Research suggests that people believe that Democrats are more likely to
endorse individualizing morals like fairness and Republicans are more likely to
endorse binding morals like obedience to authority; these beliefs reflect exagerations of true differences. The present study tested whether these beliefs explain why people tend to like political ingroup members more than outgroup members. Prior to the 2016 election, American
participants (N=314) viewed an ostensible Facebook profile that shared an
article endorsing conservative ideals (pro-Trump or pro-Republican), or liberal
ideals (pro-Clinton or pro-Democrat). Participants rated the favorability of
the profile-owner, and completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire for the
profile-owner and themselves. As predicted, participants liked the
profile-owner more when they shared political beliefs, and used political
stereotypes to infer the moral foundations of the profile-owner. Additionally, the
perceived moral foundation endorsement of the profile owner differentially
mediated the relationship between the ideology and evaluations of the profile
owner based on the party affiliation of the participant: perceived individualizing
foundations mediated the relationship
for Democratic participants and perceived binding foundations mediated the
relationship for Republican participants. In other words, people liked their
in-group members more because they thought that the profile-owner endorsed a specific
type of morals. In Study 2 (completed both 6 months and 2 years after the the 2016 election), we ruled out the
potential explanation that any political stereotype can account for the
similarity-liking effect, replicating the results of Study 1 even when controlling
for perceptions of other personality differences. Taken together, these studies
highlight that there may be something unique about the perceived type of morality
of political in-group and out-group members that may be contributing to the
similarity-liking effect in politics.