You chug your morning coffee, the fleetingly acerbic taste quickly returning in the form of news headlines. Grimacing, you skim over articles covering recent school shootings, the assasination of Charlie Kirk, and the continual Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As you read, those red or blue-tinted glasses you unconsciously use reveal an increasingly relevant issue: although morals certainly influence political opinions, it is a two-way relationship—political beliefs can also dictate individual principles and values.
Now, of course morals influence politics; they are intertwined. Everyone has convictions, maybe strengthened due to personal experiences or cultural ties, and these beliefs most likely control various aspects of one’s political stance.
According to “Psychology Today,” a common theory associated with the relationship between politics and morality is the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). Originally divided into five sections—Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity—the initial thought was that these spheres of morality influenced political opinions.
For example, many liberals are thought to center their political values around a few of the sections, particularly Care and Fairness, whereas conservatives center their values around all five.
But recently, the argument of political affiliations and beliefs actually influencing these spheres, rather than the other way around, is gathering momentum. Political opinions…are opinions. Therefore, it is rare for them to be completely unbiased, and honestly, rational.
The growing correlation between politics and opinions is creating an irrational aspect to one’s decisions as the influx of confirmation bias is blurring the line between fact and fiction.
Modern thought recognizes this dilemma, assuming that political opinions, more centered around intuition and feeling rather than measurable facts, are actually shaping the common values of MFT.
How many times have you disagreed with the actions of a public figure you respected? Maybe you start to rationalize, start to tweak aspects of your own beliefs, just to make them fit neatly into the definition of your political alliance.
We’ve all done it. Squirmed slightly in our seats, as the majority opinion—maybe including our friends —contrasts our own, not sure anymore between what is the absolute truth and what we want our own truth to be. Flicked on the TV, nodding absentmindedly at a politician’s words, focusing on the minute “R” or “D” by their name, rather than the content of their words.
Suddenly, without realizing it, we’ve actually shifted our values to fit into our political beliefs.
This cherrypicking of political ideas goes back to the whole in group versus out group debate; we typically reject “outsiders,” immediately feeling an opposition toward those individuals, and take comfort in our inner circle.
This dilemma can skew our perception of what is right and wrong, especially in terms of the current political environment. Now, many individuals choose look at content at face value instead of its actual substance.
A study conducted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln indicated how simply politicizing a topic could drastically change an individual’s perception. Creating a survey that encompassed both politically related and nonrelated topics, researchers found that slight phrasing differences were enough to completely change a person’s response.
For example, using the word politician instead of person caused people to drastically change their answers. Similarly, many people reacted positively towards certain political members, even if their ideologies did not correspond to what the individual responded to in a prior, politically unrelated question.
Although the famous saying “correlation does not imply causation” still holds true, we must ask ourselves what looking glass we choose to view everyday, and how it is affecting our own judgement.
If all it takes is a simple phrase change to not just slightly change but completely denounce individual principles, that probably means a fair amount of people are blurring the line between politics and morals.
Is it always morally right to vote for your party, no matter if you agree with a political figure’s stances? Is it always morally right to only surround yourself with those who will provide a confirmation bias? Is it always morally right to only seek out the “truth,” which is actually just a carefully curated version of the world you want to believe in?
The escalating relationship between politics and morality cannot be ignored, for it is creating a distorted reality, quite easily. Mitigating it will require a little more looking inwards and a little less use of a politically biased looking glass.