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Putting Within-Country Political Differences in (Global) Perspective

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The current political discourse in the United States focuses on extreme political polarization as a contributor to ills ranging from government shutdowns to awkward family holidays. And indeed, a large body of research has documented differences between liberals and conservatives–primarily focused on Republicans and Democrats in the United States. We combine large international surveys and more fine-grained surveys of United States citizens to compare differences in opinion between Republicans and Democrats to the full range of world opinion on moral issues (N = 37,653 in 39 countries) and issues of free speech (N = 40,786 in 38 countries). When viewed in the full distribution, polarization between Democrats and Republicans appears relatively small, even on divisive issues such as abortion, sexual preference, and freedom of religious speech. The average Democrat-Republic overlap is greater than 70% of the country pair overlaps across eight moral issues, meaning that 70% of the country pairs are more dissimilar from each other than Democrats and Republicans are dissimilar; similarly, the average Democrat-Republic overlap is greater than 79% of the country pair overlaps across five freedom of speech issues. These results suggest that cross-cultural comparisons are useful for putting differences between political partisans within the same country in context.
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Putting Within-Country Political Differences in
(Global) Perspective
Ximena Garcia-RadaID, Michael I. Norton*
Marketing unit, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, United States of America
*mnorton@hbs.edu
Abstract
The current political discourse in the United States focuses on extreme political polarization
as a contributor to ills ranging from government shutdowns to awkward family holidays. And
indeed, a large body of research has documented differences between liberals and conser-
vatives–primarily focused on Republicans and Democrats in the United States. We combine
large international surveys and more fine-grained surveys of United States citizens to com-
pare differences in opinion between Republicans and Democrats to the full range of world
opinion on moral issues (N= 37,653 in 39 countries) and issues of free speech (N= 40,786
in 38 countries). When viewed in the full distribution, polarization between Democrats and
Republicans appears relatively small, even on divisive issues such as abortion, sexual pref-
erence, and freedom of religious speech. The average Democrat-Republic overlap is
greater than 70% of the country pair overlaps across eight moral issues, meaning that 70%
of the country pairs are more dissimilar from each other than Democrats and Republicans
are dissimilar; similarly, the average Democrat-Republic overlap is greater than 79% of the
country pair overlaps across five freedom of speech issues. These results suggest that
cross-cultural comparisons are useful for putting differences between political partisans
within the same country in context.
Introduction
Heated discussions on social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and free speech have char-
acterized politics in the United States for many years; political leaders have suggested and
scholars have provided evidence of a steady increase in the gap between opinions of Demo-
cratic and Republican citizens on a host of issues [13]. Moreover, polarization has been linked
to a number of troubling outcomes, from decreased voter turnout to inequality to the
increased dominance of single-issue interest groups on the political process [4]. We argue that
dissimilarities between Democrats and Republicans may mask some underlying level of agree-
ment, such that disagreements between Republicans and Democrats may be less extreme than
they are often perceived. We suggest that placing the views of both parties in global perspec-
tive–comparing them not only to each other but to citizens of nearly 40 countries–demon-
strates that political partisans in the United States exhibit markedly more similar views to each
other than to citizens of other countries.
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OPEN ACCESS
Citation: Garcia-Rada X, Norton MI (2020) Putting
Within-Country Political Differences in (Global)
Perspective. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0231794. https://
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231794
Editor: Jeff Galak, Carnegie Mellon Univeristy,
UNITED STATES
Received: December 31, 2019
Accepted: March 31, 2020
Published: April 23, 2020
Copyright: ©2020 Garcia-Rada, Norton. This is an
open access article distributed under the terms of
the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author and source are credited.
Data Availability Statement: All data were
collected by Pew Research and can be downloaded
from Pew Research Center Global Attitudes and
Trends website: https://www.pewresearch.org/
global/datasets/ All analyses were performed using
the statistical software R (v 3.6.1). R files are
publicly available via Open Science Framework:
https://osf.io/yqzn7
Funding: The authors received no specific funding
for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared
that no competing interests exist.
Certainly, decades of research have documented robust differences between liberals and
conservatives on a host of psychological dimensions. Some research grounds the dissimilarities
between the two groups in personality traits [5]: liberals are more open to experience and
think more analytically, whereas conservatives prefer familiarity, stability, and predictability
[6,7]. Carney and colleagues [8] offer a theoretical framework and empirical evidence to sup-
port the notion that liberals score higher in openness to experience–pursuing creativity, nov-
elty, and diversity–while conservatives score higher in conscientiousness and prefer lives that
are orderly, conventional, and organized. Research in neuroscience has assessed differences in
neurocognitive functioning of liberals and conservatives [9]. And research in moral psychol-
ogy suggests that liberals and conservatives have different moral values and vary in the moral
foundations most central to their judgments and decisions [10]: liberals rely primarily on two
foundations (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity), whereas conservatives rely on all five dimen-
sions [11]. Indeed, the number of investigations demonstrating additional differences between
the two groups is too large for this brief review, ranging from different moral intuitions to dif-
ferent sensitivity to deviance [12,13].
Despite these many differences, scholars have noted that the differences between the two
groups are small in magnitude and identified underlying similarities. For example, Carney and
colleagues [8] concluded that “although our studies show clearly that there are genuine differ-
ences between liberals and conservatives, we do not wish to overstate the magnitude or signifi-
cance of these differences (pp. 835).” Similarly, psychologists have noted that although the
groups differ on which moral foundations they draw on most heavily, both draw on all five
foundations [1416]. Schein and Gray [17] suggest further similarities in moral judgment
between liberals and conservatives, and Frimer, Skitka, and Motyl [18] demonstrate that indi-
viduals from both groups are similarly motivated to avoid crosscutting information. In addi-
tion, an emerging body of literature demonstrates that while liberals and conservatives differ
in their ideal levels of wealth and income inequality, for both groups, their ideal levels are
more equal than their estimates of the current level of inequality [19,20].
However, even when differences are small, research suggests that people can continue to
demonstrate false polarization in their perceptions of differences–believing that they are “lone
moderates” but others are more extreme [21,22]; indeed, Graham, Nosek and Haidt [23] dem-
onstrate that while people are accurate in guessing the direction of differences between liberals
and conservatives, they overestimate these differences significantly. Similarly, Westfall et al.
[24] use national survey data from the American National Election Study to show that people
in the United States overestimate polarization between attitudes of Democrats and Republi-
cans. Overestimating differences between groups has troubling implications: it reduces liking
and cooperativeness toward outgroup members [25] and drives negative out-group attribu-
tions in competitive contexts [26] as well as ingroup favoritism [27].
We provide a novel approach to reframing polarization between liberals and conservatives,
even on divisive issues–including abortion, homosexuality, and freedom of religious expression–
by placing any differences that do exist in the context of the full range of opinions in countries
across the world. We suggest that cross-cultural comparisons offer a unique lens into understand-
ing the relative magnitude of the differences between Republicans and Democrats, demonstrating
that, placed in context, their similarities may be more pronounced than their differences.
Methods and results
Dataset #1: Moral issues
We first compare levels of moral acceptability for eight moral issues across 39 countries. We
used data from a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in Spring 2013 [28] among
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adult populations, in native languages and using telephone and face-to-face interviews (37,653
respondents from 39 countries; M
age
= 41.72, SD
age
= 16.49; 50.8% female). For each of eight
moral issues–Abortion, Alcohol Use, Contraception Use, Divorce, Extramarital Affairs, Gam-
bling, Homosexuality, and Premarital Sex–survey respondents answered: “Do you personally
believe that [this issue] is morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, or is not a moral issue?”
Response options were “morally acceptable,” “morally unacceptable,” “not a moral issue,”
“depends on the situation,” and “don’t know”; participants could also refuse to answer each
question (see S1 Appendix for exact items and response options).
The United States sample included 1,002 respondents: Democrats (n= 328), Independents
(n= 343), and Republicans (n= 259); 72 respondents were recorded as no preference, other
party, don’t know, or refused. Fig 1 presents results descriptively: we placed Democrats and
Republicans in the global distribution by plotting the proportion of respondents in each country
and also within Democrats and Republicans in the United States who indicated each issue was
“morally acceptable.” For full distributions of all responses in the United States, see S1 Table.
To measure similarities between two groups, we adapted the overlapping coefficient approach
[2931]. Because we had nominal rather than continuous measures, we calculated index of
Fig 1. Moral issues: Democrats and republicans in global context.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231794.g001
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dissimilarities as the ratio of the number that must be moved from cells of excess to cells of defi-
cit to achieve even distributions [32]. To illustrate, imagine that five Democrats and five Republi-
cans answered a question with only two response options: yes and no. If two Democrats selected
yes (and three selected no) and three Republicans selected yes (and two selected no), changing
just one out of the five responses from the Republican group from “yes” to “no” would produce
identical distributions. In this example, the overlap coefficient between Democrats and Republi-
cans would be 80% (= 4/5) and the index of dissimilarity would be 20% (= 1/5).
We used this procedure to calculate a Democrat-Republican overlap for each moral issue
using the StatMatch R package [33], and computed 95% confidence intervals using a bootstrap
procedure (see Democrat-Republican Overlap for eight moral issues in Fig 2); for ease of inter-
pretation, we used one minus the index of dissimilarity as the measure of overlap. Using the
same procedure, we calculated overlap coefficients for all country pairs and plotted the distri-
bution of these overlap coefficients (see Fig 3). Finally, for each moral issue, we calculated the
percentage of country pair overlaps that were smaller than the Democrat-Republican overlap,
along with bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals for this statistic (see Table 1).
Fig 2. Democrat-Republican overlap for moral issues.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231794.g002
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Fig 3. Distribution of all country pair overlap for moral issues.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231794.g003
Table 1. Overlap coefficients for moral issues.
Democrat-Republican Overlap The Democrat-Republican overlap is greater than X% of
the country pairs
Moral Issues Overlap Coefficient 95% Confidence Interval of
Overlap Coefficient
X Statistic 95% Confidence Interval of X
Statistic
Abortion 66% 60% 74% 42% 28% 58%
Alcohol Use 93% 89% 100% 97% 94% 100%
Contraception Use 93% 89% 100% 97% 94% 100%
Divorce 77% 70% 84% 66% 51% 85%
Extramarital Affairs 85% 80% 91% 40% 16% 58%
Gambling 92% 87% 100% 90% 83% 100%
Homosexuality 75% 68% 83% 65% 53% 79%
Premarital Sex 72% 65% 80% 63% 52% 73%
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231794.t001
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As in previous research, Democrats and Republicans in the United States did not fully
agree: while the Democrat-Republican overlap coefficients for all moral issues are at 66% or
above (with Abortion being the most “polarizing” issue), the average overlap across issues was
81% and no issue showed 100% overlap.
However, putting Democrat-Republican disagreement in global context revealed that,
across the eight issues, the average Democrat-Republic overlap is greater than 70% of the coun-
try pair overlaps, meaning that 70% of the country pairs are more dissimilar from each other
than Democrats and Republicans are dissimilar form each other. For six of the moral issues,
the Democrat-Republic overlap was greater than more than half of the country pair overlaps as
the confidence interval for those statistics excluded 50% (columns 5–6 in Table 1). And for the
two issues with the largest disagreement, the Democrat-Republican overlap was still greater
than 42% of all country pairs (Abortion) and 40% than all country pairs (Extramarital Affairs).
Dataset #2: Freedom of speech issues
For these eight moral issues, Americans are often in the middle of the world distribution. Do
Republicans and Democrats agree with each other more than they do with citizens of other
countries simply because they have more “middling” opinions? To address this issue, we next
compare levels of agreement on questions regarding freedom of expression across 38 countries
using a second dataset. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey was administered in Spring 2015
(40,786 respondents from 38 countries; M
age
= 41.92, SD
age
= 16.92; 50.6% female) [34].
Respondents answered five questions about freedom of expression statements: Call for Violent
Protests, Criticize the Government’s Policies, Offensive to Minorities, Offensive to Your Reli-
gion and Beliefs, and Sexually Explicit. Response options were “People should be able to say
these things publically,” “Government should be able to prevent people from saying these
things,” and “Don’t know”; participants could also refuse to answer each question (see S2
Appendix for exact items and response options).
The United States sample included 1,003 respondents: Democrats (n= 291), Independents
(n= 365), and Republicans (n= 286); 61 respondents were recorded as no preference, other
party, don’t know, or refused. Fig 4 presents results descriptively: we first put Democrats and
Republicans in global context by plotting the proportion of respondents in each country and
also within Democrats and Republicans in the United States who indicated “People should be
able to say these things publically” for each issue. For full distributions of responses in the
United States, see S2 Table.
As with the moral issues dataset, we first calculated the Democrat-Republican overlap coef-
ficient for each issue of free speech along with bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals for all
overlap coefficients (see Fig 5), and the overlap coefficients for all country pairs on the same
five issues (see Fig 6). Finally, for each issue, we calculated the percentage of country pair over-
laps that were smaller than the Democrat-Republican overlap, along with bootstrapped 95%
confidence intervals for those statistics (see Table 2).
The overall pattern of results is similar to that of the moral issues. First, Democrats and
Republicans showed some evidence of disagreement: the Democrat-Republican overlap coeffi-
cients for all issues are at 85% or above, and on average showed 92% overlap, but none reached
100%. However, putting Democrat-Republican disagreement in global context revealed that,
across the five freedom of speech issues, the average Democrat-Republic overlap is greater
than 79% of the country pair overlaps. Indeed, for all five freedom of speech issues, the Demo-
crat-Republic overlap was greater than more than half of the country pair overlaps as the confi-
dence intervals for those statistics excluded 50% (columns 5–6 in Table 2). These results for
free speech issues are consistent with the pattern observed on moral issues.
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Discussion
In conclusion, our results clearly demonstrate differences between Republicans and Demo-
crats. An overlap of just 66% in beliefs about the moral acceptability of abortion is no small
Fig 5. Democrat-Republican overlap for freedom of speech issues.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231794.g005
Fig 4. Freedom of speech issues: Democrats and republicans in global context.
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divide to bridge when forming public policy; relatively small differences remain differences
nonetheless, and it is clear that American politics is polarized. However, when reframed and
viewed in global context, our results raise the possibility that–for both moral issues and free-
dom of speech–Democrats and Republicans may share more of a common set of beliefs than is
typically believed. We suggest that such cross-cultural comparisons are a generally useful tool
for understanding the magnitude of gaps in partisan perception. While we focused on compar-
ing political groups within the United States to other countries–primarily because these data
were most readily available–the same strategy can be used to further examine within- versus
between-country similarities and differences around the world. Moreover, building on recent
research showing that emphasizing similarities leads to more accurate lay perceptions [3031]
and reduces intergroup conflict [3536]–placing within-country differences in global context
could have the potential to offer a novel strategy for decreasing perceptions of difference.
Fig 6. Distribution of all country pair overlap for freedom of speech issues.
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Table 2. Overlap coefficients for freedom of speech issues.
Democrat-Republican Overlap The Democrat-Republican overlap is greater than X%
of the country pairs
Freedom of Speech Issues Overlap Coefficient 95% Confidence Interval of
Overlap Coefficient
X Statistic 95% Confidence Interval of X
statistic
Call for Violent Protests 94% 89% 100% 82% 65% 100%
Criticize the Government 96% 94% 100% 88% 79% 100%
Offensive to Minorities 85% 78% 92% 60% 40% 77%
Offensive to Religion 88% 82% 95% 72% 54% 91%
Sexually Explicit 96% 93% 100% 94% 89% 100%
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231794.t002
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Supporting information
S1 Appendix section 1. Supporting information for dataset with moral issues.
(DOCX)
S2 Appendix Section 2. Supporting information for dataset with freedom of speech issues.
(DOCX)
S1 Table. Percentage of respondents across options for eight moral issues for Democrats,
Republicans, and Independents in the United States.
(DOCX)
S2 Table. Percentage of respondents across options for five freedom of speech statements
for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in the United States.
(DOCX)
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Jacob Poushter, Bridget Parker, Grey Smith, and Richard Wike from Pew
Research Center for their assistance, Ista Zahn for statistical support, Bonnie Scranton for data
visualization, and Todd Rogers and Peter Ondish for their helpful suggestions.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Michael I. Norton.
Formal analysis: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Michael I. Norton.
Methodology: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Michael I. Norton.
Project administration: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Michael I. Norton.
Writing original draft: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Michael I. Norton.
Writing review & editing: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Michael I. Norton.
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... The US context has some specific characteristics such as a two-party political system and winner-take-all elections that make it difficult to generalize to other contexts. Nevertheless, studies suggest that some forms of polarization are also on the rise in other countries outside the United States (e.g., 2), whereas on some issues, US polarization is moderate compared to that in other countries (3). Ultimately, however, it may be our perceptions of polarization that have the most influential effects on environmental decision-making. ...
... It is useful to distinguish between these four Whereas opinion polarization focuses on the distribution of people's opinions in society in general, intergroup polarization-also widely known as affective polarization-focuses on the reported affect or emotions that are elicited by ideological (or opinion-based) ingroups and outgroups (i.e., the object of the opinion measure is other groups, rather than issues). 3 This typically involves negative emotions-even hatred-directed toward a perceived outgroup (or outgroups), such as the opposing political party, and/or positive attitudes and emotions directed toward one's ingroup, such as one's own political party (26,39,40). Intergroup polarization is usually measured at the individual level with so-called feeling thermometers that indicate the degree of one's positive or negative affect toward one's ingroup and the opposing outgroup(s) (40). ...
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Polarization in the United States and around the world is of growing concern. Polarization is about more than just differences in opinions in society. It occurs when groups increasingly diverge in either actual or perceived differences in opinion and can involve both disagreements about issues and negative views of other groups. Since most environmental problems are collective action problems, polarization may interfere with the kinds of deliberation and collaborations needed for effective environmental decision-making. In this review, we examine how polarization influences environmental decision-making and what strategies could be useful for preventing or reducing the negative consequences of polarization. Evidence about the extent of polarization among citizens suggests the current situation may be less severe than is sometimes assumed. The coevolution of individual views, network interactions, and social media that cause polarization is complex and subject to rapid change. However, there are interventions that seem to be effective at reducing polarization. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 48 is October 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... For example, Westfall et al. (2015) found that voters of the US-American Democratic and US-American Republican Party overestimated by a factor of two on how different the other group was to them across a range of issues such as defense spending or co-operating more with Russia. Further, Wolf and Hanel (2024) showed that Democrats and Republicans are on average over 80% similar across 10 value types (Schwartz 1992) such as security, benevolence, self-direction, and power (see also Garcia-Rada and Norton 2020). ...
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The reactivity hypothesis posits that individuals who are, or perceive themselves to be, deprived tend to develop a fundamentalist worldview and/or are more likely to (further) radicalize. In the present study, however, we predicted that individuals who feel less deprived would exhibit a stronger fundamentalist worldview and/or radicalized attitudes in a political context characterized by polarization driven by leaders or institutions such as governments. Using Turkey as an example, we found partial support for our hypothesis in a Muslim sample (N = 736), which was representative of age, gender, education level, ethnic affiliations, and urbanity. Individuals who felt less disadvantaged—thus more privileged—were found to be more fundamentalist, even when controlling for a range of other variables previously associated with fundamentalism, including conspiracy beliefs, personality traits, and socio-demographic variables. In contrast, deprivation was unrelated to radicalization (acceptance of active and reactive violence). Interestingly, supporters of the nationalist-Islamist government (AKP-MHP) scored on average higher on fundamentalism and radicalization than supporters of other parties. However, we also note that there are substantial similarities between both groups and that most participants scored low on both radicalization measures. Finally, we discuss possible strategies drawn from various studies aimed at reducing polarization and radicalization.
... On the other hand, in countries where democratic systems are generally trusted, even if trust for the opposite party might be relatively low, there is likely to be a bottom line of trust between citizens, thus limiting the impact of social media on forming extreme attitudes. For instance, recent studies have demonstrated that, despite concerns regarding the U.S.'s high level of ideological polarization, the actual ideological differences are relatively minor when compared to those of other countries (Garcia-Rada & Norton, 2020;Gidron, Adams, & Horne, 2020), highlighting the importance of conducting polarization research from a cross-national perspective. While our study focuses on different national contexts than those discussed in previous studies, the implications are similar. ...
... it is especially important to distinguish between states and trends when studying polarization in cross-national contexts. For example, there is evidence that ideological, issue and affective polarization have increased rapidly in the usa in the past few decades 339,340 , but it is also true that levels of polarization in the usa are smaller than (or similar to) levels observed in other countries 65,341 . Historically speaking, polarization in the usa reflects social patterns that began with southern realignment following civil rights legislation, the rise of single-issue interest groups, changes in campaign finance law, and the withdrawal of moderates from party politics and primary races, especially on the political right 10, 27,31,34,37,72,342,343 ). ...
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We propose that political differences in social policy support may be partly driven by the tendency for conservatives to show greater sensitivity to deviance than liberals, even among targets lacking social or functional relevance. In 4 studies, participants were shown geometric figures and were asked to identify the extent to which they were "triangles" (or circles, squares, etc.). More conservative participants reported greater differentiation between perfect and imperfect shapes than more liberal participants, indicating greater sensitivity to deviance. Moreover, shape differentiation partly accounted for the relationship between political ideology and social policy, partially mediating the link between conservatism and harsher punishment of wrongdoers (Studies 1 and 4), less support for public aid for disadvantaged groups (Study 2), and less financial backing for policies that benefit marginalized groups in society (Study 3). This effect was specific to policies that targeted deviant groups (Study 3) and who were not too highly deviant (Study 4). Results suggest that, in addition to commonly cited affective and motivational reactions to deviant actors, political differences in social policy may also be driven by conservatives' greater cognitive propensity to distinguish deviance. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Do liberals and conservatives tend to use different moral languages? The Moral Foundations Hypothesis states that liberals rely more on foundations of care/harm and fairness/cheating whereas conservatives rely more on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation in their moral functioning. In support, Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009; Study 4) showed that sermons delivered by liberal and conservative pastors differed as predicted in their moral word usage, except for the loyalty foundation. I present two high-powered replication studies in religious contexts and six extension studies in politics, the media, and organizations to test ideological differences in moral language usage. On average, replication success rate was 30% and effect sizes were 38 times smaller than those in the original study. A meta-analysis (N = 303,680) found that compared to liberals, conservatives used more authority r = 0.05, 95% confidence interval = [0.02, 0.09] and purity words, r = 0.14 [0.09, 0.19], fewer loyalty words, r = −0.08 [−0.10, −0.05], and no more or less harm, r = 0.00 [−0.02, 0.02], or fairness words, r = −0.03 [−0.06, 0.01].
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Do people from different countries and different backgrounds have similar preferences for how much more the rich should earn than the poor? Using survey data from 40 countries (N = 55,238), we compare respondents' estimates of the wages of people in different occupations-chief executive officers, cabinet ministers, and unskilled workers-to their ideals for what those wages should be. We show that ideal pay gaps between skilled and unskilled workers are significantly smaller than estimated pay gaps and that there is consensus across countries, socioeconomic status, and political beliefs. Moreover, data from 16 countries reveals that people dramatically underestimate actual pay inequality. In the United States-where underestimation was particularly pronounced-the actual pay ratio of CEOs to unskilled workers (354:1) far exceeded the estimated ratio (30:1), which in turn far exceeded the ideal ratio (7:1). In sum, respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those underestimates. © The Author(s) 2014.