Liberals and Conservatives Show Equal Group Bias in Sharing Behavior: there are no ideological differences in actual behavior despite previous literature indicating differences in attitude/intention measures

Liberals and Conservatives Show Equal Group Bias in Sharing Behavior. Onurcan Yilmaz. Society for Personality and Social Psychology, conference 2021, Feb 9, 2021. https://whova.com/embedded/subsession/cecli_202103/1447166/1447200/

Rolf Degen's take: The left and the right were equally inclined to give away a larger share of the pie to people from their own camp

Description: A long-standing debate revolves around the question whether liberals and conservatives differ in their tendency for group bias. The ideology asymmetry hypothesis predicts less group bias among liberals than conservatives whereas the symmetry hypothesis expects identical group bias for both liberals and conservatives. We provide a large-scale (N=1,347) preregistered experiment testing the predictions of the asymmetry hypotheses: previously identified liberals and conservatives played Dictator Games with either an in- or out-group member, either under time-pressure (<5s) or time-delay (>20s). Although the manipulation worked as intended, we found no effect of time pressure on either group bias or on dictator sharing behavior. However, substantial group bias was observed in nearly identical amounts among liberals and conservatives. Both liberals (17.1%) and conservatives (16.3%) shared more with their in-groups. These findings suggest that there are no ideological differences in actual behavior despite previous literature indicating differences in attitude/intention measures.