When Cooperation and Compromise Fail: Distrusting and Denigrating the Moral Character of Those Who Disagree

People tend to view adversaries with dissimilar opinions as irrational, biased, and negatively motivated. However, when adversaries show honest attempts to compromise evaluations should become more positive. Unfortunately, the evidence presented here does not support this idea. Across five studies using different attitudinal issues perceivers believed dissimilar attitude targets were negatively motivated, untrustworthy, and less moral compared to similar attitude targets. Further, moral character judgments mediated the relationship between attitude target and trust. Fortunately, the strong association between motives and morality provided an opportunity to intervene. Those explicitly told that an attitude target held positive rather than negative long‐term motives evaluated those with dissimilar and similar attitudes positively. Discussion focuses on the importance of these findings for theory and public policy.