Capitalism and socialism offer starkly contrasting visions of how wealth and power should be acquired within society. For Americans today, this appears to be a fundamental ideological conflict, as most self-identified Democrats report positive views of socialism, while most self-identified Republicans report negative views. Across five studies (N = 1753), including four pre-registered experiments (N = 1640), we provide evidence that this divide is overestimated.
In Studies 1-4, we find that Americans broadly support a hybrid economic system that combines elements of capitalism and socialism, but they apply different labels—either “capitalist” or “socialist”—depending on their political ideologies. We show that highlighting these shared values reduces perceptions of intergroup differences and enhances receptiveness to outparty policies. Highlighting these shared values also increases support for outparty candidates who support (1) a social safety net that provides everyone food, clean water, basic healthcare, and shelter, (2) investments in public education and programs that develop skills, (3) a progressive tax system, and (4) regulations to ensure that free markets protect consumers and the environment.
These effects were significant for both Republicans and Democrats and persisted for at least one month. In Study (5), we replicate this pattern in Brazil, as Brazilians also largely agree on a shared economic system but apply different labels depending on their political ideologies. These findings demonstrate the potential to reduce partisan divides by revealing hidden agreement concerning the fundamental economic structure of society.
We thank Key Williams for research assistance. We thank Matt Coleman, the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, attendees of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference, and attendees of the Directions of Polarization, Social Norms & Trust in Societies workshop for helpful comments. L.W. was supported by the NSF GRFP (2140743).
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.
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