Political tolerance and the golden rule: Reciprocity increases acceptance of normative protest actions of disliked groups

Abstract

The golden rule is a widespread moral guide for preventing conflict across cultures and religions, and reciprocity is foundational to political tolerance. This raises the question of whether the golden rule has an impact on one's willingness to tolerate political protest actions of disliked ideological groups. In the current research, we examined whether making salient golden rule reciprocity impacts on political tolerance of one's least-liked groups. Data from two experiments (N = 950) revealed that participants who watched a 3-min video highlighting the golden rule showed significantly more tolerance of normative protest actions of their least-liked group relative to watching a control video. By contrast, the golden rule video had no significant impact on tolerance of non-normative protest actions of one's least-liked group. Additionally, the golden rule video had no impact on one's attitudes or willingness to engage in contact with the least-liked group indicating that increased political tolerance of normative protest actions was not due to changing attitudes towards the least-liked group. Collectively, these studies demonstrate that reminders of the principle of reciprocity and the golden rule can increase political tolerance with benefits for liberal democracy. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.