Moralizing Partisanship When Surrounded by Co-Partisans Versus in Mixed Company (WP-24-23)
Michalis Mamakos, Tessa Charlesworth, and Eli Finkel
Partisans tend to view their ingroup as moral and their outgroup as immoral. Here, the researchers examine whether left-wing and right-wing Reddit users (N > 1,000,000) express these partisan moralization views. Critically, they compare the rates of partisan moralization not only when users are in contexts (subreddits) of their ingroup (e.g., r/democrats, r/vegetarian, r/Conservative, r/Hunting), but also when in mixed-company contexts populated mostly by users without partisan engagement (e.g., r/Music, r/Parenting). First, the researchers developed four word embedding models—two for the users of each political side, one based on their comments in their ingroup contexts and one based on their comments in mixed-company contexts. Then, they evaluated the words of each model on two semantic dimensions, partisanship and morality, and they examined their correlation as an indicator of the expressed partisan moralization. The first analysis demonstrated that left-wing users express moralized partisanship to a similar degree when surrounded by co-partisans and when in mixed company. However, the moralized partisanship expressed by right-wing users in mixed company is weaker than that they express among copartisans, as well as that expressed by left-wing users in mixed company. In a second analysis, the researchers divided partisan contexts based on whether they are inherently political (e.g., r/democrats) or not (e.g., r/vegetarian). This second analysis revealed that right-wing users express moralized partisanship more strongly than leftwing users in inherently political contexts, but right- and left-wingers are similar in nonpolitical partisan contexts. These asymmetries can potentially be attributed to the self-censoring of right-wingers due to fear of social sanction.