Asymmetric polarization: The perception that Republicans pose harm to disadvantaged groups drives Democrats' greater dislike of Republicans in social contexts.

Abstract

Given growing political polarization in recent years, partisan dislike-defined as the negativity that individuals display at the prospect of having close social relations with supporters of the other party-has received increasing attention. While traditional work in social and political psychology has held that conservatives display greater outgroup hostility than liberals, the worldview conflict perspective suggests that both groups similarly express hostility toward value incongruent outgroups. Contradicting both established perspectives, we present evidence across five preregistered studies (and two additional studies reported in the Supplemental Materials) conducted between 2022 and 2023-two social media field experiments (N = 10,000) examining actual behavior and five survey-based studies (N = 2,443) operationalizing partisan dislike in various ways (e.g., blocking on social media, rating the likability of various targets, and evaluating hiring suitability)-that Democrats (i.e., liberals) dislike Republicans (i.e., conservatives) more than vice versa. We provide a potential explanation for this phenomenon by extending the worldview conflict perspective to account for asymmetries in how moralized specific values are among two conflicting groups at a given point in time. Specifically, we theorize that in light of recent social trends in the modern-day United States, the moralized belief that counter-partisans pose harm to disadvantaged groups, particularly racial/ethnic minorities, has become an asymmetric contributor to partisan dislike among Democrats. We found support for our theory across both measurement-of-mediation and experimental-mediation approaches and in both field experimental and survey data. Overall, this work advances research on ideology and outgroup hostility and extends the worldview conflict perspective to better explain partisan dislike. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).