Sacralizing Liberals and Fair‐Minded Conservatives: Ideological Symmetry in the Moral Motives in the Culture War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Political arguments may endure seemingly into perpetuity because the conflicted combatants view the issues in different ways, with one side decrying unfairness and the other side decrying attacks on the sacrosanct. We tested whether both conservatives and liberals rely on protecting the sacrosanct when justifying their attitudes on some contentious moral issues. In four studies, we examine how liberals and conservatives justify their political attitudes on the issues of same‐sex marriage and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Liberals supported same‐sex marriage rights primarily in the name of fairness and equality; conservatives primarily opposed same‐sex marriage rights as a matter of protecting the sanctity of traditional marriage. Symmetrically, liberals primarily opposed the development of the Keystone XL oil pipeline as a matter of protecting the sanctity of the Earth; conservatives supported the development of the pipeline as a matter of promoting fairness (e.g., corporate rights; as well as citing economic and foreign policy implications). Like conservatives, liberals also bring sacred thinking to moral issues. The culture war is mired in stalemate partly because each side considers some matters to be sacrosanct, and other matters as suitable for revision in the name of fairness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".