Aaron C. Kay’s research while affiliated with Duke University and other places

Scholars warn that partisan divisions in the mass public threaten the health of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy ( n = 32,059 participants) testing 25 treatments designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. We find that many treatments reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighting relatable sympathetic individuals with different political beliefs or by emphasizing common identities shared by rival partisans. We also identify several treatments that reduced support for undemocratic practices—most strongly by correcting misperceptions of rival partisans’ views or highlighting the threat of democratic collapse—which shows that antidemocratic attitudes are not intractable. Taken together, the study’s findings identify promising general strategies for reducing partisan division and improving democratic attitudes, shedding theoretical light on challenges facing American democracy.

Understanding how initiatives to support Black-owned businesses are received, and why, has important social and economic implications. To address this, we designed three experiments to investigate the role of antiegalitarian versus egalitarian ideologies among White American adults. In Study 1 ( N = 199), antiegalitarianism (vs. egalitarianism) predicted viewing initiatives supporting a Black-owned business as less fair, but only when the business was competing with other (presumably White-owned) businesses. In Study 2 ( N = 801), antiegalitarianism predicted applying survival-of-the-fittest market beliefs, particularly to Black-owned businesses. Antiegalitarianism also predicted viewing initiatives supporting Black-owned businesses as less fair than initiatives that targeted other (presumably White-owned) businesses, especially for tangible (vs. symbolic) support that directly impacts the success of a business. In Study 3 ( N = 590), antiegalitarianism predicted rejecting a program investing in Black-owned businesses. These insights demonstrate how antiegalitarian ideology can have the effect of maintaining race-based inequality, hindering programs designed to reduce that inequality.

Healthy democratic polities feature competing visions of a good society. They also require tolerance, trust, and cooperation to avoid toxic polarization that puts democracy itself at risk. In the U.S., liberal-leftists and conservative-rightists differ in many attitudes, values, and personality traits, as well as tendencies to justify the unequal status quo and embrace authoritarian aggression and group-based dominance. Some of these differences imply that conflict between liberal-leftists and conservative-rightists is tantamount to a struggle for and against democratic ideals. However, these political and psychological differences between the left and the right do not necessarily mean that Americans are forever doomed to intergroup hatred and intractable political conflict. Some modest basis for optimism emerges from recent experimental interventions, including one that encourages people to identify with and justify the system of liberal democracy in the U.S.

While the majority of Americans today endorse meritocracy as fair, we suggest that these perceptions can be shaped by whether or not people learn about the presence of socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages in others’ lives. Across five studies (N = 3,318), we find that people are able to attach socioeconomic inequalities in applicants’ backgrounds to their evaluation of the fairness of specific merit-based selection processes and outcomes. Learning that one applicant grew up advantaged—while the other grew up disadvantaged—leads both liberals and conservatives to believe that otherwise identical merit-based procedures and outcomes are significantly less fair. Importantly, learning about starting inequalities leads to greater support for policies that promote socioeconomic diversity in organizations.

The hero label has become a pervasive positive stereotype applied to many different groups and occupations, such as nurses, teachers, and members of the military. Although meant to show support, appreciation, and even admiration, we suggest that attaching this label to groups and occupations may actually have problematic consequences. Specifically, we theorize that the hero label may affect beliefs about the internal motivations of these group members that make them more vulnerable to exploitation. These ideas are tested and supported across nine preregistered studies using complementary materials and experimental paradigms. In these studies, we find that: (a) heroization strengthens expectations that teachers, nurses, and military personnel would willingly volunteer for their own exploitation; (b) the hero label and its consequences follow workers even after they transition to a new career (e.g., participants expected a military veteran—relative to a matched nonveteran—to be more willing to volunteer for his own exploitation at his subsequent civilian job, because the veteran was perceived to be more heroic than the matched nonveteran); and (c) occupational heroization—likely because of its impact on beliefs regarding what heroized workers would freely choose to do—reduces opposition to exploitative policies. In short, our studies show that heroization ultimately promotes worse treatment of the very groups that it is meant to venerate.

When and why might someone judge an ingroup transgressor more harshly than an outgroup transgressor? Taking a social functionalist perspective, we argue that morality is central to this phenomenon–the Black Sheep Effect–and that it is driven by social cohesion concerns. Using mediation and moderation methods across our studies, we find that people judge ingroup (vs. outgroup) transgressors more harshly because of concerns regarding ingroup social cohesion (Studies 1a–4). We also find that ingroup derogation is stronger for moral transgressions than weak or non‐moral transgressions (Studies 2 and 3). Throughout our studies, we address alternative explanations, including moral relativism, naïve realism, moral parochialism and belief in a just world. Our work speaks to the emerging contention around the reliability of the Black Sheep Effect by noting when and why it surfaces.

Four studies (total N = 1586) test the notion that people are motivated to punish moral rule violators because punishment offers a way to obtain structure and order in the world. First, in a correlational study, increased need for structure was associated with the stronger endorsement punishment for moral rule violators. This relationship between need for structure and punishment was not driven by political conservatism. Three experimental studies then tested, and corroborated, our main causal hypotheses: that threats to structure increase punitive judgments for moral rule violators (i.e., a compensatory mechanism; Study 2) and that a lack of punishment for wrongdoing (relative to punishment for wrongdoing) makes the world seem less structured in the moment (Studies 3 and 4). We compare and contrast our structure-based account of moral punishment to other theories and findings across the punishment literature.

Much research has examined the link between (anti-)egalitarian ideology and motivated social cognition. However, this research is typically framed around anti-egalitarianism, with the other end of this ideological pole, egalitarianism, often ignored altogether or treated as merely the absence of anti-egalitarian-motivated cognition. We integrate long-standing ideas from social dominance theory with contemporary models of motivated social cognition and a recent wave of empirical findings to argue that egalitarian ideology also drives social cognition in meaningful ways. We discuss why pursuing this avenue of research is important and outline several unanswered questions for future research.