Ideological (A-)Symmetries in Moral Judgments of Online Hate
Vladimir Bojarskich, Meltem Yucel, Lindsay Hahn, Tobias Rothmund · 2025
Political ideology is key in how we react to social and political events, but how does it predict moral judgments of online hate? The contextual symmetry hypothesis suggests that conservatives and liberals condemn online hate similarly when it targets ideologically favored groups. The generalizable asymmetry hypothesis proposes that conservatives, compared to liberals, are less condemning of hate comments regardless of the target. In pre-registered experiments in Germany (N = 903) and the U.S. (N = 490), we found consistent evidence for the contextual symmetry account: Conservatives and liberals differ in their sensitivity towards online hate depending on the target and ground their moral judgments on perceptions of the aggressor's responsibility and the victim's vulnerability and suffering. These findings imply that legal stalemates on hate speech regulation stem from ideological disparities in perceptions of who must be protected from harm rather than a general conservative indifference to online hate.