Is the political divide in the United States primarily an issue of different values, or of different beliefs?

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Overview

Analysts generally agree that the current U.S. political divide cannot be attributed to a single cause. Research on moral psychology, identity-based reasoning and media fragmentation suggests that both value differences (what people think is morally right) and epistemological differences (how people decide what is factually true) interact to produce the present level of polarisation.

Differences in Values

• Jonathan Haidt’s work argues that liberals and conservatives prioritise partially distinct moral foundations—care/harm and fairness/cheating versus loyalty, authority and sanctity—producing durable value gaps over issues such as immigration, religion and sexuality [2].
• David Brooks adds that many political preferences flow from differing visions of the “good life” rooted in class and cultural experience rather than in formal policy analysis [1].

These accounts imply that, even if Americans shared the same factual picture of the world, disagreement would remain because their moral weightings differ.

Differences in Epistemology

• The Reuters Institute review finds strong evidence that exposure to homogeneous information environments (“echo chambers”) can alter what counts as credible evidence and trusted authority for different partisan publics [3].
• The Wikle’s “Epistemic Crisis” page highlights declining agreement on basic institutional sources (legacy media, science, government statistics) and the growth of alternative knowledge networks, from partisan cable news to influencer-driven social media [4].
• Van Bavel and colleagues show that partisan identity motivates selective acceptance or rejection of factual claims; neurological studies reveal reward signals when participants defend in-party positions, even against contradictory evidence [5].

Together these findings indicate that Americans not only disagree on values but increasingly disagree on how to evaluate truth claims in the first place.

Interaction of Values and Epistemology

Empirical work suggests the two dimensions reinforce one another rather than operate independently:

• Value commitments guide which information sources are granted epistemic authority (“motivated reasoning”) [5].
• Conversely, segregated information ecologies amplify moral outrage and sharpen value differences, a feedback loop documented in experimental and observational studies of social media [3][4].

Points of Scholarly Disagreement

• Some moral psychologists (e.g., Haidt) lean toward a values-first explanation, contending that moral intuitions precede reasoning and shape information processing [2].
• Communication scholars focusing on media fragmentation emphasise epistemology, arguing that structural changes in the information environment drive polarisation by undermining shared facts [3][4].
• Identity-based neuroscientific models position partisan identity as the central factor that binds the two: identity shapes both moral preferences and epistemic filters [5].

Implications for Public Discourse

Because value and epistemic divides are mutually reinforcing, initiatives that address only one dimension (e.g., fact-checking without moral reframing, or civility training without media reform) show limited effectiveness. Cross-partisan dialogues that couple shared factual baselines with moral perspective-taking have shown modest promise in reducing hostility, though scaling such interventions remains difficult [3][5].

Sources

1. The Social Animal – Wikipedia
2. The Righteous Mind – Wikipedia
3. Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles and Polarisation: A Literature Review – Reuters Institute (2022)
4. Epistemic Crisis – The Wikle
5. Van Bavel, J. J. et al. (2018). The Partisan Brain: An Identity-Based Model of Political Belief – Trends in Cognitive Sciences 22(3)

Added Sources

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Sources

1. The Social Animal – Wikipedia (Encyclopedia article on David Brooks’s 2011 book)
2. The Righteous Mind – Wikipedia (Encyclopedia article on Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 book)
3. Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles and Polarisation: A Literature Review – Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2022 research review)
4. Epistemic Crisis – The Wikle (Wiki article / Overview page)
5. The Partisan Brain: An Identity-Based Model of Political Belief – Trends in Cognitive Sciences 22 (3), 2018 (Peer-reviewed review article)

Question

Is the political divide in the United States primarily an issue of different values, or different epistemological beliefs.