New paper with Robert Trager available in the European Journal of International Relations. Scholars have made connections between Moral Foundations Theory from @JonHaidt and foreign policy preferences. 1/n journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
Through three experiments, we show that among Americans prejudice is a better predictor than morality of when people want to take aggressive action abroad in order to help a people persecuted by their government. 2/n 
While the Moral Foundations approach says that people take abstract values and use them to make concrete policy judgments, we turn this logic on its head, arguing prejudice comes first, and ideological and moral justifications second. The picture shows the difference. 3/n
Our two experiments simply switched the identities of oppressors and oppressed. Liberals are prejudiced in favor of helping blacks oppressed by whites, while cons show no racial prejudice. Conservatives, in contrast, show a large preference for helping Muslims over Christians 4/n
Prejudice also shapes abstract moral views. When conservatives heard about Muslims oppressing Christians, they became more likely to say that the US has a general obligation to help those persecuted by their gov, and also more likely to support war in the second experiment. 5/n
The same might've been true for liberals after hearing about blacks oppressed by whites, but we did not test that due to the ordering of questions. This is evidence that foreign policy morality can be ad hoc justification for how much one likes or dislikes the groups involved 6/n
Prejudice tends to be more important than things one would think should go into a utilitarian calculus, like the degree of oppression involved or the numbers killed. 7/n
We also surveyed people on Moral Foundations, and found that they were less predictive than prejudice for explaining when Americans wanted to take aggressive action. 8/n
We close with some thoughts on how our findings can help people understand foreign policy divisions more generally. Recall that before WWII, the most anti-interventionist Americans were on the right, while the opposite was true during the Cold War. 9/n
This suggests that ideological differences in foreign policy orientation are less driven by values than prejudice, with ideology and surface justifications for one's views being downstream from that. 10/n
Today, the right sees Islamic countries like Iran as more threatening, while liberals are more worried about Russia. This is unlikely to be due to anything objective about the threats from those countries, but driven by the same prejudices that shape domestic politics. 11/n
This paper seeks to help unify the study of foreign policy preferences with the rest of American politics, where the trend is to see less principle or ideological consistency on either side and prejudice, whether partisan, racial, etc., as doing much of the heavy lifting. 12/n
