Trial by ideology: Ideological differences in responses to errors in determining guilt in the United States

Abstract

In many domains of social life, people risk wrongly accusing an innocent person (i.e., false alarm error) or failing to catch a guilty person (i.e., miss error). Do liberals and conservatives differ in their concern about these types of errors? Across six studies, we found that conservatives were more bothered by miss errors than liberals, whereas liberals were more bothered by false alarm errors than conservatives. These associations were driven by social as opposed to economic ideology (Studies 1b-3b). Further, conservatives were more bothered by less threatening miss errors than liberals, but liberals and conservatives were equally bothered by clearly threatening miss errors (Studies 2a & 2b), suggesting that threat is a mechanism for the association between conservatism and miss concern. In Study 3a, social conservatism related to increased concern about miss errors when they occurred in authoritative contexts, but not when they occurred in authority-void contexts. In contrast, social liberalism related to increased concern about false alarm errors regardless of authoritative context. Studies 3a and 3b also demonstrated that belief in retributive justice, moralization of respect for authority, and threat sensitivity statistically mediated the association between social conservatism and miss concern, whereas moralization of fairness and egalitarian concerns mediated the association between social liberalism and false alarm concern. Together these studies provide a nuanced examination of the role of political ideology in responses to errors in determinations of guilt.