PsyPost reports:

Across different types of military conflicts, people who hold conservative political views are more willing to accept unintended civilian deaths than people with liberal views. This ideological divide remains consistent whether the war features real adversaries, strategic partners, or entirely fictional nations. The findings were recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

Public opinion plays a major role in how governments wage war and handle international conflicts. Tolerance for civilian casualties can influence diplomacy, military strategy, and humanitarian aid. Researchers wanted to understand what drives the deep political divisions often seen in public polling about wartime casualties. They questioned whether this divide was tied to specific real-world conflicts or if it reflected a deeper psychological difference between political groups.

The research team was led by Julia Elad-Strenger, a researcher at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She worked alongside Daniel Statman from the University of Haifa and Thomas Kessler from Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany. They designed a series of experimental surveys to isolate the moral dimensions of wartime decision-making. Specifically, they wanted to see if right-leaning individuals generally tolerate more civilian deaths than left-leaning individuals across varied situations.

The researchers designed the study to solve a specific problem found in previous polling data. Past surveys often blurred the lines between whether a war itself is justified and whether specific actions within that war are justified. By setting all their scenarios strictly as wars of self-defense, the team held the initial justification for war constant. This isolated the participants’ views entirely on the actions taken during the combat itself. [Continue reading…]