#moralcircle — Public Fediverse posts

DATE: July 12, 2026 at 02:00PM
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: Nine recent studies that reveal the hidden psychology of American politics

URL: https://www.psypost.org/nine-recent-studies-that-reveal-the-hidden-psychology-of-american-politics/

Political ideologies now permeate nearly every aspect of human life. Recent psychological and demographic research suggests that a person’s partisan identity influences behaviors far beyond the voting booth. Our political affiliations correlate with everything from how we interpret a simple smile to how many children we choose to have.

At the same time, the institutions and platforms that shape public discourse are evolving rapidly. Elected officials increasingly use digital networks to broadcast anger, while ordinary citizens find themselves unable to distinguish real political speech from text generated by artificial intelligence. Old assumptions about race, education, and political independence are also facing scrutiny as massive new datasets emerge.

The nine peer-reviewed studies detailed below provide evidence of a rapidly changing American electorate. They highlight how underlying psychological traits, shifting demographics, and modern communication tools actively rewrite the rules of civic engagement. Together, this research offers a detailed look at the unseen forces guiding human behavior in a highly polarized era.

The Political Realignment of America: Education Overtakes Race

An analysis of survey data spanning five presidential election years suggests that the main dividing lines in American politics are changing. Ideological differences between racial groups have decreased sharply since 2008. At the same time, differences based on a person’s level of education have grown substantially.

This shift occurred partly because Black and Hispanic respondents became more conservative on average. In addition, individuals with a high school diploma or less shifted toward conservatism across all racial groups. Participants with college and graduate degrees became more liberal during this same period.

The study authors analyzed answers from over 250,000 respondents using data from the Cooperative Election Study. Participants answered questions on topics like taxes, healthcare, and immigration to measure their place on the liberal-conservative spectrum. The results indicate that education is now a highly prominent ideological divider in the United States.

Viral Heatmap Gets It Wrong: Liberals Don’t Prioritize Strangers Over Family

A viral chart circulating on social media previously claimed that political liberals care more about strangers and animals than their own family members. A new psychological study tested this idea and found no evidence of an inverted moral hierarchy on the political left. Instead, the research suggests that liberals simply extend their moral concern further outward while still prioritizing those closest to them.

Scientists use the concept of a moral circle to describe the psychological boundary of who or what a person considers worthy of ethical care. The researchers asked participants to allocate a fixed number of moral concern points across different groups, ranging from immediate family to all things in existence. This method forced participants to make tradeoffs, mimicking real-world situations where time and resources are limited.

Across multiple large samples, people across the entire political spectrum placed their closest relationships at the absolute top of their moral concern. Both conservatives and liberals overwhelmingly prioritized their family and friends. Liberals did exhibit a larger overall moral circle by extending more concern to distant targets like marginalized groups and the environment, but this did not come at the expense of caring for their loved ones.

Democrats Are Disproportionately Driving the Rise in Angry Congressional Tweets

Members of the United States Congress increasingly rely on angry rhetoric on social media to build their political brands. A recent study provides evidence that this rise in outrage is not evenly distributed across political parties. Democratic lawmakers appear to be disproportionately driving the trend toward hostile digital communication.

The researchers analyzed over 2.2 million official posts sent by members of Congress on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Because reading millions of posts by hand is impossible, the scientists used computational textual analysis. This software scanned the large bodies of text to identify specific words and emotional tones associated with anger and indignation.

The data revealed that while both parties utilize outrage to some extent, the overall escalation in angry messaging is largely fueled by the Democratic side of the aisle. The authors note that politicians across the spectrum use anger to gain attention and receive higher user engagement. High-arousal emotions tend to capture public attention quickly, giving lawmakers a strong incentive to use this type of language.

Voters Find AI-Generated Debate Answers More Authentic Than Real Political Speech

Artificial intelligence models can now generate political debate responses that everyday people find more authentic than the actual answers given by real politicians. Generative artificial intelligence refers to software systems designed to create new content based on vast patterns they learned during their training. These systems are remarkably good at imitating human communication.

To test the public perception of this technology, researchers used an artificial intelligence model to create fake responses to real audience questions from a British political debate television program. They instructed the software to roleplay as specific public figures. The scientists then asked a representative sample of 948 British adults to evaluate transcripts containing both the real and the fake responses.

Participants consistently rated the machine-generated text as more authentic, more coherent, and more relevant than the actual things the real public figures said. The machine-generated answers were particularly good at staying on topic, while real politicians frequently dodged difficult questions. This study suggests that modern technology could easily be used to mimic public figures and spread highly believable misinformation.

What Millions of Voter Records Reveal About Political Independents

Voters who do not align with the Democratic or Republican parties make up the largest portion of the American electorate. Historical political theory sometimes treated these unaffiliated individuals as apathetic citizens who lack political knowledge. Other experts have argued that independents are essentially partisan voters who hide their actual party preference to avoid social stigma.

To test these ideas, political scientists analyzed over seven million data points from a massive administrative voter database. This approach allowed the team to bypass problems common in standard telephone surveys, which often overrepresent the most active citizens. The researchers found that well over half of the independent individuals registered as moderate in their political beliefs.

A separate national survey revealed that the broader public generally views independents as people eager to work across party lines. The independent voters themselves placed a high priority on having a flexible political identity that sidesteps strict partisan labels. The findings suggest that these individuals are an active, distinct segment of the voting public wanting better representation.

Left-Leaning Americans Are Driving the U.S. Birth Decline

Demographic data suggests that political beliefs are increasingly linked to the number of children Americans choose to have. A recent study indicates that while conservative individuals tend to maintain birth rates near historical averages, left-leaning individuals are having significantly fewer children. This provides evidence that differing birth rates across ideological lines are a main driver of recent fertility declines in the United States.

The researchers analyzed data from the General Social Survey collected between 1970 and 2022. The sample included nearly 23,000 adults who had generally completed their childbearing years. For individuals born in the early 1900s, political orientation had almost no association with the number of children they had.

A massive divergence began to emerge with the cohort born in the mid-1940s. From that point onward, individuals with right-wing political views maintained birth rates near the replacement level, which is the rate needed for a population to replace itself without immigration. In contrast, the birth rates of left-wing individuals dropped sharply, falling well below the replacement level in more recent cohorts.

Authoritarianism Acts as a Psychological Bridge for Dark Personalities

People with antagonistic personality traits often express their self-centered tendencies through rigid, authoritarian political beliefs. Recent psychological frameworks group traits like narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism into a single concept known as the dark factor of personality. This core represents a general tendency to maximize personal gains at the expense of others while justifying the resulting harm.

Researchers designed a study to see how these harsh personality characteristics translate into political ideology and self-control. They surveyed 498 adult participants to measure their personality traits, emotional regulation, and political attitudes. The team specifically looked at right-wing authoritarianism, which centers on strict obedience to established authorities and a desire to punish rule-breakers.

The data showed that the dark factor of personality was entirely connected to self-control through authoritarian beliefs. Individuals with highly antagonistic dispositions reported stricter adherence to traditional authorities, which in turn was associated with their reported levels of self-control. This suggests that these individuals might use disciplined rule-following and punitive beliefs as a socially acceptable way to express their underlying hostility.

Republicans Are More Likely to See a Smile as a Play for Power

A person’s political identity appears to influence how they interpret the meaning behind a human smile. Psychological research indicates that smiling is a complex behavior serving multiple social purposes. While some smiles function to promote social bonding and reward others, different smiles help individuals manage social hierarchies by asserting dominance or signaling submission.

To see if everyday voters expect different functions from smiles depending on their beliefs, researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of adults right before the 2024 presidential election. Participants evaluated 15 different reasons why someone might smile. The statements were chosen to represent either egalitarian bonding or competitive hierarchy.

The researchers found that identifying with the Republican Party was the strongest predictor of how a person viewed smiles. Participants who identified as Republicans had substantially higher odds of endorsing hierarchy management as a reason for smiling compared to non-Republicans. The authors propose that growing up in close-knit, uniform communities might shape this hierarchical view of social interactions.

The Diploma Divide Is Real, but College Doesn’t Make Students as Liberal as People Think

Public discussions frequently debate whether colleges actively impose left-leaning ideologies on young adults. A recent study provides evidence that while completing a college degree has become increasingly linked to a liberal political identity, the actual changes during college are smaller than the general public assumes. The researchers wanted to investigate exactly how political views shift during college and which factors influence those changes.

To understand this issue, the authors separated political ideology into two categories. Issue-based ideology refers to a person’s specific views on concrete topics like taxation, while identity-based ideology refers to the label a person uses to describe themselves. The researchers found that college graduates increasingly identified as liberal starting around 2012, creating a notable diploma divide in political identity.

However, when analyzing data from over 360,000 undergraduates, they found that most students did not change their political identity during college. Among those who did change, the average shift was only slightly to the left. A supplemental study revealed that American adults tend to think college students’ political identities change about twice as much as they actually do.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/nine-recent-studies-that-reveal-the-hidden-psychology-of-american-politics/

-------------------------------------------------

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

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PoliticalPsychology #AmericanPolitics #MoralCircle #EducationVsRace #Independents #AIinPolitics #BirthRatePolitics #Authoritarianism #SmilePerception #DiplomaDivide

DATE: July 12, 2026 at 02:00PM
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: Nine recent studies that reveal the hidden psychology of American politics

URL: https://www.psypost.org/nine-recent-studies-that-reveal-the-hidden-psychology-of-american-politics/

Political ideologies now permeate nearly every aspect of human life. Recent psychological and demographic research suggests that a person’s partisan identity influences behaviors far beyond the voting booth. Our political affiliations correlate with everything from how we interpret a simple smile to how many children we choose to have.

At the same time, the institutions and platforms that shape public discourse are evolving rapidly. Elected officials increasingly use digital networks to broadcast anger, while ordinary citizens find themselves unable to distinguish real political speech from text generated by artificial intelligence. Old assumptions about race, education, and political independence are also facing scrutiny as massive new datasets emerge.

The nine peer-reviewed studies detailed below provide evidence of a rapidly changing American electorate. They highlight how underlying psychological traits, shifting demographics, and modern communication tools actively rewrite the rules of civic engagement. Together, this research offers a detailed look at the unseen forces guiding human behavior in a highly polarized era.

The Political Realignment of America: Education Overtakes Race

An analysis of survey data spanning five presidential election years suggests that the main dividing lines in American politics are changing. Ideological differences between racial groups have decreased sharply since 2008. At the same time, differences based on a person’s level of education have grown substantially.

This shift occurred partly because Black and Hispanic respondents became more conservative on average. In addition, individuals with a high school diploma or less shifted toward conservatism across all racial groups. Participants with college and graduate degrees became more liberal during this same period.

The study authors analyzed answers from over 250,000 respondents using data from the Cooperative Election Study. Participants answered questions on topics like taxes, healthcare, and immigration to measure their place on the liberal-conservative spectrum. The results indicate that education is now a highly prominent ideological divider in the United States.

Viral Heatmap Gets It Wrong: Liberals Don’t Prioritize Strangers Over Family

A viral chart circulating on social media previously claimed that political liberals care more about strangers and animals than their own family members. A new psychological study tested this idea and found no evidence of an inverted moral hierarchy on the political left. Instead, the research suggests that liberals simply extend their moral concern further outward while still prioritizing those closest to them.

Scientists use the concept of a moral circle to describe the psychological boundary of who or what a person considers worthy of ethical care. The researchers asked participants to allocate a fixed number of moral concern points across different groups, ranging from immediate family to all things in existence. This method forced participants to make tradeoffs, mimicking real-world situations where time and resources are limited.

Across multiple large samples, people across the entire political spectrum placed their closest relationships at the absolute top of their moral concern. Both conservatives and liberals overwhelmingly prioritized their family and friends. Liberals did exhibit a larger overall moral circle by extending more concern to distant targets like marginalized groups and the environment, but this did not come at the expense of caring for their loved ones.

Democrats Are Disproportionately Driving the Rise in Angry Congressional Tweets

Members of the United States Congress increasingly rely on angry rhetoric on social media to build their political brands. A recent study provides evidence that this rise in outrage is not evenly distributed across political parties. Democratic lawmakers appear to be disproportionately driving the trend toward hostile digital communication.

The researchers analyzed over 2.2 million official posts sent by members of Congress on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Because reading millions of posts by hand is impossible, the scientists used computational textual analysis. This software scanned the large bodies of text to identify specific words and emotional tones associated with anger and indignation.

The data revealed that while both parties utilize outrage to some extent, the overall escalation in angry messaging is largely fueled by the Democratic side of the aisle. The authors note that politicians across the spectrum use anger to gain attention and receive higher user engagement. High-arousal emotions tend to capture public attention quickly, giving lawmakers a strong incentive to use this type of language.

Voters Find AI-Generated Debate Answers More Authentic Than Real Political Speech

Artificial intelligence models can now generate political debate responses that everyday people find more authentic than the actual answers given by real politicians. Generative artificial intelligence refers to software systems designed to create new content based on vast patterns they learned during their training. These systems are remarkably good at imitating human communication.

To test the public perception of this technology, researchers used an artificial intelligence model to create fake responses to real audience questions from a British political debate television program. They instructed the software to roleplay as specific public figures. The scientists then asked a representative sample of 948 British adults to evaluate transcripts containing both the real and the fake responses.

Participants consistently rated the machine-generated text as more authentic, more coherent, and more relevant than the actual things the real public figures said. The machine-generated answers were particularly good at staying on topic, while real politicians frequently dodged difficult questions. This study suggests that modern technology could easily be used to mimic public figures and spread highly believable misinformation.

What Millions of Voter Records Reveal About Political Independents

Voters who do not align with the Democratic or Republican parties make up the largest portion of the American electorate. Historical political theory sometimes treated these unaffiliated individuals as apathetic citizens who lack political knowledge. Other experts have argued that independents are essentially partisan voters who hide their actual party preference to avoid social stigma.

To test these ideas, political scientists analyzed over seven million data points from a massive administrative voter database. This approach allowed the team to bypass problems common in standard telephone surveys, which often overrepresent the most active citizens. The researchers found that well over half of the independent individuals registered as moderate in their political beliefs.

A separate national survey revealed that the broader public generally views independents as people eager to work across party lines. The independent voters themselves placed a high priority on having a flexible political identity that sidesteps strict partisan labels. The findings suggest that these individuals are an active, distinct segment of the voting public wanting better representation.

Left-Leaning Americans Are Driving the U.S. Birth Decline

Demographic data suggests that political beliefs are increasingly linked to the number of children Americans choose to have. A recent study indicates that while conservative individuals tend to maintain birth rates near historical averages, left-leaning individuals are having significantly fewer children. This provides evidence that differing birth rates across ideological lines are a main driver of recent fertility declines in the United States.

The researchers analyzed data from the General Social Survey collected between 1970 and 2022. The sample included nearly 23,000 adults who had generally completed their childbearing years. For individuals born in the early 1900s, political orientation had almost no association with the number of children they had.

A massive divergence began to emerge with the cohort born in the mid-1940s. From that point onward, individuals with right-wing political views maintained birth rates near the replacement level, which is the rate needed for a population to replace itself without immigration. In contrast, the birth rates of left-wing individuals dropped sharply, falling well below the replacement level in more recent cohorts.

Authoritarianism Acts as a Psychological Bridge for Dark Personalities

People with antagonistic personality traits often express their self-centered tendencies through rigid, authoritarian political beliefs. Recent psychological frameworks group traits like narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism into a single concept known as the dark factor of personality. This core represents a general tendency to maximize personal gains at the expense of others while justifying the resulting harm.

Researchers designed a study to see how these harsh personality characteristics translate into political ideology and self-control. They surveyed 498 adult participants to measure their personality traits, emotional regulation, and political attitudes. The team specifically looked at right-wing authoritarianism, which centers on strict obedience to established authorities and a desire to punish rule-breakers.

The data showed that the dark factor of personality was entirely connected to self-control through authoritarian beliefs. Individuals with highly antagonistic dispositions reported stricter adherence to traditional authorities, which in turn was associated with their reported levels of self-control. This suggests that these individuals might use disciplined rule-following and punitive beliefs as a socially acceptable way to express their underlying hostility.

Republicans Are More Likely to See a Smile as a Play for Power

A person’s political identity appears to influence how they interpret the meaning behind a human smile. Psychological research indicates that smiling is a complex behavior serving multiple social purposes. While some smiles function to promote social bonding and reward others, different smiles help individuals manage social hierarchies by asserting dominance or signaling submission.

To see if everyday voters expect different functions from smiles depending on their beliefs, researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of adults right before the 2024 presidential election. Participants evaluated 15 different reasons why someone might smile. The statements were chosen to represent either egalitarian bonding or competitive hierarchy.

The researchers found that identifying with the Republican Party was the strongest predictor of how a person viewed smiles. Participants who identified as Republicans had substantially higher odds of endorsing hierarchy management as a reason for smiling compared to non-Republicans. The authors propose that growing up in close-knit, uniform communities might shape this hierarchical view of social interactions.

The Diploma Divide Is Real, but College Doesn’t Make Students as Liberal as People Think

Public discussions frequently debate whether colleges actively impose left-leaning ideologies on young adults. A recent study provides evidence that while completing a college degree has become increasingly linked to a liberal political identity, the actual changes during college are smaller than the general public assumes. The researchers wanted to investigate exactly how political views shift during college and which factors influence those changes.

To understand this issue, the authors separated political ideology into two categories. Issue-based ideology refers to a person’s specific views on concrete topics like taxation, while identity-based ideology refers to the label a person uses to describe themselves. The researchers found that college graduates increasingly identified as liberal starting around 2012, creating a notable diploma divide in political identity.

However, when analyzing data from over 360,000 undergraduates, they found that most students did not change their political identity during college. Among those who did change, the average shift was only slightly to the left. A supplemental study revealed that American adults tend to think college students’ political identities change about twice as much as they actually do.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/nine-recent-studies-that-reveal-the-hidden-psychology-of-american-politics/

-------------------------------------------------

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 #PoliticalPsychology #AmericanPolitics #MoralCircle #EducationVsRace #Independents #AIinPolitics #BirthRatePolitics #Authoritarianism #SmilePerception #DiplomaDivide

DATE: July 7, 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: Viral heatmap gets it wrong: Liberals don’t prioritize strangers over family

URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/

A new psychological study published in Political Psychology suggests that people on the political left do not value distant strangers more than their own friends and family. Instead, the research indicates that liberals simply extend their moral concern further outward while still prioritizing those closest to them. These findings help explain how different ideological groups balance local loyalties with global compassion.

Human beings naturally display ingroup bias, which is the tendency to favor family, friends, and familiar community members over outsiders. Social identity theory proposes that people derive a strong sense of self-worth from their group memberships, fostering deep loyalty toward insiders. Evolutionary biology models suggest that this trait helped early humans survive in small, tightly knit groups by ensuring mutual protection and resource sharing.

Over time, human societies have grown more interconnected, prompting discussions about how people expand their moral circle. The moral circle is a concept describing the psychological boundary of who or what a person considers worthy of ethical care. In 2019, a paper titled “Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle” by Adam Waytz and colleagues explored this concept.

In one phase of their 2019 research, the authors asked participants to allocate moral concern across concentric circles ranging from immediate family to all things in existence. The study produced data that eventually became a viral visual on social media. Memes featuring two heatmap charts, one labeled “conservatives” and the other “liberals,” began appearing in political discussions online.

Right-wing commentators and even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration have used the heatmap to imply that liberals care more about strangers and animals than about their immediate family.

Kyle Fiore Law, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah and director of the Morality, Altruism, and Prosociality Lab, noticed this narrative taking shape. “A specific claim had been circulating in public discourse, that people on the political left have come to value distant others more than their own family, neighbors, and community, effectively reversing the usual ordering of moral concern,” Law said.

“That ‘inversion’ framing showed up in political rhetoric and in a widely shared social media chart. It’s an empirically testable descriptive claim, so we wanted to test it directly.”

The previous research methods had some structural limitations regarding how people could express their priorities. “The most cited prior work here shows that liberals tend to draw a broader moral circle than conservatives, but those tasks were built in a way that assumes concern expands outward step by step, which made them poorly suited to detect whether concern for distant others actually trades off against concern for close others,” Law explained. “We used a measure that lets people structure their own moral circles independently, so that tradeoff could show up if it existed.”

The research team, led by Law and Stylianos Syropoulos of Arizona State University, conducted three separate analyses. In the first phase, known as Study 1a, they examined a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adult participants in the United States. The participants completed a short version of the Moral Expansiveness Scale, alongside a measure of their political ideology ranging from very liberal to very conservative.

This scale measures how much moral concern a person attributes to various entities, allowing participants to structure their own moral circles independently. Participants rated targets like genetic relatives, individuals of different religions, plants, animals, and villains. They assigned each target a score from zero to three, where zero meant the entity fell outside their moral boundary and three placed it in their inner circle.

The findings from Study 1a provided evidence that concern for distant entities does not reduce concern for close ones. Rating human outgroups highly on the moral scale actually correlated positively with caring for genetic relatives. Across almost all political affiliations, participants consistently granted the highest level of moral concern to their own inner circle. Surprisingly, very conservative participants showed a slightly smaller gap between family and outgroups, primarily because they reported slightly lower concern for genetic relatives compared to other political groups.

“In the nationally representative sample, the most conservative participants were the one group that didn’t show a clear gap between concern for ingroups and outgroups, and that came from somewhat lower concern for close others rather than heightened concern for outgroups,” Law told PsyPost. However, he noted that the “pattern did not hold in our preregistered replication, so I’d read it as a lead for future work rather than a firm result.”

For Study 1b, the scientists analyzed combined data from four previous online samples, totaling 3,201 adult participants from the United States. This phase utilized a longer version of the same moral scale. The list featured a wider variety of targets, including romantic partners, friends, opposing political members, coral reefs, and artificial intelligence constructs like supercomputers.

The results from Study 1b supported the first study. Both liberals and conservatives overwhelmingly prioritized their family and friends over outgroups, nature, and artificial intelligence. Liberals did exhibit a larger overall moral circle, but this expansion was driven by increased concern for marginalized humans and the environment. It did not stem from a lack of concern for their close social ties. Interestingly, conservatives in this sample showed slightly higher moral concern for artificial intelligence than liberals did.

To confirm these patterns under different conditions, the authors conducted a new, preregistered experiment called Study 2. They recruited 899 adults from an online platform, intentionally gathering roughly equal numbers of liberals, moderates, and conservatives. This study measured moral concern in two distinct ways to capture different psychological realities.

First, participants completed the unconstrained rating scale using updated categories. These categories included future generations alongside close others, human outgroups, animals, plants, technological agents, and criminals. In this unconstrained format, the findings replicated the earlier results. Every ideological group placed their close relationships at the absolute top of their moral hierarchy.

Second, the scientists introduced a fixed-resource allocation task. Participants received 100 moral concern points to distribute across the different entity categories. This setup mimics real-world scenarios where time, money, and attention are strictly limited resources that must be divided.

When resources were constrained to 100 points, tradeoffs naturally emerged. Giving points to distant targets mathematically required taking points away from close ones. Under these strict limits, liberals distributed more points to plants and future generations than conservatives did, which resulted in them allocating slightly fewer points to their close family and friends.

But even with this resource limitation in place, the inner circle remained the dominant priority across the entire political spectrum. The data suggests that liberals and conservatives largely agree on who matters most in a general sense. They simply differ on exactly how much of a limited resource should be shared with the broader world when sacrifices are necessary.

“Across a nationally representative sample, four large online samples, and a preregistered replication, people across the whole political spectrum placed their closest relationships at the top of their moral concern,” Law explained. “We found no evidence of an inverted hierarchy on the left. What differed by ideology was how far concern reached outward. Liberals, on average, extended more concern to distant targets like human outgroups, animals, and future generations, which is why their overall moral circles look larger, and that did not come with reduced concern for close others. When we forced people to divide a fixed pool of concern, tradeoffs did appear, but ingroups still came first for everyone. The more accurate summary is broader scope sitting alongside strong concern for those close to home.”

“The ingroup-first pattern was large and highly consistent, with very sizable effect sizes in the online samples. That’s the robust headline. The ideological differences in concern for distant targets were real but modest, often on the order of one to three percent of the variance. I’d encourage readers to hold both facts together. Prioritizing close others is close to universal and strongly expressed, and the liberal-conservative gap is a smaller difference layered on top of that shared pattern.”

While the findings challenge the idea of a liberal moral inversion, the researchers are careful to bound their conclusions. “The most important thing to flag is that this is descriptive work,” Law noted. “We’re not making any claim about whether prioritizing close or distant others is the morally right thing to do. That’s a question for ethics and for society, and it sits outside our data.”

The research does have limitations, particularly regarding its reliance on self-reported attitudes rather than physical behaviors. Rating how much you care about an entity on a survey might not perfectly reflect how you would spend your actual money or time. The fixed-resource point task helps bridge this gap, but it still functions as a hypothetical scenario rather than an incentivized behavioral measure.

Looking ahead, the authors plan to expand their methodology to better capture physical behaviors rather than self-reported attitudes. “We’d like to test whether these patterns hold when allocations carry real costs, using incentivized behavioral tasks rather than self-report,” Law explained. “Longitudinal designs would help us understand how moral concern and political identity shape each other over time.”

The research team also hopes to explore the nuances of political affiliation beyond a simple spectrum. “We’re also interested in more specific political identities that a single left-right item can miss, and in running a large nationally representative study with the full measure,” Law said.

“The idea I’d most like readers to walk away with is that debates about ‘moral inversion’ tend to blur two separate questions, how widely someone extends moral regard, and whether extending concern widely necessarily means smaller concern for those who are close,” Law concluded. “Our data seem to show that circles can be wide and also strong at the center at the same time. Keeping those two questions apart makes a lot of the disagreement clearer.”

The study, “Ideological differences in moral concern reflect circle expansion, not inversion,” was authored by Kyle Fiore Law, Seoyeon Bae, Liane Young, and Stylianos Syropoulos.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/

-------------------------------------------------

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 #MoralCircle #LiberalConservative #IngroupBias #MoralExpansion #PoliticalPsychology #Empathy #GlobalCompassion #MoralTradeoffs #LiberalVsConservative #PublicDiscourse

DATE: July 7, 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: Viral heatmap gets it wrong: Liberals don’t prioritize strangers over family

URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/

A new psychological study published in Political Psychology suggests that people on the political left do not value distant strangers more than their own friends and family. Instead, the research indicates that liberals simply extend their moral concern further outward while still prioritizing those closest to them. These findings help explain how different ideological groups balance local loyalties with global compassion.

Human beings naturally display ingroup bias, which is the tendency to favor family, friends, and familiar community members over outsiders. Social identity theory proposes that people derive a strong sense of self-worth from their group memberships, fostering deep loyalty toward insiders. Evolutionary biology models suggest that this trait helped early humans survive in small, tightly knit groups by ensuring mutual protection and resource sharing.

Over time, human societies have grown more interconnected, prompting discussions about how people expand their moral circle. The moral circle is a concept describing the psychological boundary of who or what a person considers worthy of ethical care. In 2019, a paper titled “Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle” by Adam Waytz and colleagues explored this concept.

In one phase of their 2019 research, the authors asked participants to allocate moral concern across concentric circles ranging from immediate family to all things in existence. The study produced data that eventually became a viral visual on social media. Memes featuring two heatmap charts, one labeled “conservatives” and the other “liberals,” began appearing in political discussions online.

Right-wing commentators and even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration have used the heatmap to imply that liberals care more about strangers and animals than about their immediate family.

Kyle Fiore Law, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah and director of the Morality, Altruism, and Prosociality Lab, noticed this narrative taking shape. “A specific claim had been circulating in public discourse, that people on the political left have come to value distant others more than their own family, neighbors, and community, effectively reversing the usual ordering of moral concern,” Law said.

“That ‘inversion’ framing showed up in political rhetoric and in a widely shared social media chart. It’s an empirically testable descriptive claim, so we wanted to test it directly.”

The previous research methods had some structural limitations regarding how people could express their priorities. “The most cited prior work here shows that liberals tend to draw a broader moral circle than conservatives, but those tasks were built in a way that assumes concern expands outward step by step, which made them poorly suited to detect whether concern for distant others actually trades off against concern for close others,” Law explained. “We used a measure that lets people structure their own moral circles independently, so that tradeoff could show up if it existed.”

The research team, led by Law and Stylianos Syropoulos of Arizona State University, conducted three separate analyses. In the first phase, known as Study 1a, they examined a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adult participants in the United States. The participants completed a short version of the Moral Expansiveness Scale, alongside a measure of their political ideology ranging from very liberal to very conservative.

This scale measures how much moral concern a person attributes to various entities, allowing participants to structure their own moral circles independently. Participants rated targets like genetic relatives, individuals of different religions, plants, animals, and villains. They assigned each target a score from zero to three, where zero meant the entity fell outside their moral boundary and three placed it in their inner circle.

The findings from Study 1a provided evidence that concern for distant entities does not reduce concern for close ones. Rating human outgroups highly on the moral scale actually correlated positively with caring for genetic relatives. Across almost all political affiliations, participants consistently granted the highest level of moral concern to their own inner circle. Surprisingly, very conservative participants showed a slightly smaller gap between family and outgroups, primarily because they reported slightly lower concern for genetic relatives compared to other political groups.

“In the nationally representative sample, the most conservative participants were the one group that didn’t show a clear gap between concern for ingroups and outgroups, and that came from somewhat lower concern for close others rather than heightened concern for outgroups,” Law told PsyPost. However, he noted that the “pattern did not hold in our preregistered replication, so I’d read it as a lead for future work rather than a firm result.”

For Study 1b, the scientists analyzed combined data from four previous online samples, totaling 3,201 adult participants from the United States. This phase utilized a longer version of the same moral scale. The list featured a wider variety of targets, including romantic partners, friends, opposing political members, coral reefs, and artificial intelligence constructs like supercomputers.

The results from Study 1b supported the first study. Both liberals and conservatives overwhelmingly prioritized their family and friends over outgroups, nature, and artificial intelligence. Liberals did exhibit a larger overall moral circle, but this expansion was driven by increased concern for marginalized humans and the environment. It did not stem from a lack of concern for their close social ties. Interestingly, conservatives in this sample showed slightly higher moral concern for artificial intelligence than liberals did.

To confirm these patterns under different conditions, the authors conducted a new, preregistered experiment called Study 2. They recruited 899 adults from an online platform, intentionally gathering roughly equal numbers of liberals, moderates, and conservatives. This study measured moral concern in two distinct ways to capture different psychological realities.

First, participants completed the unconstrained rating scale using updated categories. These categories included future generations alongside close others, human outgroups, animals, plants, technological agents, and criminals. In this unconstrained format, the findings replicated the earlier results. Every ideological group placed their close relationships at the absolute top of their moral hierarchy.

Second, the scientists introduced a fixed-resource allocation task. Participants received 100 moral concern points to distribute across the different entity categories. This setup mimics real-world scenarios where time, money, and attention are strictly limited resources that must be divided.

When resources were constrained to 100 points, tradeoffs naturally emerged. Giving points to distant targets mathematically required taking points away from close ones. Under these strict limits, liberals distributed more points to plants and future generations than conservatives did, which resulted in them allocating slightly fewer points to their close family and friends.

But even with this resource limitation in place, the inner circle remained the dominant priority across the entire political spectrum. The data suggests that liberals and conservatives largely agree on who matters most in a general sense. They simply differ on exactly how much of a limited resource should be shared with the broader world when sacrifices are necessary.

“Across a nationally representative sample, four large online samples, and a preregistered replication, people across the whole political spectrum placed their closest relationships at the top of their moral concern,” Law explained. “We found no evidence of an inverted hierarchy on the left. What differed by ideology was how far concern reached outward. Liberals, on average, extended more concern to distant targets like human outgroups, animals, and future generations, which is why their overall moral circles look larger, and that did not come with reduced concern for close others. When we forced people to divide a fixed pool of concern, tradeoffs did appear, but ingroups still came first for everyone. The more accurate summary is broader scope sitting alongside strong concern for those close to home.”

“The ingroup-first pattern was large and highly consistent, with very sizable effect sizes in the online samples. That’s the robust headline. The ideological differences in concern for distant targets were real but modest, often on the order of one to three percent of the variance. I’d encourage readers to hold both facts together. Prioritizing close others is close to universal and strongly expressed, and the liberal-conservative gap is a smaller difference layered on top of that shared pattern.”

While the findings challenge the idea of a liberal moral inversion, the researchers are careful to bound their conclusions. “The most important thing to flag is that this is descriptive work,” Law noted. “We’re not making any claim about whether prioritizing close or distant others is the morally right thing to do. That’s a question for ethics and for society, and it sits outside our data.”

The research does have limitations, particularly regarding its reliance on self-reported attitudes rather than physical behaviors. Rating how much you care about an entity on a survey might not perfectly reflect how you would spend your actual money or time. The fixed-resource point task helps bridge this gap, but it still functions as a hypothetical scenario rather than an incentivized behavioral measure.

Looking ahead, the authors plan to expand their methodology to better capture physical behaviors rather than self-reported attitudes. “We’d like to test whether these patterns hold when allocations carry real costs, using incentivized behavioral tasks rather than self-report,” Law explained. “Longitudinal designs would help us understand how moral concern and political identity shape each other over time.”

The research team also hopes to explore the nuances of political affiliation beyond a simple spectrum. “We’re also interested in more specific political identities that a single left-right item can miss, and in running a large nationally representative study with the full measure,” Law said.

“The idea I’d most like readers to walk away with is that debates about ‘moral inversion’ tend to blur two separate questions, how widely someone extends moral regard, and whether extending concern widely necessarily means smaller concern for those who are close,” Law concluded. “Our data seem to show that circles can be wide and also strong at the center at the same time. Keeping those two questions apart makes a lot of the disagreement clearer.”

The study, “Ideological differences in moral concern reflect circle expansion, not inversion,” was authored by Kyle Fiore Law, Seoyeon Bae, Liane Young, and Stylianos Syropoulos.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/

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DATE: July 7, 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. **
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TITLE: Viral heatmap gets it wrong: Liberals don’t prioritize strangers over family

URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/

A new psychological study published in Political Psychology suggests that people on the political left do not value distant strangers more than their own friends and family. Instead, the research indicates that liberals simply extend their moral concern further outward while still prioritizing those closest to them. These findings help explain how different ideological groups balance local loyalties with global compassion.

Human beings naturally display ingroup bias, which is the tendency to favor family, friends, and familiar community members over outsiders. Social identity theory proposes that people derive a strong sense of self-worth from their group memberships, fostering deep loyalty toward insiders. Evolutionary biology models suggest that this trait helped early humans survive in small, tightly knit groups by ensuring mutual protection and resource sharing.

Over time, human societies have grown more interconnected, prompting discussions about how people expand their moral circle. The moral circle is a concept describing the psychological boundary of who or what a person considers worthy of ethical care. In 2019, a paper titled “Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle” by Adam Waytz and colleagues explored this concept.

In one phase of their 2019 research, the authors asked participants to allocate moral concern across concentric circles ranging from immediate family to all things in existence. The study produced data that eventually became a viral visual on social media. Memes featuring two heatmap charts, one labeled “conservatives” and the other “liberals,” began appearing in political discussions online.

Right-wing commentators and even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration have used the heatmap to imply that liberals care more about strangers and animals than about their immediate family.

Kyle Fiore Law, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah and director of the Morality, Altruism, and Prosociality Lab, noticed this narrative taking shape. “A specific claim had been circulating in public discourse, that people on the political left have come to value distant others more than their own family, neighbors, and community, effectively reversing the usual ordering of moral concern,” Law said.

“That ‘inversion’ framing showed up in political rhetoric and in a widely shared social media chart. It’s an empirically testable descriptive claim, so we wanted to test it directly.”

The previous research methods had some structural limitations regarding how people could express their priorities. “The most cited prior work here shows that liberals tend to draw a broader moral circle than conservatives, but those tasks were built in a way that assumes concern expands outward step by step, which made them poorly suited to detect whether concern for distant others actually trades off against concern for close others,” Law explained. “We used a measure that lets people structure their own moral circles independently, so that tradeoff could show up if it existed.”

The research team, led by Law and Stylianos Syropoulos of Arizona State University, conducted three separate analyses. In the first phase, known as Study 1a, they examined a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adult participants in the United States. The participants completed a short version of the Moral Expansiveness Scale, alongside a measure of their political ideology ranging from very liberal to very conservative.

This scale measures how much moral concern a person attributes to various entities, allowing participants to structure their own moral circles independently. Participants rated targets like genetic relatives, individuals of different religions, plants, animals, and villains. They assigned each target a score from zero to three, where zero meant the entity fell outside their moral boundary and three placed it in their inner circle.

The findings from Study 1a provided evidence that concern for distant entities does not reduce concern for close ones. Rating human outgroups highly on the moral scale actually correlated positively with caring for genetic relatives. Across almost all political affiliations, participants consistently granted the highest level of moral concern to their own inner circle. Surprisingly, very conservative participants showed a slightly smaller gap between family and outgroups, primarily because they reported slightly lower concern for genetic relatives compared to other political groups.

“In the nationally representative sample, the most conservative participants were the one group that didn’t show a clear gap between concern for ingroups and outgroups, and that came from somewhat lower concern for close others rather than heightened concern for outgroups,” Law told PsyPost. However, he noted that the “pattern did not hold in our preregistered replication, so I’d read it as a lead for future work rather than a firm result.”

For Study 1b, the scientists analyzed combined data from four previous online samples, totaling 3,201 adult participants from the United States. This phase utilized a longer version of the same moral scale. The list featured a wider variety of targets, including romantic partners, friends, opposing political members, coral reefs, and artificial intelligence constructs like supercomputers.

The results from Study 1b supported the first study. Both liberals and conservatives overwhelmingly prioritized their family and friends over outgroups, nature, and artificial intelligence. Liberals did exhibit a larger overall moral circle, but this expansion was driven by increased concern for marginalized humans and the environment. It did not stem from a lack of concern for their close social ties. Interestingly, conservatives in this sample showed slightly higher moral concern for artificial intelligence than liberals did.

To confirm these patterns under different conditions, the authors conducted a new, preregistered experiment called Study 2. They recruited 899 adults from an online platform, intentionally gathering roughly equal numbers of liberals, moderates, and conservatives. This study measured moral concern in two distinct ways to capture different psychological realities.

First, participants completed the unconstrained rating scale using updated categories. These categories included future generations alongside close others, human outgroups, animals, plants, technological agents, and criminals. In this unconstrained format, the findings replicated the earlier results. Every ideological group placed their close relationships at the absolute top of their moral hierarchy.

Second, the scientists introduced a fixed-resource allocation task. Participants received 100 moral concern points to distribute across the different entity categories. This setup mimics real-world scenarios where time, money, and attention are strictly limited resources that must be divided.

When resources were constrained to 100 points, tradeoffs naturally emerged. Giving points to distant targets mathematically required taking points away from close ones. Under these strict limits, liberals distributed more points to plants and future generations than conservatives did, which resulted in them allocating slightly fewer points to their close family and friends.

But even with this resource limitation in place, the inner circle remained the dominant priority across the entire political spectrum. The data suggests that liberals and conservatives largely agree on who matters most in a general sense. They simply differ on exactly how much of a limited resource should be shared with the broader world when sacrifices are necessary.

“Across a nationally representative sample, four large online samples, and a preregistered replication, people across the whole political spectrum placed their closest relationships at the top of their moral concern,” Law explained. “We found no evidence of an inverted hierarchy on the left. What differed by ideology was how far concern reached outward. Liberals, on average, extended more concern to distant targets like human outgroups, animals, and future generations, which is why their overall moral circles look larger, and that did not come with reduced concern for close others. When we forced people to divide a fixed pool of concern, tradeoffs did appear, but ingroups still came first for everyone. The more accurate summary is broader scope sitting alongside strong concern for those close to home.”

“The ingroup-first pattern was large and highly consistent, with very sizable effect sizes in the online samples. That’s the robust headline. The ideological differences in concern for distant targets were real but modest, often on the order of one to three percent of the variance. I’d encourage readers to hold both facts together. Prioritizing close others is close to universal and strongly expressed, and the liberal-conservative gap is a smaller difference layered on top of that shared pattern.”

While the findings challenge the idea of a liberal moral inversion, the researchers are careful to bound their conclusions. “The most important thing to flag is that this is descriptive work,” Law noted. “We’re not making any claim about whether prioritizing close or distant others is the morally right thing to do. That’s a question for ethics and for society, and it sits outside our data.”

The research does have limitations, particularly regarding its reliance on self-reported attitudes rather than physical behaviors. Rating how much you care about an entity on a survey might not perfectly reflect how you would spend your actual money or time. The fixed-resource point task helps bridge this gap, but it still functions as a hypothetical scenario rather than an incentivized behavioral measure.

Looking ahead, the authors plan to expand their methodology to better capture physical behaviors rather than self-reported attitudes. “We’d like to test whether these patterns hold when allocations carry real costs, using incentivized behavioral tasks rather than self-report,” Law explained. “Longitudinal designs would help us understand how moral concern and political identity shape each other over time.”

The research team also hopes to explore the nuances of political affiliation beyond a simple spectrum. “We’re also interested in more specific political identities that a single left-right item can miss, and in running a large nationally representative study with the full measure,” Law said.

“The idea I’d most like readers to walk away with is that debates about ‘moral inversion’ tend to blur two separate questions, how widely someone extends moral regard, and whether extending concern widely necessarily means smaller concern for those who are close,” Law concluded. “Our data seem to show that circles can be wide and also strong at the center at the same time. Keeping those two questions apart makes a lot of the disagreement clearer.”

The study, “Ideological differences in moral concern reflect circle expansion, not inversion,” was authored by Kyle Fiore Law, Seoyeon Bae, Liane Young, and Stylianos Syropoulos.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/viral-heatmap-gets-it-wrong-liberals-dont-prioritize-strangers-over-family/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #MoralCircle #LiberalConservative #IngroupBias #MoralExpansion #PoliticalPsychology #Empathy #GlobalCompassion #MoralTradeoffs #LiberalVsConservative #PublicDiscourse