The Value Clarification Hypothesis: Explaining a Striking Asymmetry in the Link Between Education and Moral Attitudes

Social scientists have long documented a robust association between higher education and liberal moral attitudes. However, this relationship may be more complex than previously understood. Using large-scale survey data from the United States (General Social Survey), we demonstrate that the education-liberalism link is profoundly asymmetric across political ideology. Education strongly predicts liberal attitudes among self-identified liberals but has virtually no association with attitudes among strong conservatives. We explain this striking pattern by introducing and testing the Value Clarification Hypothesis, which proposes that education acts as a value-clarifying rather than uniformly liberalizing force. Higher education enhances individuals' ability to align their attitudes with their more fundamental moral values, but this process produces different outcomes depending on one's ideological starting point. For liberals, whose values center on preventing harm and promoting fairness, exposure to moral arguments consistently reinforces positions justified by such arguments. For conservatives, whose broader moral framework creates cross-cutting considerations, the net effect is negligible. A preregistered replication using similar survey data from New Zealand (the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Survey) confirms both the asymmetric pattern and our theoretical explanation. These findings reframe debates about political bias in higher education and offer new insights into how educational experiences shape political belief systems.