Exploring the Cross-Cultural Generalizability and Scope of Morally Motivated Intolerance

Research conducted in Western cultural contexts has discovered that people are more intolerant of moral than demographic diversity, prefer greater social and physical distance from morally dissimilar others, and actively discriminate against those who do not share their moral attitudes. The goal of the current work was to test whether (a) these findings generalize across cultural contexts and (b) similar patterns would emerge with not only social but also political intolerance. Strength of moral conviction associated with participants’ most important issue was associated with higher and similar levels of social intolerance of attitudinally dissimilar others in both China and the United States but was only related to political intolerance in China. These results demonstrate that moral mandate effects are not unique to highly individualized cultural contexts and reveal a possible boundary condition on the links between moral conviction and intolerance. Implications are discussed.