Political ideology and attitude change toward moral and immoral persons.

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the investigation of the specific features that characterize people who endorse different ideologies (e.g., Carney et al., 2008). For instance, research has pointed out that conservatives and liberals emerge as very distinct groups, not only for personal opinions, personality and cognitive style (Jost et al., 2009), but also for deeper mechanisms. For instance, conservatives (vs. liberals) display an automatic selective attention for negative (vs. positive) stimuli (Carraro et al., 2011) and this seems to have important social consequences. For instance, conservatives tend to more easily form illusory correlations between negative information and minority groups (Castelli & Carraro, 2011; Carraro et al., 2013). In the present study, we further explored the likely consequences of this attentional asymmetry in attitude formation and change processes toward moral and immoral persons. Participants were initially (phase 1) presented with moral (vs. immoral, between participants) behaviors performed by a person. Then, implicit (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998) and explicit attitudes toward that person were detected. Subsequently (phase 2), participants were presented with counter-attitudinal information regarding the same person, and then implicit and explicit attitudes were detected again. Overall, conservatives demonstrated a higher tendency to change their implicit attitudes when negative information was presented as second information. That is in line with the idea that conservatives weight more negative than positive information and thus they are more likely to change their opinion about a moral person but they are less likely to change their opinion about an immoral person