A new study published in American Psychologist finds that political liberals, while generally disliking prejudice, tend to rate antisemitic remarks more positively when they are paired with justifications rooted in human rights or criticisms of Israel. The researchers say these specific justifications can function as social signals, leading liberals to view the speaker as an ally rather than broadly bigoted.
Antisemitism refers to prejudice or hatred directed at Jewish people. The researchers explain that in social psychology, expressions of prejudice are often accompanied by a justification to make them seem more socially acceptable or grounded in a legitimate concern.
The study notes a rise in hate crimes against Jewish people in the United States after the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023, increasing from 11% of all hate crimes in the year before the war to 27% in the year after. It also recalls that prior to the war, agreement with overt antisemitic statements was two to three times higher on the American far right than on the far left, a pattern previously reported in PsyPost coverage.
Lead author Jordan W. Moon, a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Southampton, said there had been a “sharp rise in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents” and that those who were otherwise protective of minorities were “unconcerned or even dismissive of this rise.”
Moon and his team set out to test whether certain forms of prejudice might be more tolerated by liberals, and whether there are particular ways of expressing antisemitism that liberal audiences find more acceptable. They proposed two potential mechanisms: ingroup favoritism, where a justification signals shared political views, and alliance politics, where a justification suggests the speaker is not indiscriminately hateful toward other groups.
The researchers describe antisemitism as related to, but distinct from, political attitudes toward Israel. They cite recent work showing different associations between antisemitic attitudes and support for violence, compared with criticism of Israel and legal activism.
To explore these ideas, the team conducted three preregistered online experiments from October to December 2024 with 979 American adults. Participants were recruited via Prolific and quota-matched to the U.S. population, with Jewish participants being negligible. Political views were treated as a continuous scale from 0 (extremely liberal) to 100 (extremely conservative.
The first experiment involved 270 participants who read profiles of individuals expressing prejudice against Jewish people, Black people or Muslims. Each participant saw all three prejudiced profiles among five unrelated distractors and was randomly assigned to see the prejudice stated plainly or accompanied by a socially common justification.
For antisemitism, the justification was a strong disapproval of Israel and its war in Gaza. For antisemitism, other profiles used justifications about crime rates for anti-Black prejudice and conflicting cultural values for anti-Muslim prejudice. After reading the profiles, participants rated how much they liked or disliked the individual on a seven-point scale and estimated the speaker’s likely political orientation and bigotry.
The results showed that, without justification, liberal participants disliked all prejudiced individuals more than conservatives did. When antisemitism was justified by disapproval of Israel, liberals liked the speaker 1.1 points more on the seven-point scale, while conservatives were unaffected by the justification. Justifications for anti-Black and anti-Muslim prejudice did not increase liberal liking.
Moon emphasised that this did not mean liberals endorsed prejudice; “On a scale of ‘Dislike Extremely’ toward ‘Like Extremely’, the prejudiced targets were largely disliked by both liberals and conservatives, regardless of which prejudice they expressed and how it was justified,” he noted. “That is, liberals did not ‘like’ antisemites, but certain justifications did make them feel relatively more positively toward them.”
The second experiment, with 277 participants, expanded targets to Jewish, Black, Muslim, Chinese and Russian American groups and tested liberal value-based justifications (such as human rights violations) against conservative value-based justifications (such as threats to traditional American values).
Again, liberals disliked all prejudiced individuals without justification, but when the prejudice against any group was justified by citing human rights violations, liberals evaluated the speakers more positively by roughly half a point to a full point on the seven-point scale. Conservatives also showed modest increases for some groups, while the anti-Jewish speaker differed reliably only between liberals and conservatives in certain cases. Traditional American values had little effect for either group.
The authors stress that the finding is not about antisemitism alone. Moon clarified: “Although we focused our writeup on antisemitism, we found similar effects for other prejudices. A person who expresses prejudice toward Black Americans or Chinese Americans was liked a bit more by politically liberal observers when they appealed to human rights abuses by African countries or China.”
A third experiment, involving 432 participants, focused exclusively on anti-Jewish prejudice and tested a wider array of rationalisations, including disapproval of Israel, conspiracies about Jewish power, beliefs in genetic inferiority and religious blame. Each participant saw only one profile.
As in the earlier studies, liberals disliked unjustified antisemitic speakers more than conservatives did. When the speaker justified their prejudice with disapproval of Israel or conspiracies about Jewish power, the negative social penalty was reduced compared with no reason given. However, unlike in Experiments 1 and 2, these effects did not differ significantly between liberals and conservatives when analysed separately, and the authors caution against treating the results as definitive.
Genetic-inferiority claims lowered liking for the speaker overall, and both liberals and conservatives perceived that speaker as more likely to be a bigot. Religious justification had no statistically significant effect.
Moon highlighted a surprising finding about a conspiracy trope long associated with the political right: “One of the justifications we included was the trope that Jews hold too much power and influence over financial markets, governments, and the media.” He noted that, in the experiments, profiles uttering this trope were viewed as more liberal than those expressing unchecked antisemitism, with similar licensing effects to the Israel-disapproval justification.
Across the three experiments, the researchers identified two mechanisms that accounted for liberals’ relative tolerance of left-leaning justifications: ingroup proximity, making the speaker seem politically close, and the perception that a speaker emphasising human rights is less likely to be broadly bigoted or a threat to the liberal coalition.
Dylan Selterman, who directs research and resource development at Heterodox Academy, commented that the work shows how people can condemn group-based prejudice in some contexts while condoning it in others if it is morally licensed by a justification. He stressed the importance of recognising that people may feel immune to prejudice yet be influenced by its framing.
Selterman cautioned that the study has limits: the different justifications across groups were not perfectly identical, the research relies on statistical models, and real-world interactions are more complex than brief written profiles. He added that the authors’ experiments were well designed and statistically sound, though Experiment 3 was less consistent with the first two.
Moon concluded that campaigns against antisemitism should address not only the prejudice itself but also the language used to package it, suggesting that arguments framed as moral or humanitarian can signal strong commitment to a cause and to a political group.
“If we want to understand why some prejudices become socially acceptable, we should consider the guises they take, and what information they communicate to others,” he said.
Selterman outlined next steps, including exploring whether people recognise when they use moral licensing, identifying other attitudes linked to this licensing, and developing interventions to promote consistent moral standards against prejudice without justification.
The study is titled “Justifying Antisemitism: Political Liberalism and Perceptions of Prejudices” and was authored by Jordan W. Moon, Michael Barlev, and Steven L. Neuberg.
