Member Spotlight: Spike W. S. Lee on Morality, Politics, and Overcoming Stigma

APS Fellow Spike W. S. Lee is a social psychologist and associate professor at the University of Toronto, where he researches topics involving politics, morality, language, culture, social class, and higher-order cognition. Lee was named an APS Rising Star in 2016.

Your research focuses on political polarization, antiscience attitudes, and morality. What led to your scientific interest in these subjects? 

Trump 1.0, Hong Kong, and COVID.

Trump’s victory in 2016 took numerous pollsters and pundits by surprise. With it came “Trumpism,” a whole host of values, beliefs, attitudes, motives, and agendas that were on full national display and that rapidly exacerbated the divisiveness in the U.S. The polarization was visceral. I couldn’t ignore it. I bet you couldn’t either. In fact, I remember being at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention in 2017. During a coffee break on the preconference day, someone casually said to me, “Trump is gonna turn a lot of social psychologists into political psychologists.” I wish I could remember who this wise, prophetic stranger was.

Two years later, summer 2019 marked the beginning of a social/political movement in my hometown Hong Kong, at an unprecedented scale. In one massive rally, by some estimates, 2 million people protested. The entire population of Hong Kong was only 7.5 million. Put in American context, with its 340-million population, it’d be like 91 million protesters on the streets. You have to understand that unlike in the U.S., political engagement has traditionally been pretty low in Hong Kong, especially among the youth. 2019 ushered in a generational shift. A series of police brutalities, broken promises, systemic injustice, and cruel indifference forced so many of us to ask, “How could all of this—any of this—happen? What can I do to change this?”

Late 2019, early 2020, COVID hit. I always thought that this global pandemic should have been entirely—or at least mostly—a public health issue. Yet almost every aspect of COVID got politicized or moralized: Whether it’s a real thing. If it’s real, how severe it is (“it’s just like flu”). Whether to wear a mask, to do physical distancing, to lock down, to develop a vaccine. Whether and for whom the vaccine is safe, or beneficial, or necessary, or should be mandatory. Whether to trust scientific findings, science itself, and scientists (us). The list goes on. All the while, people were getting sick, getting hospitalized, dying. Yet politics prevailed, literally in life-or-death circumstances.

These events convinced me I had to study politics, morality, and antiscience.

What are some highlights of your research? What has it shown?

People say that you come up with research ideas in the shower or on the toilet seat. It’s true. But this particular idea emerged in the dental chair.

I’m very sensitive to physical pain. Even with just regular dental cleaning, I always have to have my teeth and gums numbed first. So here I was, feeling nothing in my mouth while my dental hygienist was doing everything. Trained as an experimental social psychologist, I started wondering how numbing people’s pain sensations might change their moral and political views. Well, it’s probably hard to numb enough people to get a large enough sample size for high enough statistical power. But then I thought, maybe I don’t have to numb people because different people have different preexisting levels of pain sensitivity. Would these individual variations track morality and politics in any way?

My prediction was that higher pain sensitivity would predict stronger moral views in general because it would amplify the subjective feelings of harm or suffering that often underlie moral judgments. I was wrong. We didn’t find a broad effect of pain sensitivity on all moral views in general. Instead, we found a nuanced effect of pain sensitivity on some moral views, but not others.

Specifically, higher pain sensitivity predicts higher level of support for moral views that are typically favored by one’s ideological opponent. That is, more pain-sensitive liberals (relative to less pain-sensitive liberals) are more inclined to support moral foundations typically favored by conservatives (being loyal, respecting authority, and staying pure). More pain-sensitive conservatives (relative to less pain-sensitive conservatives) are more inclined to support moral foundations typically favored by liberals (providing care and pursuing equality).

When we first found this “cross-aisle” effect of pain sensitivity, I thought it was a fluke. So we ran several preregistered replications. We kept finding the same results.

The reason for this cross-aisle effect, it turns out, is that moral views are multiply determined—by higher-level processes like political ideology and lower-level processes like pain sensitivity, among other factors. If you’re a liberal, your liberal-leaning media and friends and beliefs already tell you that inequality and ignoring those in need are immoral. So whether you’re high or low on pain sensitivity doesn’t matter much for your perception of harm in these domains. But your liberal ideology doesn’t typically lead you to perceive as much harm in other domains such as nonconformity to societal traditions, challenge to authority figures, or unconventional sexual practices. It is precisely in these domains where pain sensitivity matters, by amplifying liberals’ perception of harm and heightening their moral condemnation.

The same logic applies to conservatives. In domains where their conservative ideology already points out clear harm, pain sensitivity doesn’t matter much. But in other domains where their conservative ideology doesn’t already point out clear harm, higher pain sensitivity strongly predicts greater harm perception and thus stronger moral views.

We also found the same cross-aisle effect of pain sensitivity on political views, which are closely tied to moral views. More pain-sensitive liberals (relative to less pain-sensitive liberals) showed higher likelihoods of voting for Trump over Biden in the 2020 presidential election, stronger support for Republican politicians, and more conservative attitudes toward contentious political issues. More pain-sensitive conservatives (relative to less pain-sensitive conservatives) showed higher likelihoods of voting for Biden over Trump, stronger support for Democratic politicians, and more liberal attitudes toward contentious political issues. We replicated these findings in two additional preregistered studies.

Finally, we asked lay people to predict how pain sensitivity might be related to moral and political views. Lay predictions were opposite to the actual findings. Lay people predicted that more pain-sensitive individuals would have stronger moral and political views in line with their ideological allies. In fact, more pain-sensitive individuals have stronger moral and political views in line with their ideological opponents.

This work was with my graduate student Cecilia Ma. It was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and received an Honorable Mention for the Best Paper Award from the International Social Cognition Network.

Other than that, with my collaborators and students, I have recently also examined the psychological underpinnings of antiscience attitudes (Philipp-Muller et al., 2022), identified the powerful effects of ingroup norms on affective polarization (You & Lee, 2024), and mapped out the emergence of moral language in child development (Ramezani et al., 2024).

What is the biggest challenge you have encountered in your career?

I’ve always been interested in morality. Early on, I was fascinated by a particular aspect of morality: concerns with purity, disgust, and cleanliness. I studied it through the theoretical lens of embodied cognition and conceptual metaphor (e.g., Lee & Schwarz, 2010, 2021; Lee et al., 2024). These theoretical perspectives, which I still endorse and appreciate, have deep roots in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive sciences. But in social psychology, unfortunately, these approaches have gone through a period of intense stigmatization (Lee, 2021). Both the research and the researchers have been stigmatized. I can’t tell how common this sort of experience is, but if you’ve been on the receiving end of stigma because of your passion (in my case, my research topic), you can relate to the feeling. You lose the sense of belonging. You have to re-earn it. That was the biggest challenge to my career.

Fortunately, there are colleagues and collaborators who trust and validate you. I want to take this opportunity to thank them. They mean a ton to me.

What new or expanded research are you planning to pursue? 

What are the most powerful moral, affective, cognitive, and behavioral underpinnings of ideological leaning (from most liberal to most conservative) and political extremity (from moderate to extremist)? Can we turn these knobs up or down? How? These are the questions I’ve been most excited about.

As a few quick examples, my lab members and I have been investigating whether liberals and conservatives really have fundamentally different moral foundations or not. We’ve been analyzing the media content that political moderates and extremists consume. We’ve been tracking the psychological well-being of individuals across the ideological spectrum in many places. We’ve been testing an intervention for facilitating political dialogue and dampening affective polarization. We’ve also been planning an intervention tournament for improving intellectual humility in politics. 

What practical advice would you offer to an early career researcher who wants to be in your position someday, especially those who are interested in science denial, polarization, or political psychology as a whole? 

I used to shy away from tackling big problems because they felt unsurmountable, or because it seemed like so many smarter people than me were already working on them. But I’ve since learned that I can and do bring something to the table. It may not be a lot, but it’s something. And if the problem I’m tackling really matters, then no matter how small my something is, I am contributing to a big thing that matters, one baby step at a time.

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