Give people the exact same research report, change only which groups it compares, and their verdict on its scientific quality shifts. Across three experiments with more than 1,800 participants, left-leaning people rated a study claiming liberals think more flexibly than conservatives as clearly sounder than an identical study claiming the same about White people over Black people.
The research was carried out by Julia Elad-Strenger of Bar-Ilan University, Alyce M. Thiel of Freie Universität Berlin and Thomas Kessler of Friedrich Schiller University Jena. It was published online in the European Journal of Social Psychology on December 30, 2025.
One report, four versions
Participants read what looked like a newspaper summary of an American study. It said one group shows more rigid thinking, less willingness to compromise and more intolerance of ambiguity than another, and that the gap is partly genetic. The text for the liberals versus conservatives version summarised real findings from political psychology. For the racial version, the researchers simply swapped in “Whites” and “Blacks”.
People then rated the findings, the methods and whether the work deserved funding, on 14 items combined into one score. A pilot study surveyed 130 Germans. Study 1 surveyed 604 White Germans and added reversed versions, in which conservatives or Black people came out ahead. Study 2 repeated the full design with 1,146 Americans, roughly half White and half Black. Political orientation was measured at the end so it would not prime answers, and education and prior familiarity with the topic were controlled for.
Liberals of both races showed the same tilt
In every sample, people on the left rated the liberals-over-conservatives report more favourably than the Whites-over-Blacks report. In Study 1 the gap among German leftists was 0.72 on a standardised scale. In the US it was 0.78 among White liberals and 0.54 among Black liberals.
The left was not simply wary of race research in general. When the direction flipped, leftists saw no difference between a report favouring conservatives and one favouring Black people. They did, however, rate the pro-liberal report higher than the pro-conservative one, a sign of ideological in-group favouritism.
Their judgements also tracked what they considered socially acceptable research. Left-leaning participants rated the liberal superiority study as far more acceptable to carry out and publish, and statistically that perception explained much of their preference. No such link appeared among right-leaning participants.
The right split by country and race
German rightists rated both stereotypical reports about the same. White American conservatives showed the mirror image of liberals, preferring the Whites-over-Blacks report to the liberals-over-conservatives one by 0.44 points, and favouring the pro-conservative report over the pro-liberal one. Black American conservatives showed no consistent preference at all, which the authors suggest may reflect cross-pressure between racial and ideological identity.
The authors stress that they are not claiming the two research lines are scientifically or morally equivalent, only that laypeople judged structurally identical claims differently. They note that social acceptability was measured, not manipulated, so its causal role is not proven. They also flag that “Liberale” carries a free-market meaning in German, though leftists there still treated liberals as their in-group.
The paper closes by turning the question on its own authors, asking whether liberals, themselves included, would defend open inquiry into racial differences as readily as into ideological ones.
Study Details:
- Title: Ideological (a)Symmetry in Research Evaluations: The Case of Research on Ideological Versus Racial Group Differences
- Authors: Julia Elad-Strenger, Alyce M. Thiel, Thomas Kessler
- Journal: European Journal of Social Psychology
- Publication Date: December 30, 2025
- DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.70050