Moral Bases of Public Distrust
Moral Bases of Public Distrust
Politics, Partisanship, and Compromise
This chapter uses morality as a lens for understanding distrust of government in the United States today. Drawing from recent work on the psychology of morality, it highlights the unique nature of moral convictions and the strong links between morality and trust. With this as a backdrop, distrust is discussed in relation to ingroup-outgroup status and perceptions of threat in moral conflict. These factors are then used to explore the increased partisanship that has defined U.S. national politics over the past few decades. Together morality and partisanship provide a basis for understanding distrust not only of those on the opposite side of the political divide, which we might expect, but, paradoxically, also distrust of those on our own side of the political divide as well.
Keywords: morality, trust, distrust, politics, partisanship, ingroup, outgroup, threat
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
