Striving to protect friends and family or holding everyone accountable: Moral expansiveness explains the difference between conservatives and liberals

The current research aimed to explain how conservatives and liberals differ in moral expansiveness, which is the extent to which an individual ascribes moral status to others. Using two measures of moral expansiveness, we demonstrated that both conservatives and liberals give moral regard to in-groups (e.g., friends, family, co-workers), but liberals tend to show more concern for out-groups (e.g., foreign citizen, people with different religious beliefs, members of LGBTI community) than conservatives do. Conservatives reserve their moral concern for friends and family, whereas liberals have no moral boundaries between people. In policy-making, conservatives and liberals disagree when their focuses of moral consideration do not match. We discuss that conflicts between the two can be explained by expansiveness of moral regard for out-groups. The results explain the relationship between political orientation and moral expansiveness and the way an individual includes others in the circle of moral regard.