Perceptions of social dangers, moral foundations, and political orientation

What underlies people’s tendency to be politically liberal or conservative? Conservatism has been explained as being a consequence of fear- and anxiety-related variables and, recently, of emphasizing moral foundations pertaining to group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity (which are referred to as the “binding” foundations, as opposed to the “individualizing” foundations pertaining to justice and care). Aiming to integrate these two explanations of political orientation, we conducted a study in which 140 students in the Netherlands completed the belief in a dangerous world scale, the moral foundations questionnaire, and explicit and implicit measures of political orientation. Consistent with previous research, both higher perceptions of social dangers and greater emphases on the binding moral foundations (relative to the individualizing foundations) were associated with explicitly and implicitly measured conservatism. More importantly, there was evidence that a “conservative pattern” of moral attitudes mediates the relationship between perceived social dangers and political conservatism. By integrating conceptually distinct explanations, the present findings take initial steps toward a more complete picture of what underlies individual differences in political orientation.