Fearing the outgroup: why Italian Liberals dislike Conservatives

The term ‘intergroup bias’ describes how people tend to favor their ingroup and derogate their outgroup by means of positive/negative evaluations, emotions and behaviors. Traditional literature on political psychology claims that this bias is stronger in Conservatives than Liberals because of epistemic and personality motives. Conversely, recent research showed that Italian Liberals express more positive emotions for their ingroup and more negative emotions for the outgroup compared to Italian Conservatives. Moreover, it has been suggested that Liberals and Conservatives can be equally prejudiced, depending on which group they face, namely the more the outgroup is in contrast with their values and is perceived as threatening the more people tend to express the bias, regardless their political ideology. Here, in 3 separate studies we aimed at providing a fine-grained picture of political intergroup bias in Italy by measuring Liberals’ and Conservatives’ bias evoked by different political stimuli (i.e., pictures of politicians; ideological words) in emotional and cognitive domains. Furthermore, we tested whether variables such as entitativity and agency of the ingroup and the outgroup and perceived threat of the outgroup could play a role in this phenomenon. In study 1, Mixed Model Regression analysis showed that Liberals tended to express more negative emotions for politicians they categorized as conservative and more positive emotions for politicians they categorized as liberal. In contrast, conservatives did not show this effect. Interestingly, when the stimuli to categorize were ideological words (study 2) both groups showed the intergroup bias, that however, remained stronger for Liberals. Study 3 showed that the difference of intergroup bias in the two political groups was not only related to the emotional domain (positive/negative emotions) but also to the cognitive domain (positive/negative cognitive evaluations). Interestingly, a mediation analysis showed that perceived threat of the outgroup mediates the relationship between political affiliation and intergroup bias in the emotional but not in the cognitive domain. Thus, in line with value conflict hypothesis and morality-based groups theories, our findings suggest that Liberals might feel more negative emotions towards Conservatives (especially when certain categories of stimuli -i.e. pictures of politicians- are presented), because they feel more threatened by them. The resulting partial mediation indicated that other variables could play a role in the process; neither entitativity nor agency seem to be involved, as the two groups did not differ in how they evaluated ingroup and outgroup along these dimensions.