Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Cognition. 2021 Jun;211:104623. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104623. Epub 2021 Feb 16.
Speech is a critical means of negotiating political, adaptive interests in human society. Prior research on motivated political cognition has found that support for freedom of speech depends on whether one agrees with its ideological content. However, it remains unclear if people (A) openly hold that some speech should be more free than other speech; or (B) want to feel as if speech content does not affect their judgments. Here, we find support for (B) over (A), using social dominance orientation and political alignment to predict support for speech. Study 1 demonstrates that if people have previously judged restrictions of speech which they oppose, they are less harsh in condemning restrictions of speech which they support, and vice versa. Studies 2 and 3 find that when participants judge two versions of the same scenario, with only the ideological direction of speech being reversed, their answers are strongly affected by the ordering of conditions: While the first judgment is made in accordance with one's political attitudes, the second opposing judgment is made so as to remain consistent with the first. Studies 4 and 5 find that people broadly support the principle of giving both sides of contested issues equal speech rights, also when this is stated abstractly, detached from any specific scenario. In Study 6 we explore the boundaries of our findings, and find that the need to be consistent weakens substantially for speech that is widely seen as too extreme. Together, these results suggest that although people can selectively endorse moral principles depending on their political agenda, many seek to conceal this bias from others, and perhaps also themselves.
言语是人类社会中协商政治和适应性利益的重要手段。先前关于动机认知政治的研究发现，对言论自由的支持取决于人们是否认同其思想内容。然而，人们（A）是否公开认为某些言论应该比其他言论更自由；或者（B）是否希望让自己感觉言论内容不影响他们的判断，目前仍不清楚。在这里，我们发现（B）比（A）更有支持，使用社会主导倾向和政治立场来预测对言论的支持。研究 1 表明，如果人们之前已经对他们反对的言论限制进行了判断，那么他们对支持的言论限制的谴责就不会那么严厉，反之亦然。研究 2 和 3 发现，当参与者判断同一情景的两个版本，只有言论的意识形态方向被反转时，他们的答案受到条件顺序的强烈影响：第一个判断是根据自己的政治态度做出的，而第二个相反的判断则是为了与第一个判断保持一致。研究 4 和 5 发现，人们普遍支持给有争议问题的双方同等言论权利的原则，即使这是从抽象的、与任何特定情景无关的角度提出的。在研究 6 中，我们探索了我们研究结果的界限，并发现，当言论被广泛认为过于极端时，一致性的需求会大大减弱。总之，这些结果表明，尽管人们可以根据自己的政治议程有选择地支持道德原则，但许多人试图向他人隐瞒这种偏见，也许也包括自己。
