Do attitudes about language differ by political party affiliation?
On average, all three groups slightly agreed that reality is determined by the words we use and that people should say and believe what they want, even if others think it is hurtful.
All three groups, on average, agreed that people can cause severe physical harm with the words they use. This finding is in line with the work of scholars (e.g., Haslam, 2016; Sunstein, 2018) who have argued that harm-related concepts may be used more often to describe verbal and symbolic actions in rich democracies where rates of actual physical violence are historically low (Pinker, 2011).
Meaningful differences emerged regarding the statement: “Not using someone’s preferred gendered pronouns leads to physical harm against the LBGTQ community.”
- Democrats slightly agreed with the statement while individuals that identified with the Republican party, or no party in particular, slightly disagreed with the statement. This difference is not attributable to differences in religiosity between the groups.
- One explanation for why all groups did not agree more strongly with this question, despite agreeing that words cause harm, is that this particular language norm has only recently emerged in Progressive cultural niches; other segments of the population (including moderate Democrats) may have had lower exposure to it.
