2025/05/05 by Krishnan Nair, Rajen A. Anderson, Trevor Spelman +2 · 6 citations
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Academic Freedom and Politics
paper · doi:10.1037/pspi0000495
= 2,443) operationalizing partisan dislike in various ways (e.g., blocking on social media, rating the likability of various targets, and evaluating hiring suitability)-that Democrats (i.e., liberals) dislike Republicans (i.e., conservatives) more than vice versa. We provide a potential explanation for this phenomenon by extending the worldview conflict perspective to account for asymmetries in how moralized specific values are among two conflicting groups at a given point in time. Specifically, we theorize that in light of recent social trends in the modern-day United States, the moralized belief that counter-partisans pose harm to disadvantaged groups, particularly racial/ethnic minorities, has become an asymmetric contributor to partisan dislike among Democrats. We found support for our theory across both measurement-of-mediation and experimental-mediation approaches and in both field experimental and survey data. Overall, this work advances research on ideology and outgroup hostility and extends the worldview conflict perspective to better explain partisan dislike. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).