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The politics of time: Conservatives differentially reference the past and liberals differentially reference the future
Author(s) -
Robinson Michael D.,
Cassidy Deirdre M.,
Boyd Ryan L.,
Fetterman Adam K.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/jasp.12306
Subject(s) - normative , politics , focus (optics) , psychology , biology and political orientation , value (mathematics) , social psychology , certainty , positive economics , liberalism , political science , law , epistemology , philosophy , economics , physics , optics , machine learning , computer science
Conservatives are thought to favor certainty and value tradition (suggesting a focus on the past), whereas liberals are thought to favor change (suggesting a focus on the future), even when it is associated with some degree of uncertainty. On this basis, two studies contrasted references to the past versus the future in language usage. Study 1 analyzed 600 texts from conservative and liberal websites. After adjusting for normative differences, a cross‐over interaction was obtained: Conservative posts referenced the past to a greater extent than the future and liberal posts referenced the future more than the past. A conceptually parallel cross‐over interaction was obtained in Study 2, which analyzed 145 State of the Union addresses. The temporal orientation of conservatives and liberals, then, appears qualitatively different.