Today, many public debates escalate with striking speed — from whether a novel should be taught at school, to whether a statue should be torn down, or whether a public figure should be “cancelled”. We often take these clashes as the fight between conservatives and liberals. But social psychologist Namrata Goyal, drawing on research across 59 countries, argues that the real divide runs deeper: a psychological and philosophical split between moral absolutism and moral relativism. Understanding this divide, she suggests, is key to making sense of today’s culture wars — and for enabling effective dialogue between the left and the right.

Why do so many disagreements today feel impossible to resolve? A debate over whether a novel should be taught in schools, whether a historical monument should stay or be removed, or whether a public figure deserves forgiveness can escalate rapidly. One person insists a line has been crossed and that certain actions are always wrong; another argues that the situation is more complicated and that judgment depends on context. The content of the dispute varies, but the structure is the same: one side appeals to fixed moral rules, the other to circumstances and interpretation.

It is tempting to explain these collisions as a clash between conservatives and liberals. But our research suggests the divide runs deeper. What actually drives these conflicts is a more fundamental difference in moral philosophy: moral absolutism, the belief that some actions are right or wrong regardless of context, and moral relativism, the view that moral judgment depends on circumstances, intentions, and cultural meaning.

In survey data covering 59 countries and hundreds of thousands of people, this philosophical divide appeared with remarkable consistency. Conservatives tended to reason in more absolutist terms, while liberals leaned toward relativist ones. This broad pattern set the stage for a closer look at how these moral philosophies appear in people’s beliefs and their everyday language.

Conservatives and absolutism, liberals and relativism

In our experiments, conservatives were consistently more likely to endorse statements such as “Morality is defined by basic human principles that do not vary across societies” and “What is moral or immoral does not change based on the circumstances.” Liberals, in contrast, tended to agree with items expressing a more contextual view of morality, such as “Morality is defined by culturally specific principles” and “What is moral or immoral depends on the situation you are in.”

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Although absolutism and relativism seem abstract, they show up in political behavior in surprisingly concrete ways.

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These differences appear not only in the explicit statements they endorsed, but also in the way people communicate. When we examined millions of tweets from politically identified users on X, conservative users were far more likely to use phrases like “always wrong,” “never okay,” and “absolutely unacceptable,” and their language overall aligned more closely with a morally absolutist outlook. Liberal users used this kind of categorical language far less often, and their tweets more closely resembled a relativist way of thinking, one that allows for nuance and context.