The growing divisiveness: Culture wars or a war of words?

This study seeks to resolve a paradox. While a substantial amount of schola rly research and media discourse suggests a growing divisiveness among Amer icans on a variety of social and moral issues, empirical studies show that attitudinal differences among various groups on these issues have remained fairly stable over the past 25 years. Basing our study largely on social ca tegorization theory and recent work on culture, structure, and cognition, w e propose that several key historical events during the 1970s and 1980s inc reased the salience of many social and moral issues while concomitantly red efining the terms conservative and liberal These events led members of orth odox religious denominations to increasingly categorize themselves as conse rvative and members of progressive religious denominations to categorize th emselves as liberal despite a lack of attitudinal changes. They further dev eloped a more negative opinion of out-group members. Data from the GSS prov ide qualified support for this perspective. Implications of this study are discussed.