The Poverty of Moral Foundation Messaging

Prominent scholars have argued that reframing political positions and issues in terms of moral foundations that appeal to conservatives or liberals can attract more individual-level support for those positions, even when such support would be unexpected. Such a change of attitude would be promising for those looking to narrow ideological divides. As two independent research teams, we set out to explore the promising evidence along these lines and to identify further nuances in the arguments. We tested moral reframing in the context of five issue areas: the environment, tax policy, immigration, English as an official language, and universal healthcare. We consistently found null results, not just for overall samples but for sub-groups that have been hypothesized as the most likely to be affected by moral reframing. Using Bayes factors, the observed data are 100 times more likely to occur under the null hypothesis (of no effect) than the moral foundations hypothesis. We explored the reasons for these null results by examining possibilities such as misunderstanding the treatment, the negative or positive valence of the treatment, and small sample sizes. We found no plausible explanation for the absence of treatment effect. Moral reframing techniques may be less helpful to persuasion than previous research suggests.