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Description: Study Protocol Study Design The current study is a survey-based experiment. In this study participants will be randomly assigned to one of two conditions, whereby they will be asked to make judgments about a speaker whose statement they will read. The conditions are: a politically correct statement about a target, or a politically incorrect statement about target. Several different target groups will be used: undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, and individuals with mental disabilities. All participants will then be asked their thoughts about the speaker who used or did not use political correctness, and about their endorsements of the Moral Foundations (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). Finally, they will be surveyed on their demographic characteristics. Study Site Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Participants and Recruitment Inclusion Criteria: • 18 years of age or older Sample Size Determination We plan to recruit 50 participants per condition, resulting in 300 participants total. Measures Key Dependent Variables: The extent to which the participants rate the authenticity, warmth, and competence of the speaker of the statement they read. Authenticity will measured using the susceptibility to influence items from Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis, & Joseph (2008): “He/she is strongly influenced by the opinions of others,” “He/she usually does what other people tell him/her to do,” “He/she always feels the need to do what others expect him/her to do,” and “Other people influence him/her greatly.” Warmth and competence will be measured using the items from Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu (2002): caring, sincere, tolerant, likable, and good natured, and confident, intelligent, competent, independent, and competitive. Political Ideology: We will ask participants about their political ideology, “How would you describe your overall political views?” The options will be: very conservative, moderately conservative, moderately liberal, or very liberal. Exploratory Morals: The extent to which the participants endorse each of the moral foundations (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). We intend to compute five moral foundations from this scale: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Planned Analysis Primary Analyses: We will analyze the results to determine if the condition impacted participant responses relating to the degree to which they believed their target was 1) authentic, 2) warm, and 3) competent. To do this, we will run separate ANOVA analyses: 2 (Language: politically correct vs. politically incorrect) x 4 (participant ideology). We will run follow-up analyses with a factor for the target group (3 tested) but we do not expect this factor to interact meaningfully with any of the analyses. Hypothesis 1: We predict politically correct vs. incorrect speakers will be rated as warmer, but less authentic (more externally influenced). We don’t expect to see a difference in perceived competence. Hypothesis 2: We predict an interaction between language and participant ideology, such that conservative participants will rate politically correct and politically incorrect speakers as being similarly warm, and liberal participants will rate politically correct and politically incorrect speakers as being similarly authentic (externally influenced). We also expect that ideological differences in ratings of warmth and authenticity will be particularly pronounced when the label is politically incorrect (vs. correct). Exploratory Analyses: We will further test whether endorsement of any of the five moral foundations will mediate the effect of ideology on ratings of warmth and authenticity (in the politically incorrect condition). Based on prior research, we expect that conservatives will rate ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity principles more highly and liberals will rate harm/care and fairness/reciprocity principles more highly (Graham et al., 2009). We think it is possible that purity will mediate the effect of ideology on authenticity whereas fairness and equality may mediate the effect of ideology on warmth, but these analyses are exploratory.