New research published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology It suggests that the particular moral language used to promote a political cause can influence whether people share it on social media. This finding indicates that liberals are less likely to publicly support causes with which they agree when the message relies on values commonly associated with conservatives. In contrast, conservatives focus more on the root cause itself and seem to consistently share their message regardless of the moral language used.
Social media platforms have greatly expanded the reach of social movements. These allow individuals to advocate for important political and social causes with the click of a button. In this digital environment, advancing a cause becomes a public statement that can shape perception, direct debate, and drive real policy change. Because of this high visibility, specific rhetoric attached to specific objectives can have important implications for everyday users.
The authors of the new study wanted to better understand how individuals navigate situations where they support a movement’s goals but feel disconnected from the moral language used to promote them. Monica Games Jokic, an assistant professor at Purdue University, described the inspiration for the study. “We were interested in how people navigate political expression online, especially in highly visible environments like social media,” Gamezjokic said.
“Previous research on ‘moral reframing’ suggests that people can sometimes make arguments more persuasive by framing them using the moral values of opposing political sides,” she said. “However, most of that activity focused on private attitudes rather than public advocacy.” The authors wanted to understand how these dynamics play out when actions are visible to others.
“We wondered whether people would actually be willing to publicly share messages that use moral language related to opposing political camps, even if they agreed with the underlying cause itself,” Gamezjokic said. “Social media creates a particularly interesting context in this regard, as sharing a message does not just mean agreement, but can also convey values and identity to others.”
To test these ideas, scientists drew on a psychological framework that divides human moral judgment into two major categories: personalizing values and binding values. Individualized values focus on fairness, equality, and prevention of harm to individuals. Binding values emphasize loyalty to a group, respect for authority, and protection of purity or sanctity. Past research has shown that liberals tend to prioritize personalizing values almost exclusively, whereas conservatives tend to support both personalizing and binding values more equally.
The researchers conducted a series of five online experiments to investigate how these moral frameworks influence sharing behavior. In the first set of experiments, with 378 participants in one group and 392 participants in another, the scientists focused on the highly polarizing issue of abortion. Participants read aloud a message from a fictitious local organization.
One group read a message supporting abortion rights, a position generally favored by liberals. The other group read messages opposing abortion rights, a position generally favored by conservatives. The researchers randomly assigned participants to read a version of the message framed with either personalizing or binding language.
The individuation framework focused on autonomy, rights, and minimizing harm to the individual. This bonding frame focused on the sanctity of the family, social order, and spiritual purity. After reading the assigned text, participants rated their willingness to share the organization’s entire message on their personal social media accounts.
The results revealed clear asymmetries between political groups. Liberals were significantly less willing to share pro-abortion rights messages when they used binding moral rhetoric than when they used personalizing rhetoric. Conservatives did not show this sensitivity to moral frames, as their willingness to share anti-abortion rights messages remained high and relatively stable regardless of frame.
“One of the surprising things was that the pattern was asymmetrical,” Gamezjokic told PsyPost. “Although we expected both liberals and conservatives to be reluctant to promote rhetoric associated with opposing political sides, the effect was more consistent among liberals. Conservatives appeared to be relatively more willing to support causes in line with their views, regardless of the specific moral framework used.”
To see if this pattern holds across a variety of issues, the researchers conducted two additional experiments focused on immigration. These studies included much larger samples, with 1,468 participants rating liberal-leaning ideals and 922 participants rating conservative-leaning ideals. This message, aligned with liberals, advocated against the separation of immigrant families. The message, aligned with conservatives, advocated tighter border controls.
Messages were framed using either personal terms, such as compassion and human rights, or binding terms, such as authority and national integrity. In these studies, scientists also added visibility conditions. Some participants were asked how willing they were to share their message publicly on social media where it could be seen by thousands of people, while others were asked whether they would privately endorse the message on an anonymous advocacy platform.
“Another interesting finding is that these effects are particularly pronounced in public sharing contexts, such as social media, where support is visible to others,” Gamezjokic said. This result reproduced the initial asymmetry. There was some statistical evidence that liberals were more likely to support anti-family separation messages when they used personalizing rather than binding rhetoric, and that this resistance was slightly stronger in public sharing situations.
Conservatives were largely unaffected by the moral framework of border control messages. They reported a high willingness to support causes in both public and private settings, regardless of the rhetoric used. The researchers noted that conservatives may be less sensitive to differences in frameworks because they view both moral frameworks as compatible with their worldview.
In a final experiment involving 389 participants, the scientists investigated the underlying mechanisms behind liberal reluctance. They wanted to test whether ideological signaling played a role. Ideological signaling refers to the idea that people use public activities to spread their beliefs and demonstrate loyalty to a particular political group.
Participants read about companies that engage in environmentally harmful practices and companies that respond negatively to allegations of sexual harassment. These scenarios were combined with personalizing or binding moral arguments. Participants then rated whether sharing the message helped spread liberal or conservative moral values to their social networks.
The authors found that liberals perceive binding rhetoric to be strongly associated with conservative values. This perception was directly related to a decreased willingness to share the message. The researchers used statistical models to show that these beliefs about ideological implications act as a bridge, explaining why liberals shy away.
“Our findings suggest that the way a message is morally framed may influence whether people promote it publicly online,” Gamezjokic said. “Several studies have shown that liberals were less willing to share messages supporting causes with which they subscribed if they used the ‘binding’ moral rhetoric often associated with conservatism – language that emphasizes values such as purity, loyalty, authority, and tradition.”
“Importantly, this doesn’t necessarily mean liberals are opposed to the cause itself,” she said. “Rather, they seemed concerned about publicly amplifying rhetoric that they perceived to be ideologically connected to political opponents. Conservatives, by contrast, were generally less sensitive to whether messages used binding or personalizing moral language.”
As with all studies, there are some potential limitations that should be considered. “One important limitation is that much of the research relies on hypothetical message-sharing decisions rather than real-world behavior, although it also includes observational studies using Twitter/X data,” Gamez-Djokic said.
“Furthermore, some of the evidence regarding the psychological mechanisms involved is correlational, meaning future research is needed to more clearly establish why these effects occur,” she noted.
Another limitation is the use of online convenience samples. This is because they tend to be slightly more liberal than the general U.S. population. The researchers note that testing a broader, more representative sample of highly conservative individuals may result in different sensitivities to moral frameworks. Also, because this study focuses only on individuals in the United States, the results may not apply to other political cultures or multiparty systems.
The authors also acknowledge that conservatives may prioritize simply defending their core ideals rather than forming a broader moral discourse around a topic. Future research may be able to separate religious language and binding moral concepts to pinpoint what causes people’s reluctance to share. Scientists might also investigate whether conservatives sometimes show similar sensitivity to different conditions and different political issue frames.
The study, “Crossing Ideological Divide in Digital Spaces: How Political Ideology and Moral Rhetoric Shape Online Cause Advancement,” was authored by Monica Gamez-Djokic, Marlon Mooijman, Matthew D. Rocklage, and Maryam Kouchaki.
