Parochial Altruism and Political Ideology

Author(s)

Marilynn B. Brewer
Nancy R. Buchan, university of south carolinaFollow
Orgul D. OzturkFollow
Gianluca Grimalda

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Parochial altruism refers to the propensity to direct prosocial behavior toward members of one's own ingroup to a greater extent than toward those outside one's group. Both theory and empirical research suggest that parochialism may be linked to political ideology, with conservatives more likely than liberals to exhibit ingroup bias in altruistic behavior. The present study, conducted in the United States and Italy, tested this relationship in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, assessing willingness to contribute money to charities at different levels of inclusiveness—local versus national versus international. Results indicated that conservatives contributed less money overall and were more likely to limit their contribution to the local charity while liberals were significantly more likely to contribute to national and international charities, exhibiting less parochialism. Conservatives and liberals also differed in social identification and trust, with conservatives higher in social identity and trust at the local and national levels and liberals higher in global social identity and trust in global others. Differences in global social identity partially accounted for the effects of political ideology on donations.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12852

Publication Info

Published in Political Psychology, Volume 44, Issue 2, 2022, pages 383-396.

© 2022 The Authors. Political Psychology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Society of Political Psychology.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

APA Citation

Brewer, M. B., Buchan, N. R., Ozturk, O. D., & Grimalda, G. (2022). Parochial altruism and political ideology. Political Psychology, 44(2), 383–396. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12852

Rights

© 2022 The Authors. Political Psychology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Society of Political Psychology.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.