Moral intuitions of young Polish liberals and conservatives

One of the basic classifications of the political orientations is a division of the political spectrum into liberals and conservatives. According to the research by Haidt and Graham (2007), Graham, Nosek and Haidt (2009) liberals and conservatives differ in regard to the issues (concepts, behaviours, etc.) they consider moral. The moral spectrum of the liberals centers around the issues concerning the protection of individual rights, while for conservatives morality is mainly (but not exclusively) a question of issues that bind people into groups and institutions. However, such results are obtained in the countries with longer experience of democracy. Thus, it would be interesting to see whether the same holds also in Poland. The reported study aimed at answering the following questions: 1. Do members of different youth organizations associated with major political parties in Poland young Polish liberals and conservatives actually differ on the liberal-conservative dimension? 2. To what extent does the moral sphere of young people in Poland who describe themselves as liberals or conservatives resemble that of liberals and conservatives from the countries with a long tradition of democracy? 3. To what extent are people with different political orientations able to reconstruct the moral reasoning of their ideological opponents? The results show that there are differences between members of various political youth organizations on the liberal-conservative dimension and significant similarities of liberals and conservatives moral spheres in Poland and in the countries with longer democracy experience. The results also show that there are differences between liberals and conservatives in accuracy of reconstructing the moral reasoning of their ideological opponents. peerReviewed publishedVersion