Moralizing partisanship when surrounded by copartisans versus in mixed company

Partisans tend to view their ingroup as moral and their outgroup as immoral. Here, we examine whether left-wing (LW) and right-wing (RW) Reddit users (N > 1,000,000) express these partisan moralization views. Critically, we compare the rates of partisan moralization not only when users are in contexts (subreddits) of their ingroup (e.g. r/democrats, r/vegetarian, r/Conservative, r/Hunting) but also when in mixed-company contexts populated mostly by users without partisan engagement (e.g. r/Music, r/Parenting). First, we developed four word embedding models—two for the users of each political side, one based on their comments in their ingroup contexts and one based on their comments in mixed-company contexts. Then, we evaluated the words of each model on two semantic dimensions, partisanship and morality, and we examined their correlation as an indicator of the expressed partisan moralization. Our first analysis demonstrated that LW users express moralized partisanship to a similar degree when surrounded by copartisans and when in mixed company. However, the moralized partisanship expressed by RW users in mixed company is weaker than that they express among copartisans, as well as that expressed by LW users in mixed company. In a second analysis, we divided partisan contexts based on whether they are inherently political (e.g. r/democrats) or not (e.g. r/vegetarian). This second analysis revealed that RW users express moralized partisanship more strongly than LW users in inherently political contexts, but right- and left-wingers are similar in nonpolitical partisan contexts. The discussion considers potential explanations for these asymmetries.