Speech is a critical means of negotiating political, adaptive interests in human society. Prior research on motivated political cognition has found that support for freedom of speech depends on whether one agrees with its ideological content. However, it remains unclear if people (A) openly hold that some speech should be more free than other speech; or (B) want to feel as if speech content does not affect their judgments. Here, we find support for (B) over (A), using social dominance orientation and political alignment to predict support for speech. Study 1 demonstrates that if people have previously judged restrictions of speech which they oppose, they are less harsh in condemning restrictions of speech which they support, and vice versa. Studies 2 and 3 find that when participants judge two versions of the same scenario, with only the ideological direction of speech being reversed, their answers are strongly affected by the ordering of conditions: While the first judgment is made in accordance with one's political attitudes, the second opposing judgment is made so as to remain consistent with the first. Studies 4 and 5 find that people broadly support the principle of giving both sides of contested issues equal speech rights, also when this is stated abstractly, detached from any specific scenario. In Study 6 we explore the boundaries of our findings, and find that the need to be consistent weakens substantially for speech that is widely seen as too extreme. Together, these results suggest that although people can selectively endorse moral principles depending on their political agenda, many seek to conceal this bias from others, and perhaps also themselves.

言论是人类社会谈判政治、适应性利益的重要手段。先前对动机性政治认知的研究发现，对言论自由的支持取决于一个人是否同意其意识形态内容。然而，目前尚不清楚人们是否 (A) 公开认为某些言论应该比其他言论更自由；(B) 希望感觉演讲内容不会影响他们的判断。在这里，我们使用社会支配取向和政治联盟来预测对言论的支持，发现对（B）的支持超过（A）。研究1表明，如果人们之前对他们反对的言论限制做出了判断，那么他们在谴责他们支持的言论限制时就会不那么严厉，反之亦然。研究2和3发现，当参与者对同一场景的两个版本进行判断时，只有言论的意识形态方向相反，他们的答案会受到条件排序的强烈影响：第一个判断是根据一个人的政治态度做出的，做出第二个相反的判断是为了与第一个判断保持一致。研究 4 和研究 5 发现，人们普遍支持给予争议问题双方平等言论权的原则，即使是抽象地表述这一点，脱离任何具体情况。在研究 6 中，我们探索了研究结果的界限，发现对于被广泛认为过于极端的言论，一致性的需要大大减弱。总之，这些结果表明，尽管人们可以根据自己的政治议程有选择地认可道德原则，但许多人试图向他人隐瞒这种偏见，也许还有他们自己。