When threat leads to intergroup bias: the strange case of Italian Liberals

The tendency to favor the ingroup and derogate the outgroup by means of positive/negative evaluations, emotions and behaviors is known as intergroup bias. Traditionally, Conservatives are thought to be more biased compared to Liberals. However, the value-conflict hypothesis suggests that this tendency can be equally expressed by the two political groups. In 3 separate studies, we provided a fine-grained picture of political intergroup bias by measuring Italian Liberals’ and Conservatives’ bias evoked by different political stimuli (i.e. ideological words, images of politicians and non-politicians people) in the emotional and cognitive domains. Furthermore, we tested whether ingroup/outgroup entitativity and agency and perceived threat of the outgroup could influence this phenomenon. Results from Study 1 show that while Liberals expressed more negative emotions towards pictures of politicians they categorized as conservative and more positive emotions towards those they categorized as liberal (intergroup bias), Conservatives did not. Interestingly, when ideological words were presented (Study 2) both groups showed the intergroup bias, which remained stronger for Liberals. Study 3 showed how this difference of the intergroup bias affects also the cognitive domain and that the relation between political affiliation and emotional bias is mediated by the perceived threat of the outgroup. Consistently with the value-conflict hypothesis, our results show that political groups express more intergroup bias accordingly to the perceived threat of the outgroup. Furthermore, we show how perceived threat plays a role in the emotional but not cognitive domain, suggesting that the different components of this bias can be independently modulated.