Conservatives prefer political ideas that connect to the past; the preference is so strong, that they can be convinced of any idea, including liberal ones, if framed to connect to the past

Political conservatism as preference for the past.  Joris Lammers, Matt Baldwin. 51. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie, Frankfurt, Sep 2018, https://osf.io/sk4uj/

Abstract: Differences in political ideology are traditionally seen as differences in preference what direction the country should head toward: more or less taxes, stricter or more lenient treatment of immigrants, etc. We test instead the effect of differences in temporal orientation. Specifically, we propose that political conservatives (those at the right) are more focused on the past, compared to liberals (those on the left).  Therefore, conservatives prefer political ideas that connect to the past. We propose that this preference is so strong, that conservatives can be convinced of any political idea – including liberal ideas – if these are framed to connect to the past. We find robust support for this idea in more than 20 experiments. In each study, conservatives disliked liberal political plans, but accepted those same liberal plans if they were framed to connect to the past. Using a past-focused frame leads political conservatives to misattribute their warm and nostalgic feelings for the past onto liberal ideas and therefore support them. For example, American conservatives opposed climate change policies (e.g. the Paris Agreement), but they support them if they were framed as attempts at restoring the pristine nature of the past. German conservatives opposed admitting more refugees from Syria, but embraced them if immigration was framed as part of a German tradition. All in all, temporal framing reduced conservatives’ disagreement with liberal ideas by between 30 percent and 100 percent. Furthermore, the effect replicates across various countries, including the USA, Britain, and Germany. We also show the process behind this effect, by focusing on the mediating role of nostalgia and moderating role of processing style. All in all, these studies suggest that a large portion of the political disagreement between conservatives and liberals is not (only) about the content, but also largely about the stylistics of how political ideas are presented. This suggests that political differences are much easier to solve than previously though.