Moralizing Immigration: Political Framing, Moral Conviction, and Polarization in the United States and Denmark

Morally charged rhetoric is commonplace in political discourse on immigration but scholars have not examined how it affects divisions over the issue among the public. To address this gap, we employ preregistered survey experiments in two countries where anti-immigration rhetoric has been prominent: the United States and Denmark. We demonstrate that exposure to moralized messages leads respondents to place greater moral weight on their existing immigration opinions and become more averse to political leaders and, in the United States, social interaction partners who espouse opposite beliefs. This suggests that political moralization contributes to moral conflict and affective polarization. We find no evidence, however, that moral framing produces attitudinal polarization—that is, more extreme immigration opinions. Our study helps make sense of the heightened intensity of anti-immigrant politics even when attitudes are stable. It also suggests a promising avenue for comparative research on affective polarization by shifting the focus from partisanship to the moralization of existing issue disagreements.

The Significance of Enabling Human Consideration in Policymaking: How to Get the E-Ferry That You Want

There is broad agreement in literature and policy that the transport sector needs to maximise electric mobility, in order to lower both energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This ongoing transformation continues to require a high degree of technological innovation. Consequently, policymakers are striving to reward innovation in procurement tender contracts, in order to achieve sustainable innovation. At the same time, such contracts are often designed with a principle of technology neutrality in mind, to prevent any distortion of the market logic. This article suggests that it is misguided to try to perfect the logic of the tender system and that articulating contract that rewards innovation is no guarantee of a sustainable solution. Rather than being technological, the problem should be seen as moral: the mounting environmental challenge. Policymakers thus have clear ideas about the action needed based on what they, through moral conviction, consider to be appropriate action. This case study—conducted as a part of the EU H2020-funded ECHOES Project under Work Package 6—on the electrification of the Flakk–Rørvik ferry connexion reveals how policymakers were able to achieve the intended results: in this case, an e-ferry rather than a biodiesel ferry, in spite of, rather than because of, the tender system logic. They achieved this by involving stakeholders in the process with a continuous and uninterrupted dialogue. The project stakeholders were able to intervene in the tender system logic in favour of human considerations. We argue that this project was a success because human judgement, not system logic, was the driving force. By extension, we argue that systems will only allow policymakers to pursue moral issues to the degree that they allow human intervention.

Moral Conviction

Moral conviction refers to the perception that one’s feelings about a given attitude object are based on one’s beliefs about right and wrong. Holding an attitude with moral conviction means that a person has attached moral significance to it. Some people hold an attitude based on their likes and dislikes, or their preferences. Other attitudes may be based more on norms and conventions in a society, such as what the law dictates or what close others believe. Still other attitudes are based on people’s beliefs about right and wrong, and thus are attitudes held with moral conviction. Unlike some of the other dominant ways of conceptualizing morality in moral psychology, research on moral conviction takes a bottom-up approach. Instead of assuming certain issues are moral, individuals are asked to evaluate different attitude objects and issues based on their beliefs about right and wrong with questions like, “To what extent is your position on X connected to your beliefs about fundamental right and wrong?” Attitudes held with strong moral conviction, also called “moral mandates,” have a number of important characteristics and consequences that set them apart from other strong, but nonmoral, attitudes. When an attitude is based on one’s sense of right and wrong, it is perceived to be more of an objective fact (e.g., it is the correct and factual position to have) that should be universally held. Morally convicted attitudes have a stronger emotional intensity than equally strong but nonmoral attitudes. These attitudes are more likely to have a motivational component to them, so people act in favor of their moral attitudes because they provide justification for the action and are seen as obligations. Moral convictions can also provide an internal guide for behavior, independent of authority or group influence (i.e., authority independence). Moral mandates have a variety of consequences, which can be seen in either a normatively positive or negative light. Moral conviction is, for example, associated with increased political engagement and volunteerism (generally seen as normative goods), but also predicts increased intolerance and unwillingness to compromise with those who do not share one’s moral point of view (generally seen as normative bads).

An Examination of the Social Identity Model of Collective Action in the Context of Vietnam

Introduction: Although collective action relating to land and environmental disputes in Vietnam has been increasing over the past decades, there is little research from the perspective of social psychology on this topic. Objective: This study was conducted to examine the applicability of the social identity model of collective action [SIMCA] in the context of Vietnam. Specifically, we assessed the predictive powers of moral conviction, politicized identity, group-based anger, and group efficacy on people’s intentions to engage in collective action in a situation where people from three communes of Hanoi blocked garbage trucks to enter a waste treatment complex located in this area. Methods: The participants were 132 residents from these communes. We collected the data by a self-report survey and then executed regression and path analyses to test our hypotheses. Results and Discussion: The results indicated that, except for group efficacy, variables in SIMCA were capable of independently predicting intentions to participate in collective action. Also, politicized identity had directly and indirectly positive effects on collective action intentions through group-based anger but not group efficacy. Politicized identity and group-based anger played partial mediating roles in the relationship between moral conviction and collective action intentions. Conclusion: These findings partly supporting the proposed SIMCA demonstrated the impacts of Vietnam's unique cultural and political characteristics on individuals' engagement in collective action relating to land and environmental disputes between people and their local authorities.

The Psychology of Moral Conviction

This review covers theory and research on the psychological characteristics and consequences of attitudes that are experienced as moral convictions, that is, attitudes that people perceive as grounded in a fundamental distinction between right and wrong. Morally convicted attitudes represent something psychologically distinct from other constructs (e.g., strong but nonmoral attitudes or religious beliefs), are perceived as universally and objectively true, and are comparatively immune to authority or peer influence. Variance in moral conviction also predicts important social and political consequences. Stronger moral conviction about a given attitude object, for example, is associated with greater intolerance of attitude dissimilarity, resistance to procedural solutions for conflict about that issue, and increased political engagement and volunteerism in that attitude domain. Finally, we review recent research that explores the processes that lead to attitude moralization; we integrate these efforts and conclude with a new domain theory of attitude moralization.

Social Influence and Group Identity

This chapter reviews research on the group identity explanation of social influence, grounded in self-categorization theory, and contrasts it with other group-based explanations, including normative influence, interdependence, and social network approaches, as well as approaches to persuasion and influence that background group (identity) processes. Although the review primarily discusses recent research, its focus also invites reappraisal of some classic research in order to address basic questions about the scope and power of the group identity explanation. The self-categorization explanation of influence grounded in group norms, moderated by group identification, is compared and contrasted to other normative explanations of influence, notably the concept of injunctive norms and the relation to moral conviction. A range of moderating factors relating to individual variation, features of the intragroup and intergroup context, and important contextual variables (i.e., anonymity versus visibility, isolation versus copresence) that are particularly relevant to online influence in the new media are also reviewed.

Moral conviction increases sharing preference for politically congruent headlines

Evidence suggests that political polarization in the United States may be due, in part, to liberal and conservative partisans living in different factual realities, as a consequence of being exposed to information streams that rarely challenge their background beliefs and cherished narratives. In this project, we approached the issue of biased access to political information at the level of information emission, by focusing on ordinary citizens’ decisions to share political news headlines on simulated social media touching on four controversial issues: gun control, abortion, sex equality and racial equality. Across 8 studies, we found robust evidence that participants have a sharing preference for politically congruent news items over incongruent ones, and that this sharing bias increases with the moral importance of the issue. Those effects were observed on true and false headlines alike. Perceived accuracy and coalitional motivations to share headlines to advance political goals were among the main motivations to share. The transmission preference for congruent content and its interaction with issue importance held in spite of manipulations of the anonymousness of sharing (from an anonymous vs. a personal social media account), and audience’s political congeniality (agree vs. disagree). Intervention messages reminding participants of their susceptibility to the myside bias had little moderating influence. While biased communication on politics may be rational for the individual, it likely contributes to reinforce partisan differences in perceptions of society, and may reinforce affective polarization.