Political Moderates May Look Like The Opposition To Both Sides

The Middle Ground Isn’t as Safe as It Looks, According to New Research

Staying largely neutral during a heated political debate might feel like the reasonable move. A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General finds otherwise: people on both sides of a divisive issue tend to slot moderates into the opposing camp, regardless of which camp is judging.

Say someone firmly pro-life hears a person say they support allowing abortion only in the first trimester. That pro-lifer is likely to call the speaker pro-choice. A firm pro-choicer hearing the exact same statement will probably call that same person pro-life. Researchers at the University of Florida and the University of California, San Diego named this the ‘moderate as out-group’ effect. The paper’s title, Whoever Is Not With Me Is Against Me, captures the idea neatly: when an issue feels morally loaded and threatening, the middle ground doesn’t register as neutral. It registers as belonging to the other team.

Across five studies involving 3,272 participants, the pattern appeared across three very different flashpoints: abortion policy, the 2024 presidential election, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Its strength, though, depended on the participants and how the moderate position was framed.

Moderate Policies Get Labeled as the Opposition’s Views

In the first two studies, researchers recruited U.S.-based participants online and asked them to identify their own position on abortion, from definitely pro-life to definitely pro-choice. Participants then rated a series of abortion policies, from ‘never allowed’ to ‘always allowed,’ in four-week increments of pregnancy, on a scale of how pro-life or pro-choice each one seemed.

Policies allowing abortion up to 4, 8, and 12 weeks were the moderate options, according to participants who had no strong stance themselves. But pro-life participants rated those same three policies as pro-choice, and pro-choice participants rated them as pro-life. The more extreme someone’s own position, the more they pushed those moderate policies toward the other side: ‘definitely pro-life’ participants moved them further toward pro-choice than ‘mostly pro-life’ participants did, and the same held in reverse for pro-choice participants.

A second study asked participants to judge a fictional person named Jamie who supported each policy, instead of judging the policies directly. The pattern held: pro-choice participants labeled Jamie pro-life across all three moderate policies, and pro-life participants did the same for two of the three, though they rated the mildest one as a wash.

Extreme Views Make the Effect Even Sharper

A third study, run five days before the 2024 presidential election, examined how people judged a hypothetical person who equally supported both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Liberal participants clearly rated that person as leaning conservative. Conservative participants leaned toward calling the same person liberal too, though that result was weaker.

That study also tested when the effect fades. Participants reported whether they saw the election as a matter of preference or morality, and whether the opposing candidate’s win felt like a threat. In an exploratory analysis, the effect appeared only when participants saw the election as both a moral issue and a threat.

Here too, the most committed liberals rated the moderate target as more conservative than milder liberals did. The same trend showed up among conservatives, though it was weaker and less statistically certain.

Failing to Condemn the Other Side Is What Really Counts

Studies four and five dug into why this happens. Two explanations were on the table: partisans might classify moderates as outsiders because they fail to condemn the opposing side, or because they do not back their own side strongly enough. The evidence favored the first explanation.

Study four recruited only self-identified liberal participants to evaluate targets expressing varying support for Trump or Harris. A target with ‘mixed opinions about Trump’s politics’ was labeled conservative. A target with ‘mixed opinions about Harris’s politics’ was rated as neither liberal nor conservative, essentially just moderate. Failing to oppose the other side carried far more weight than failing to fully back one’s own.

Study five, run weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, tested the same idea using the Israel-Palestine conflict. Participants read about a fictional person, Jamie, who held a moderate position, framed either as accepting both sides’ actions or rejecting both sides’ actions. When Jamie accepted both, partisans on each side placed Jamie in the opposing camp. When Jamie rejected both, the effect was substantially weaker. Disagreeing with everyone made Jamie seem far less aligned with the other side.

Centrist News Outlets May Face the Same Fate

As a speculative implication rather than a direct conclusion of their research, the researchers note that this effect could help explain a broader media pattern: nonpartisan outlets may find themselves rejected by both sides rather than embraced by any, since balanced coverage could read as sympathy for the threatening side. This is raised as a hypothesis worth exploring, not an established finding.

Repeated misclassification, the authors speculate, could eventually make moderation harder to maintain, though the studies did not test whether moderates actually change their views after being misclassified.

Political theories have long assumed moderates serve as bridge-builders, making compromise possible. This research points to a psychological barrier working against that function. When an issue feels morally loaded and the other side feels like a threat, the middle ground may not read as neutral to partisans who see it in exactly those terms. It reads as a tell.

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