Mitigating welfare-related prejudice and partisanship among U.S. conservatives with moral reframing of a universal basic income policy

Inequality and deep poverty have risen sharply in the US since 1990s. Simultaneously, cash-based welfare policies frayed, support for public assistance has fallen on political right, prejudice against recipients of remained high. Yet, recent years Universal Basic Income (UBI) gained traction, a policy proposing to give all citizens cash sufficient meet basic needs with no strings attached. We hypothesized that UBI can mitigate partisanship define existing paradigm but this potential depends critically narratives attached it. Indeed, across three online experiments adults (total N = 1888), we found communicating novel features alone were not achieve bipartisan or overcome negative stereotyping its recipients. However, when was described as advancing more conservative value financial freedom, conservatives perceived be aligned their values less opposed (meta-analytic effect support: d 0.36 [95% CI: 0.27 0.46]). Extending literatures moral reframing cultural match, further find values-aligned narrative mitigated among conservatives, reducing welfare-related ?0.27 ?0.38 ?0.16]), while increasing affiliation them. Together, these findings point promising means by which institutional used bridge partisan divides reduce prejudice.