A new psychological study published in the journal Political Psychology suggests that people on the political left value distant strangers less than their own friends and family. Instead, research shows that liberals simply extend their moral concerns further outward, while prioritizing those closest to them. These findings help explain how different ideological groups balance local loyalty and global compassion.
Humans naturally exhibit ingroup bias. This is a preference for family, friends, and familiar community members over outsiders. Social identity theory proposes that people derive strong self-esteem from group membership and develop deep loyalty to insiders. Evolutionary biology models suggest that this trait helped early humans survive in small, close-knit groups by ensuring mutual protection and resource sharing.
Over time, human societies have become more interconnected, prompting discussions about how people expand their moral circles. The moral circle is a concept that describes the psychological boundaries of who or what a person considers worthy of ethical consideration. In 2019, this concept was explored in a paper titled “Ideological Differences in the Expansion of Moral Circles” by Adam Weitz et al.
In one phase of the 2019 study, the authors asked participants to allocate their moral concerns across concentric circles, from immediate family members to everything in existence. The data generated by this study was eventually disseminated as a viral visual on social media. A meme featuring two heatmap charts, one labeled “Conservative” and the other “Liberal,” began appearing in online political discussions.
Commentators on the right, and even the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, have used heat maps to imply that liberals care more about strangers and animals than their immediate family.
Kyle Fiore Roe, assistant professor of psychology and director of the Morality, Altruism, and Prosociality Laboratory at the University of Utah, noticed this story taking shape. “Certain claims were being circulated in public that people on the political left began to value distant others more than their own families, neighbors, and communities, effectively reversing the normal order of moral consideration,” Roe said.
“That ‘inversion’ framework appeared in political rhetoric and widely shared social media charts. This is an empirically testable descriptive claim, so we wanted to test it directly.”
Previous research methods had some structural limitations regarding how people expressed their priorities. “Although the most cited prior research here shows that liberals tend to draw wider moral circles than conservatives, their agendas are constructed in a way that assumes a gradual outward expansion of concerns, making them less well-suited to detecting whether concern for distant others actually trades off with concern for near others,” Roe explained. “We used a means that allows people to independently build their own moral circles, so if there are trade-offs, those trade-offs can emerge.”
A research team led by Law and Stilianos Silopoulos at Arizona State University conducted three separate analyses. The first phase, known as Study 1a, surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adult participants in the United States. Participants completed a short version of the Moral Broadness Scale, along with a measure of political ideology ranging from very liberal to very conservative.
This scale measures the degree of moral concern a person has for different actors and allows participants to independently construct their own moral circle. Participants rated targets such as genetic relatives, individuals of different religions, plants, animals, and villains. They assigned each target a score from 0 to 3. 0 means the entity is outside the moral boundaries, 3 means the entity belongs to their inner circle.
The results of Study 1a provided evidence that concern for distant entities does not reduce concern for nearby entities. Rating human outgroups highly on moral scales was actually positively correlated with consideration for genetic relatives. Across nearly all political affiliations, participants consistently demonstrated the highest levels of moral consideration toward their inner circle. Surprisingly, highly conservative participants showed a slightly smaller gap between their family and outgroup. This is primarily because they reported slightly lower concern for genetic relatives compared to other political groups.
“In a nationally representative sample, the most conservative participants were the only group that did not show a clear difference between their concern for ingroups and outgroups, and this was due to slightly less concern for close others rather than increased concern for outgroups,” Lo told SciPost. However, he said, “This pattern did not apply to the pre-registered replications, so we read this as a clue for future research rather than a definitive result.”
In Study 1b, scientists combined and analyzed data from four previous online samples of a total of 3,201 adult participants in the United States. A longer version of the same morality scale was utilized at this stage. The list included a variety of targets, including lovers, friends, opposition politicians, coral reefs, and artificial intelligence structures such as supercomputers.
The results of Study 1b supported the first study. Both liberals and conservatives overwhelmingly prioritized family and friends over outgroups, nature, and artificial intelligence. Although liberals did exhibit a larger moral circle overall, this expansion was driven by increased concern for marginalized humans and the environment. It does not stem from indifference to their close social ties. Interestingly, conservatives in this sample showed slightly higher moral concerns about artificial intelligence than liberals.
To confirm these patterns under different conditions, the authors conducted a new preregistered experiment called Study 2. They recruited 899 adults from an online platform, purposefully drawing in roughly equal numbers of liberals, moderates, and conservatives. In this study, we measured moral concern in two different ways to capture different psychological realities.
First, participants completed an open-ended rating scale using the updated categories. These categories included future generations and close others, human outgroups, animals, plants, engineers, and criminals. In this unconstrained form, our findings replicated previous results. All ideological groups placed their close ties at the absolute top of the moral hierarchy.
Second, scientists introduced fixed resource allocation tasks. Participants received 100 moral concern points, which were distributed among different entity categories. This setting mimics real-world scenarios where time, money, and attention are strictly limited resources and need to be divided.
Naturally, when resources are limited to 100 points, there are trade-offs. It was mathematically necessary to give points to distant targets by taking points away from nearby targets. Under these strict restrictions, liberals allocated more points to plants and future generations than conservatives, but ended up allocating slightly fewer points to next of kin and friends.
However, even with these resource limitations, the inner circle remained the dominant priority across the political spectrum. The data suggests that liberals and conservatives are pretty much in agreement about who matters most in a general sense. They simply disagree about exactly how much of their limited resources should be shared with the wider world, if sacrifices are required.
“Through a nationally representative sample, four large online samples, and pre-registered replications, we found that people across the political spectrum have the closest connections to the top of their moral concerns,” Roe explained. “We found no evidence that the left’s hierarchies were reversing. What differed by ideology was the extent to which concerns reached outward. Liberals, on average, extended their concerns more to distant objects such as human outgroups, animals, and future generations. This meant that their overall moral circle was larger. This does not make them less interested in others close to them. Trade-offs did emerge when people split up a certain pool of interests, but the in-group was still primary for everyone. A more accurate summary is that there is a wider range of interests alongside people closer to home. ”
“The pattern of ingroup preference was large, very consistent, and showed very large effect sizes in the online sample. That’s the strong headline. Ideological differences in concern for distant goals were real, but often only on the order of 1 to 3 percent of the variance. We encourage readers to grasp both facts together. Preference for near others is near universal and strongly expressed, and the liberal-conservative gap is a small difference superimposed on that shared pattern.”
Although this finding calls into question the idea of liberal moral reversal, the researchers are careful to be constrained in their conclusions. “The most important thing to warn you about is that this is a descriptive work,” Lo pointed out. “We’re not making any claims about whether it’s morally right to prioritize people near or far away. That’s an ethical and social question, and it’s outside of our data.”
This study has limitations, particularly regarding its reliance on self-reported attitudes rather than physical behaviors. How much you care about a company in a survey may not fully reflect how you actually spend your money and time. Fixed resource point tasks help fill this gap, but they still serve as hypothetical scenarios rather than incentivizing behavioral indicators.
Looking to the future, the authors plan to expand their methodology to better capture physical behaviors rather than self-reported attitudes. “We want to test whether these patterns hold true when the assignments have real costs, using an incentivized behavioral task rather than self-report,” Lo explained. “Longitudinal designs help us understand how moral concerns and political identities mutually shape each other over time.”
The research team also wants to explore the nuances of political affiliation beyond simple scope. “We are also interested in conducting a large-scale, nationally representative survey with more specific political identity and complete measures that a single left-right item might miss,” Lo said.
“The idea that readers would most like to avoid is that discussions of ‘moral reversal’ tend to obscure two separate questions: how far-reaching is someone’s moral concern, and whether extending concern broadly necessarily means less concern for those close to them,” Roe concluded. “Our data seem to indicate that the circle can get wider and the center stronger at the same time. Keeping these two questions distinct makes many disagreements more clear.”
The study, “Ideological differences in moral concerns reflect a widening of the circle rather than a reversal,” was authored by Kyle Fiore Law, Seoyeon Bae, Liane Young, and Stylianos Syropoulos.
