Can Values Pull Us Together? Basic Human Values and Polarization Reduction

• In Event: How to Reduce Polarization

Abstract

Can Basic Human Values be utilized to reduce affective polarization? While focusing on shared values and common goals is a well-known component of the optimal conditions for mitigating intergroup tensions (Allport 1954; Pettigrew and Tropp 2006), study of values as the medium to reduce prejudice and affective polarization remains surprisingly unexplored. This study fills in this gap in the literature by testing the effectiveness of basic human value rhetoric in reducing affective polarization. In doing this, I also examine how voter partisanship interacts with values that are “congruent” or “incongruent” to their partisanship in the voters’ evaluation of the parties and politicians.
Basic Human Values were found by social psychologists. They found 10 values with a consistent value structure across cultures. They also find this unique set of values predict a wide variety of preferences from personal domain to professional domain, including one’s shopping habits, musical tastes, tendency to negotiate or not, as well as one’s choices in career paths and one’s political ideologies. Research also finds that Republicans and Democrats rate these basic human values in a very similar manner, demonstrating that basic human values are shared across the party lines. A focus on basic human values is beneficial because unlike core political values that are directly embedded in the American political discourse and that can easily signal partisanship (Enders and Lupton 2021), basic human values are removed from the political discourse and much less politicized.
Given the broad appeal that basic human values have, I hypothesize that human value rhetoric is effective in persuading the voters and reducing affective polarization across the party lines. In addition to this central hypothesis that human value rhetoric can bring people together through its shared appeal to both parties, I also test whether the effects are conditional upon partisanship and how congruent the value statements are to the conventional party messaging. For example, while both Republicans and Democrats tend to rate values like “self-transcendence” highly, such value aligns better with the Democratic party messages. On the other hand, “conservation” values align better with the Republican party messages. I hypothesize that when politicians endorse values that “trespass” traditional party messages, voters from their parties will punish such move while voters from the other parties will reward such move.
Through testing the conditions to how value rhetoric might change party evaluations, this project both finds the effectiveness of human value rhetoric in changing voters’ opinions on parties and finds whether basic human values are seen to be “owned” by political parties. This project contributes to several important discourse including polarization reduction, voter belief system, and the power of elite messaging. Moreover, I believe further engaging Basic Human Values, an original concept from social psychology is an important step forward in renovating our understanding of democracy and public opinion. I am currently in the process of collecting data, and I foresee that the data analysis will be completed well in advance of the APSA annual meeting.

Author

• Minyoung Kim, University of Minnesota