Who's More Prejudiced, Left or Right?
Conservatives and liberals are equally intolerant - but just toward different groups
For more than half a century, psychologists have told us that conservatives are more prejudiced than liberals1 - that is, that conservatives harbor negative attitudes toward a wider range of groups, from gays and lesbians to ethnic minorities. This difference has been dubbed the prejudice gap, and is typically chalked up to conservatives’ supposed fearfulness and lack of open mindedness.
But although psychologists have amassed considerable evidence of greater prejudice on the right, a growing body of research suggests that the prejudice gap may be overstated - or perhaps even entirely illusory. This might sound like a contradiction, but it’s not. To show that one side is more prejudiced than the other, you have to look at the full spectrum of prejudices, not just an unrepresentative sample. The problem, though, is that most psychologists are liberals, and they may therefore have focused exclusively on conservatives’ prejudices while barely even noticing their own.
A fascinating paper by social psychologist Mark Brandt and colleagues suggests that that’s exactly what’s been happening.