A new study finds both conservatives and liberals think progressive causes are morally superior

Political tension has and will likely always exist, but there is always the question of how loose or how tight the tension between the opposing parties will be. However, two studies of left-winged and right-winged causes in Spain found that there is common ground between them. The results found that people both on the left and right felt a strong moral obligation to protect traditionally progressive issues such as environmental policy and gender equality. Not only that, the conservatives in the studies found their leftists counterparts to be more morally focused than they are as a group.

The two Spanish studies had enlisted psychology students and their acquaintances for the online studies. The first one asked 650 participants to rate their sense of moral obligation to defend one of 12 political topics randomly assigned, each one strongly associated either important to the left (such as the environment) or the right (like national security). They also asked participants their political orientation so they could focus in on the very left-winged and the very-right winged participants, and had them rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with various statements like “Defending ____ is a deep moral imperative” and the like.

The second study of 749 participants rated the various moral, meta-, and self-stereotypes related to ideological groups, evaluating how moral they thought leftists and ring-wingers were along with what they believed about their own groups in terms of their morality.

There was a consistent result across both studies: leftist concerns and left-winged individuals were judged as more moral than the right. The right-winged individuals felt that there was a more moral obligation to support traditionally progressive issues such as lowering poverty than right-winged policies such as protecting national identity.

“We expected some differences, but the consistency of the asymmetry was striking. Even rightists reported feeling more morally obliged to defend leftist causes than rightist ones,” said Prof. Cristian Catena-Fernández to PsyPost. “One key message is that political conflict is not only about policy differences, but about competing moral narratives. Recognizing that both sides see themselves as morally motivated may be a first step toward fostering more constructive dialogue.”

It should be noted that while the results of this study are interesting and are worthy of discussion, there are multiple caveats that don’t make this an all-encompassing conclusion between the left and the right. First, the study was done with primarily university students rather than a wider variety of people of different ages, classes, and educational backgrounds. Along with that, the study was done exclusively in Spain and not Europe as a whole, much less involving American or global politics. Thirdly, the study specifically excluded moderates who could have their own feelings and opinions about either far-right or far-left sides of the political coin. While it’s promising to see that both sides of the aisle have common agreements anywhere, this type of study needs to be massively expanded and undergo multiple trials across the world to determine anything concrete.

However, even if the study’s findings were found to be true across the globe, just because a person or an issue is seen as moral doesn’t mean it generates votes. A prime example of this is the current U.S. President Donald Trump. A significant bloc of Trump’s own voters never found him to be of questionable moral character but voted for him anyway, even after he was a convicted felon. This is because his voters saw him as a more effective leader and could provide the change they were looking for in spite of his perceived moral shortcomings or any methods deemed immoral that lead to the desired results.

In the end, better understanding of the mentality of people and voters can hopefully yield better results in the long term.