associated with this kind of licensing, and (c) what kind of interventions would get people to have consistent moral standards against prejudice, without any justification.”
The study, “Justifying Antisemitism: Political Liberalism and Perceptions of Prejudices,” was authored by Jordan W. Moon, Michael Barlev, and Steven L. Neuberg.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #JustifyingAntisemitism #LiberalBias # antisemitism #PoliticalPsychology #HumanRightsJustifications #IngroupFavoritism #AlliancePolitics # Liberal vs Conservative # antisemitismresearch #SocialSignals
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DATE: October 3, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Left-wing justifications partly shield antisemitism from liberal disapproval, study suggests
A recent study published in American Psychologist suggests that while political liberals generally harbor a strong distaste for prejudiced individuals, they tend to evaluate people expressing antisemitism more positively when those remarks are accompanied by justifications related to human rights or criticism of Israel. The research provides evidence that these specific justifications act as social signals, and liberals tended to view the speaker as a political ally who is not broadly bigoted.
Antisemitism involves prejudice or hatred directed toward Jewish people. In social psychology, researchers also study how prejudices are expressed in daily life, noting that people rarely state a prejudice outright without offering a justification. A justification is a reason or rationale provided by a speaker to make their prejudiced views seem more socially acceptable or grounded in a legitimate concern.
Hate crimes against Jewish people in the United States spiked following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, rising from 11% of all hate crimes in the year before the war to 27% in the year after. Historically, political liberals have been fiercely protective of minority groups and quick to condemn discrimination. In fact, a study covered by PsyPost in 2022 found that, before the war, agreement with overtly antisemitic statements was two to three times higher on the American far right than on the far left.
“Part of our motivation came from observing political discourse,” lead author Jordan W. Moon, a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Southampton, told PsyPost. “There has been a sharp rise in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents, but it seemed to us that the people who were otherwise most concerned about protecting minorities were somewhat unconcerned or even dismissive of this rise.”
Moon and his team wanted to investigate this apparent contradiction. “We wondered whether some types of prejudice and discrimination were more tolerated by different audiences—in this case, whether antisemitism was tolerated by political liberals,” he added. “We wanted to know, first, whether liberals indeed currently tolerated antisemitism, and second, whether there are certain ways of expressing antisemitism that are more accepted by liberal audiences.”
Antisemitism and criticism of Israel are related but distinct attitudes. A study covered by PsyPost in 2025, for example, found that antisemitic attitudes were linked to greater support for political violence, while criticism of Israel on its own was linked to legal activism but not to support for violence.
The researchers aimed to understand whether specific political rationalizations help explain why liberals might tolerate certain expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice. They noted that by 2025, 75% of Republicans but only 21% of Democrats said their sympathies lay with Israelis, which they argued may make criticism of Israel a marker of liberal identity. They proposed two potential psychological mechanisms: ingroup favoritism, where a justification signals shared political views, and alliance politics, where a justification implies the speaker is not indiscriminately hateful toward other groups.
To test these ideas, the research team conducted three preregistered online experiments between October and December of 2024 involving 979 American adults. The samples were recruited via Prolific and quota-matched to the U.S. population on age, gender, ethnicity, and political party; the number of Jewish participants was negligible. In their analyses, the researchers treated political views as a continuous scale running from 0 (extremely liberal) to 100 (extremely conservative). They then estimated each effect for someone somewhat liberal, around 17 or 18 on that scale, and someone somewhat conservative, around 79 to 81.
In the first experiment, 270 participants read profiles of individuals expressing prejudice against Jewish people, Black people, or Muslims. Each participant saw all three prejudiced profiles mixed among five unrelated distractor profiles. Participants were randomly assigned to see the prejudice stated plainly without explanation, or accompanied by a socially common justification.
For antisemitism, the justification was a strong disapproval of Israel and its war in Gaza. For anti-Black prejudice, the justification was a belief about crime rates, and for anti-Muslim prejudice, it was a belief about conflicting cultural values. After reading the profiles, participants rated how much they liked or disliked the individual on a 7-point scale, and estimated the speaker’s likely political orientation and how likely they were to be a bigot.
The results showed that without any justification, liberal participants disliked all prejudiced individuals more than conservative participants did. But when the anti-Jewish prejudice was justified by a disapproval of Israel, liberals liked the speaker 1.1 points more on the 7-point scale. This particular justification did not have an effect on how conservative participants evaluated the speaker. The justifications used for anti-Black and anti-Muslim prejudices did not increase liking among liberals.
The researchers emphasized that this relative increase in liking did not mean these participants suddenly endorsed prejudice. “On a scale of ‘Dislike Extremely’ toward ‘Like Extremely’, the prejudiced targets were largely disliked by both liberals and conservatives, regardless of which prejudice they expressed and how it was justified,” Moon noted. “That is, liberals did not ‘like’ antisemites, but certain justifications did make them feel relatively more positively toward them.”
To test if left-leaning justifications work for other types of prejudices, the scientists conducted a second experiment with 277 participants. They expanded the targets of prejudice to include Jewish, Black, Muslim, Chinese, and Russian Americans. This time, they tested justifications appealing to liberal values, such as accusing the targeted group’s ancestral home country of human rights violations. They compared these to justifications appealing to conservative values, such as claiming the targeted group threatens traditional American values.
Once again, liberals strongly disliked all prejudiced individuals when no justification was provided. However, when prejudices against any of the five groups were justified by citing human rights violations, liberals evaluated the speakers more positively, by roughly half a point to a full point on the 7-point scale.
Conservatives also liked some of these speakers more, including those prejudiced against Muslim and Chinese Americans, so only for the anti-Jewish speaker did the effect differ reliably between liberals and conservatives. Justifications centered on traditional American values mostly had no effect for either group, raising liberals’ liking only for the speaker prejudiced against Russian Americans and conservatives’ liking only for the speaker prejudiced against Chinese Americans.
The authors pointed out that this finding addresses a common misperception that their results only apply to antisemitism. “Although we focused our writeup on antisemitism, we found similar effects for other prejudices,” Moon clarified. “A person who expresses prejudice toward Black Americans or Chinese Americans was liked a bit more by politically liberal observers when they appealed to human rights abuses by African countries or China. This process seems to be a general notion of ‘prejudice is more acceptable when expressed by someone in my group’ than something that is unique to a single type of prejudice.”
A third experiment with 432 participants focused exclusively on anti-Jewish prejudice but tested a wider variety of rationalizations. These included disapproval of Israel, conspiracies about Jewish power and influence, historical beliefs about genetic inferiority, and religious blame. Each participant saw only one profile.
As in the earlier experiments, liberals disliked the unjustified antisemitic speaker more than conservatives did. When the speaker justified their prejudice using a disapproval of Israel or conspiracies about Jewish power, the negative social penalty for expressing the prejudice was reduced relative to when no reason was given. Unlike in the first two experiments, however, these two effects did not differ between liberals and conservatives, and neither reached statistical significance when the researchers examined liberals and conservatives separately. The authors say they are cautious about treating these results as definitive.
Justifying the prejudice with claims that Jews are genetically inferior lowered liking overall, and both liberals and conservatives saw that speaker as more likely to be a bigot. The religious justification had no statistically significant effect.
Moon said the team was surprised by how participants responded to a conspiracy trope long associated with the political right. “One of the justifications we included was the trope that Jews hold too much power and influence over financial markets, governments, and the media,” he explained. “Historically in the U.S., this has been a right-coded justification. However, in our experiment, participants thought the profile uttering this trope was more politically liberal than the profile expressing unjustified antisemitism, and this trope had a similar effect in licensing antisemitism as the disapproval of Israel and the war in Gaza justification.”
Across the experiments, the authors found evidence for two psychological processes that statistically accounted for why liberals liked speakers who used left-leaning justifications. First, liberals viewed these speakers as being politically closer to themselves, indicating a type of ingroup favoritism. Second, liberals inferred that a speaker focusing on human rights was less likely to be generally bigoted, which the authors interpret as making them less of a threat to the broader liberal political coalition.
Dylan Selterman, director of research and resource development at Heterodox Academy and an SNF Agora Faculty Affiliate at Johns Hopkins University, was not involved in the research. (He noted that these views are his own and do not represent his employer, Heterodox Academy.) He told PsyPost that “this research shows how people who in some cases eschew group-based ethnic prejudice may yet condone it in other cases, if such prejudice is accompanied by a moral justification.”
“This is an important fact because many people believe that they are immune to negative prejudices,” Selterman added. “However, this is not always the case.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The specific justifications tested across different marginalized groups in the first two experiments were not perfectly identical, which makes direct comparisons between prejudices somewhat difficult. The study also relied on statistical models to test the psychological mechanisms, meaning future experimental designs would be needed to establish exact cause and effect. Additionally, the research measured how people react to brief written profiles, which might not fully capture the complexities of real-world social interactions.
“My confidence is high,” Selterman said. “The authors appear to have done some elegant experiments, with sound statistical tests. Experiment 3 was somewhat inconsistent with the results of Experiments 1 and 2 but the authors reported it anyway,” he noted. “That makes me feel more confident in the results that did emerge.”
“Condoning prejudice is not the same as expressing prejudice,” Selterman explained. “The authors did not find that respondents held prejudice; rather, they studied how people view others who hold prejudices. These studies highlight how third-party judgment works. However, even though these studies did not examine prejudicial feelings directly, the findings are still very important because they show how prejudice can become more socially acceptable, which can lead to increases in discrimination and even violence.”
The authors suggest that efforts to combat antisemitism should consider not just the underlying prejudice but the language used to package it. They speculate that a prejudiced statement made in the service of a social cause might signal especially strong commitment to that cause, and to the political group associated with it.
“This kind of justification communicates that one is part of the liberal political coalition,” Moon said. “Because of ingroup favoritism, liberals were more tolerant of the person expressing antisemitism in this way. If we want to understand why some prejudices become socially acceptable, we should consider the guises they take, and what information they communicate to others.”
As for next steps, Selterman said he would want to better understand “(a) whether people are aware that they are using a justification to morally license bigoted attitudes, (b) what specific political attitudes (beyond simply being liberal or conservative) are associated with this kind of licensing, and (c) what kind of interventions would get people to have consistent moral standards against prejudice, without any justification.”
The study, “Justifying Antisemitism: Political Liberalism and Perceptions of Prejudices,” was authored by Jordan W. Moon, Michael Barlev, and Steven L. Neuberg.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #JustifyingAntisemitism #LiberalBias # antisemitism #PoliticalPsychology #HumanRightsJustifications #IngroupFavoritism #AlliancePolitics # Liberal vs Conservative # antisemitismresearch #SocialSignals
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DATE: October 3, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Left-wing justifications partly shield antisemitism from liberal disapproval, study suggests
A recent study published in American Psychologist suggests that while political liberals generally harbor a strong distaste for prejudiced individuals, they tend to evaluate people expressing antisemitism more positively when those remarks are accompanied by justifications related to human rights or criticism of Israel. The research provides evidence that these specific justifications act as social signals, and liberals tended to view the speaker as a political ally who is not broadly bigoted.
Antisemitism involves prejudice or hatred directed toward Jewish people. In social psychology, researchers also study how prejudices are expressed in daily life, noting that people rarely state a prejudice outright without offering a justification. A justification is a reason or rationale provided by a speaker to make their prejudiced views seem more socially acceptable or grounded in a legitimate concern.
Hate crimes against Jewish people in the United States spiked following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, rising from 11% of all hate crimes in the year before the war to 27% in the year after. Historically, political liberals have been fiercely protective of minority groups and quick to condemn discrimination. In fact, a study covered by PsyPost in 2022 found that, before the war, agreement with overtly antisemitic statements was two to three times higher on the American far right than on the far left.
“Part of our motivation came from observing political discourse,” lead author Jordan W. Moon, a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Southampton, told PsyPost. “There has been a sharp rise in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents, but it seemed to us that the people who were otherwise most concerned about protecting minorities were somewhat unconcerned or even dismissive of this rise.”
Moon and his team wanted to investigate this apparent contradiction. “We wondered whether some types of prejudice and discrimination were more tolerated by different audiences—in this case, whether antisemitism was tolerated by political liberals,” he added. “We wanted to know, first, whether liberals indeed currently tolerated antisemitism, and second, whether there are certain ways of expressing antisemitism that are more accepted by liberal audiences.”
Antisemitism and criticism of Israel are related but distinct attitudes. A study covered by PsyPost in 2025, for example, found that antisemitic attitudes were linked to greater support for political violence, while criticism of Israel on its own was linked to legal activism but not to support for violence.
The researchers aimed to understand whether specific political rationalizations help explain why liberals might tolerate certain expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice. They noted that by 2025, 75% of Republicans but only 21% of Democrats said their sympathies lay with Israelis, which they argued may make criticism of Israel a marker of liberal identity. They proposed two potential psychological mechanisms: ingroup favoritism, where a justification signals shared political views, and alliance politics, where a justification implies the speaker is not indiscriminately hateful toward other groups.
To test these ideas, the research team conducted three preregistered online experiments between October and December of 2024 involving 979 American adults. The samples were recruited via Prolific and quota-matched to the U.S. population on age, gender, ethnicity, and political party; the number of Jewish participants was negligible. In their analyses, the researchers treated political views as a continuous scale running from 0 (extremely liberal) to 100 (extremely conservative). They then estimated each effect for someone somewhat liberal, around 17 or 18 on that scale, and someone somewhat conservative, around 79 to 81.
In the first experiment, 270 participants read profiles of individuals expressing prejudice against Jewish people, Black people, or Muslims. Each participant saw all three prejudiced profiles mixed among five unrelated distractor profiles. Participants were randomly assigned to see the prejudice stated plainly without explanation, or accompanied by a socially common justification.
For antisemitism, the justification was a strong disapproval of Israel and its war in Gaza. For anti-Black prejudice, the justification was a belief about crime rates, and for anti-Muslim prejudice, it was a belief about conflicting cultural values. After reading the profiles, participants rated how much they liked or disliked the individual on a 7-point scale, and estimated the speaker’s likely political orientation and how likely they were to be a bigot.
The results showed that without any justification, liberal participants disliked all prejudiced individuals more than conservative participants did. But when the anti-Jewish prejudice was justified by a disapproval of Israel, liberals liked the speaker 1.1 points more on the 7-point scale. This particular justification did not have an effect on how conservative participants evaluated the speaker. The justifications used for anti-Black and anti-Muslim prejudices did not increase liking among liberals.
The researchers emphasized that this relative increase in liking did not mean these participants suddenly endorsed prejudice. “On a scale of ‘Dislike Extremely’ toward ‘Like Extremely’, the prejudiced targets were largely disliked by both liberals and conservatives, regardless of which prejudice they expressed and how it was justified,” Moon noted. “That is, liberals did not ‘like’ antisemites, but certain justifications did make them feel relatively more positively toward them.”
To test if left-leaning justifications work for other types of prejudices, the scientists conducted a second experiment with 277 participants. They expanded the targets of prejudice to include Jewish, Black, Muslim, Chinese, and Russian Americans. This time, they tested justifications appealing to liberal values, such as accusing the targeted group’s ancestral home country of human rights violations. They compared these to justifications appealing to conservative values, such as claiming the targeted group threatens traditional American values.
Once again, liberals strongly disliked all prejudiced individuals when no justification was provided. However, when prejudices against any of the five groups were justified by citing human rights violations, liberals evaluated the speakers more positively, by roughly half a point to a full point on the 7-point scale.
Conservatives also liked some of these speakers more, including those prejudiced against Muslim and Chinese Americans, so only for the anti-Jewish speaker did the effect differ reliably between liberals and conservatives. Justifications centered on traditional American values mostly had no effect for either group, raising liberals’ liking only for the speaker prejudiced against Russian Americans and conservatives’ liking only for the speaker prejudiced against Chinese Americans.
The authors pointed out that this finding addresses a common misperception that their results only apply to antisemitism. “Although we focused our writeup on antisemitism, we found similar effects for other prejudices,” Moon clarified. “A person who expresses prejudice toward Black Americans or Chinese Americans was liked a bit more by politically liberal observers when they appealed to human rights abuses by African countries or China. This process seems to be a general notion of ‘prejudice is more acceptable when expressed by someone in my group’ than something that is unique to a single type of prejudice.”
A third experiment with 432 participants focused exclusively on anti-Jewish prejudice but tested a wider variety of rationalizations. These included disapproval of Israel, conspiracies about Jewish power and influence, historical beliefs about genetic inferiority, and religious blame. Each participant saw only one profile.
As in the earlier experiments, liberals disliked the unjustified antisemitic speaker more than conservatives did. When the speaker justified their prejudice using a disapproval of Israel or conspiracies about Jewish power, the negative social penalty for expressing the prejudice was reduced relative to when no reason was given. Unlike in the first two experiments, however, these two effects did not differ between liberals and conservatives, and neither reached statistical significance when the researchers examined liberals and conservatives separately. The authors say they are cautious about treating these results as definitive.
Justifying the prejudice with claims that Jews are genetically inferior lowered liking overall, and both liberals and conservatives saw that speaker as more likely to be a bigot. The religious justification had no statistically significant effect.
Moon said the team was surprised by how participants responded to a conspiracy trope long associated with the political right. “One of the justifications we included was the trope that Jews hold too much power and influence over financial markets, governments, and the media,” he explained. “Historically in the U.S., this has been a right-coded justification. However, in our experiment, participants thought the profile uttering this trope was more politically liberal than the profile expressing unjustified antisemitism, and this trope had a similar effect in licensing antisemitism as the disapproval of Israel and the war in Gaza justification.”
Across the experiments, the authors found evidence for two psychological processes that statistically accounted for why liberals liked speakers who used left-leaning justifications. First, liberals viewed these speakers as being politically closer to themselves, indicating a type of ingroup favoritism. Second, liberals inferred that a speaker focusing on human rights was less likely to be generally bigoted, which the authors interpret as making them less of a threat to the broader liberal political coalition.
Dylan Selterman, director of research and resource development at Heterodox Academy and an SNF Agora Faculty Affiliate at Johns Hopkins University, was not involved in the research. (He noted that these views are his own and do not represent his employer, Heterodox Academy.) He told PsyPost that “this research shows how people who in some cases eschew group-based ethnic prejudice may yet condone it in other cases, if such prejudice is accompanied by a moral justification.”
“This is an important fact because many people believe that they are immune to negative prejudices,” Selterman added. “However, this is not always the case.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The specific justifications tested across different marginalized groups in the first two experiments were not perfectly identical, which makes direct comparisons between prejudices somewhat difficult. The study also relied on statistical models to test the psychological mechanisms, meaning future experimental designs would be needed to establish exact cause and effect. Additionally, the research measured how people react to brief written profiles, which might not fully capture the complexities of real-world social interactions.
“My confidence is high,” Selterman said. “The authors appear to have done some elegant experiments, with sound statistical tests. Experiment 3 was somewhat inconsistent with the results of Experiments 1 and 2 but the authors reported it anyway,” he noted. “That makes me feel more confident in the results that did emerge.”
“Condoning prejudice is not the same as expressing prejudice,” Selterman explained. “The authors did not find that respondents held prejudice; rather, they studied how people view others who hold prejudices. These studies highlight how third-party judgment works. However, even though these studies did not examine prejudicial feelings directly, the findings are still very important because they show how prejudice can become more socially acceptable, which can lead to increases in discrimination and even violence.”
The authors suggest that efforts to combat antisemitism should consider not just the underlying prejudice but the language used to package it. They speculate that a prejudiced statement made in the service of a social cause might signal especially strong commitment to that cause, and to the political group associated with it.
“This kind of justification communicates that one is part of the liberal political coalition,” Moon said. “Because of ingroup favoritism, liberals were more tolerant of the person expressing antisemitism in this way. If we want to understand why some prejudices become socially acceptable, we should consider the guises they take, and what information they communicate to others.”
As for next steps, Selterman said he would want to better understand “(a) whether people are aware that they are using a justification to morally license bigoted attitudes, (b) what specific political attitudes (beyond simply being liberal or conservative) are associated with this kind of licensing, and (c) what kind of interventions would get people to have consistent moral standards against prejudice, without any justification.”
The study, “Justifying Antisemitism: Political Liberalism and Perceptions of Prejudices,” was authored by Jordan W. Moon, Michael Barlev, and Steven L. Neuberg.
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DATE: October 3, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Left-wing justifications partly shield antisemitism from liberal disapproval, study suggests
A recent study published in American Psychologist suggests that while political liberals generally harbor a strong distaste for prejudiced individuals, they tend to evaluate people expressing antisemitism more positively when those remarks are accompanied by justifications related to human rights or criticism of Israel. The research provides evidence that these specific justifications act as social signals, and liberals tended to view the speaker as a political ally who is not broadly bigoted.
Antisemitism involves prejudice or hatred directed toward Jewish people. In social psychology, researchers also study how prejudices are expressed in daily life, noting that people rarely state a prejudice outright without offering a justification. A justification is a reason or rationale provided by a speaker to make their prejudiced views seem more socially acceptable or grounded in a legitimate concern.
Hate crimes against Jewish people in the United States spiked following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, rising from 11% of all hate crimes in the year before the war to 27% in the year after. Historically, political liberals have been fiercely protective of minority groups and quick to condemn discrimination. In fact, a study covered by PsyPost in 2022 found that, before the war, agreement with overtly antisemitic statements was two to three times higher on the American far right than on the far left.
“Part of our motivation came from observing political discourse,” lead author Jordan W. Moon, a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Southampton, told PsyPost. “There has been a sharp rise in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents, but it seemed to us that the people who were otherwise most concerned about protecting minorities were somewhat unconcerned or even dismissive of this rise.”
Moon and his team wanted to investigate this apparent contradiction. “We wondered whether some types of prejudice and discrimination were more tolerated by different audiences—in this case, whether antisemitism was tolerated by political liberals,” he added. “We wanted to know, first, whether liberals indeed currently tolerated antisemitism, and second, whether there are certain ways of expressing antisemitism that are more accepted by liberal audiences.”
Antisemitism and criticism of Israel are related but distinct attitudes. A study covered by PsyPost in 2025, for example, found that antisemitic attitudes were linked to greater support for political violence, while criticism of Israel on its own was linked to legal activism but not to support for violence.
The researchers aimed to understand whether specific political rationalizations help explain why liberals might tolerate certain expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice. They noted that by 2025, 75% of Republicans but only 21% of Democrats said their sympathies lay with Israelis, which they argued may make criticism of Israel a marker of liberal identity. They proposed two potential psychological mechanisms: ingroup favoritism, where a justification signals shared political views, and alliance politics, where a justification implies the speaker is not indiscriminately hateful toward other groups.
To test these ideas, the research team conducted three preregistered online experiments between October and December of 2024 involving 979 American adults. The samples were recruited via Prolific and quota-matched to the U.S. population on age, gender, ethnicity, and political party; the number of Jewish participants was negligible. In their analyses, the researchers treated political views as a continuous scale running from 0 (extremely liberal) to 100 (extremely conservative). They then estimated each effect for someone somewhat liberal, around 17 or 18 on that scale, and someone somewhat conservative, around 79 to 81.
In the first experiment, 270 participants read profiles of individuals expressing prejudice against Jewish people, Black people, or Muslims. Each participant saw all three prejudiced profiles mixed among five unrelated distractor profiles. Participants were randomly assigned to see the prejudice stated plainly without explanation, or accompanied by a socially common justification.
For antisemitism, the justification was a strong disapproval of Israel and its war in Gaza. For anti-Black prejudice, the justification was a belief about crime rates, and for anti-Muslim prejudice, it was a belief about conflicting cultural values. After reading the profiles, participants rated how much they liked or disliked the individual on a 7-point scale, and estimated the speaker’s likely political orientation and how likely they were to be a bigot.
The results showed that without any justification, liberal participants disliked all prejudiced individuals more than conservative participants did. But when the anti-Jewish prejudice was justified by a disapproval of Israel, liberals liked the speaker 1.1 points more on the 7-point scale. This particular justification did not have an effect on how conservative participants evaluated the speaker. The justifications used for anti-Black and anti-Muslim prejudices did not increase liking among liberals.
The researchers emphasized that this relative increase in liking did not mean these participants suddenly endorsed prejudice. “On a scale of ‘Dislike Extremely’ toward ‘Like Extremely’, the prejudiced targets were largely disliked by both liberals and conservatives, regardless of which prejudice they expressed and how it was justified,” Moon noted. “That is, liberals did not ‘like’ antisemites, but certain justifications did make them feel relatively more positively toward them.”
To test if left-leaning justifications work for other types of prejudices, the scientists conducted a second experiment with 277 participants. They expanded the targets of prejudice to include Jewish, Black, Muslim, Chinese, and Russian Americans. This time, they tested justifications appealing to liberal values, such as accusing the targeted group’s ancestral home country of human rights violations. They compared these to justifications appealing to conservative values, such as claiming the targeted group threatens traditional American values.
Once again, liberals strongly disliked all prejudiced individuals when no justification was provided. However, when prejudices against any of the five groups were justified by citing human rights violations, liberals evaluated the speakers more positively, by roughly half a point to a full point on the 7-point scale.
Conservatives also liked some of these speakers more, including those prejudiced against Muslim and Chinese Americans, so only for the anti-Jewish speaker did the effect differ reliably between liberals and conservatives. Justifications centered on traditional American values mostly had no effect for either group, raising liberals’ liking only for the speaker prejudiced against Russian Americans and conservatives’ liking only for the speaker prejudiced against Chinese Americans.
The authors pointed out that this finding addresses a common misperception that their results only apply to antisemitism. “Although we focused our writeup on antisemitism, we found similar effects for other prejudices,” Moon clarified. “A person who expresses prejudice toward Black Americans or Chinese Americans was liked a bit more by politically liberal observers when they appealed to human rights abuses by African countries or China. This process seems to be a general notion of ‘prejudice is more acceptable when expressed by someone in my group’ than something that is unique to a single type of prejudice.”
A third experiment with 432 participants focused exclusively on anti-Jewish prejudice but tested a wider variety of rationalizations. These included disapproval of Israel, conspiracies about Jewish power and influence, historical beliefs about genetic inferiority, and religious blame. Each participant saw only one profile.
As in the earlier experiments, liberals disliked the unjustified antisemitic speaker more than conservatives did. When the speaker justified their prejudice using a disapproval of Israel or conspiracies about Jewish power, the negative social penalty for expressing the prejudice was reduced relative to when no reason was given. Unlike in the first two experiments, however, these two effects did not differ between liberals and conservatives, and neither reached statistical significance when the researchers examined liberals and conservatives separately. The authors say they are cautious about treating these results as definitive.
Justifying the prejudice with claims that Jews are genetically inferior lowered liking overall, and both liberals and conservatives saw that speaker as more likely to be a bigot. The religious justification had no statistically significant effect.
Moon said the team was surprised by how participants responded to a conspiracy trope long associated with the political right. “One of the justifications we included was the trope that Jews hold too much power and influence over financial markets, governments, and the media,” he explained. “Historically in the U.S., this has been a right-coded justification. However, in our experiment, participants thought the profile uttering this trope was more politically liberal than the profile expressing unjustified antisemitism, and this trope had a similar effect in licensing antisemitism as the disapproval of Israel and the war in Gaza justification.”
Across the experiments, the authors found evidence for two psychological processes that statistically accounted for why liberals liked speakers who used left-leaning justifications. First, liberals viewed these speakers as being politically closer to themselves, indicating a type of ingroup favoritism. Second, liberals inferred that a speaker focusing on human rights was less likely to be generally bigoted, which the authors interpret as making them less of a threat to the broader liberal political coalition.
Dylan Selterman, director of research and resource development at Heterodox Academy and an SNF Agora Faculty Affiliate at Johns Hopkins University, was not involved in the research. (He noted that these views are his own and do not represent his employer, Heterodox Academy.) He told PsyPost that “this research shows how people who in some cases eschew group-based ethnic prejudice may yet condone it in other cases, if such prejudice is accompanied by a moral justification.”
“This is an important fact because many people believe that they are immune to negative prejudices,” Selterman added. “However, this is not always the case.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The specific justifications tested across different marginalized groups in the first two experiments were not perfectly identical, which makes direct comparisons between prejudices somewhat difficult. The study also relied on statistical models to test the psychological mechanisms, meaning future experimental designs would be needed to establish exact cause and effect. Additionally, the research measured how people react to brief written profiles, which might not fully capture the complexities of real-world social interactions.
“My confidence is high,” Selterman said. “The authors appear to have done some elegant experiments, with sound statistical tests. Experiment 3 was somewhat inconsistent with the results of Experiments 1 and 2 but the authors reported it anyway,” he noted. “That makes me feel more confident in the results that did emerge.”
“Condoning prejudice is not the same as expressing prejudice,” Selterman explained. “The authors did not find that respondents held prejudice; rather, they studied how people view others who hold prejudices. These studies highlight how third-party judgment works. However, even though these studies did not examine prejudicial feelings directly, the findings are still very important because they show how prejudice can become more socially acceptable, which can lead to increases in discrimination and even violence.”
The authors suggest that efforts to combat antisemitism should consider not just the underlying prejudice but the language used to package it. They speculate that a prejudiced statement made in the service of a social cause might signal especially strong commitment to that cause, and to the political group associated with it.
“This kind of justification communicates that one is part of the liberal political coalition,” Moon said. “Because of ingroup favoritism, liberals were more tolerant of the person expressing antisemitism in this way. If we want to understand why some prejudices become socially acceptable, we should consider the guises they take, and what information they communicate to others.”
As for next steps, Selterman said he would want to better understand “(a) whether people are aware that they are using a justification to morally license bigoted attitudes, (b) what specific political attitudes (beyond simply being liberal or conservative) are associated with this kind of licensing, and (c) what kind of interventions would get people to have consistent moral standards against prejudice, without any justification.”
The study, “Justifying Antisemitism: Political Liberalism and Perceptions of Prejudices,” was authored by Jordan W. Moon, Michael Barlev, and Steven L. Neuberg.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #JustifyingAntisemitism #LiberalBias # antisemitism #PoliticalPsychology #HumanRightsJustifications #IngroupFavoritism #AlliancePolitics # Liberal vs Conservative # antisemitismresearch #SocialSignals