Abstract
Although people often tolerate disagreement in attitude domains that concern matters of personal taste or social convention, they are much less tolerant of disagreement about moral convictions—attitudes that they construe as matters of right and wrong. The current studies test a novel theory that this ostensibly unique intolerance for moral disagreement is simply a special case of identity-based prejudice. This theory holds that moral convictions are identity-central components of the collective self, and that intolerance for moral disagreement can be explained by a tendency to use moral convictions to distinguish a moral “us” from an immoral “them.” Consistent with this theory, we found that moral conviction was associated with both self-report and reaction-time measures of identity centrality with remarkable consistency, suggesting that relatively moralized attitudes are almost always at least relatively central to the self-concept. We also found (using a recall-based task of social categorization) that participants were more likely to use their moral convictions to categorize others to the extent that participants identified with those convictions. Inconsistent with our theory, however, we found that political and social intolerance for moral disagreement were unrelated to social categorization processes; moreover, participants’ collective identification with the group of people who shared their moral convictions accounted for little if any of the link between attitude-level moral conviction and intolerance for dissimilar others. We conclude that although moral convictions are very often central to identity and invoke collectives of like-minded others, moral disagreement is not just a matter of “us” versus “them.”