The Role of Psychological Distance on the Antecedents and Consequences of Political Outgroup Moral Derogation

Political polarization in the United States has continually increased at least across the past 40 years. Political partisans now regard out-party members as immoral. I employed three experiments (Experiment 1: n = 1070; Experiment 2: n = 402; Experiment 3: n = 392) to explore the antecedents and consequences of moral derogation in an inter-party context using the Ultimatum Game (UG) paradigm. Psychological distance was manipulated in Experiment 3, by randomly assigning participants to play the UG either in the same room or an adjacent room as a confederate. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 were conducted online and served as ancillary comparisons, albeit with important caveats. Political extremity led to out-party moral derogation in conditions of psychological distance, rather than psychological proximity, across all experiments. A trend towards individual moral actions (fair, unfair, or kind actions) moderating the effect of out-party status on moral derogation appeared in a condition of psychological proximity in Experiment 3, but not in a condition of psychological distance in Experiment 3, nor in Experiment 1or Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, evidence suggested that moral derogation elicits harm in a condition of psychological proximity, not psychological distance. However, evidence from Experiment 1and Experiment 2 conflicted with this finding, as moral derogation elicited harm in both experiments. Limitations and future directions are discussed.