Inequality and deep poverty have risen sharply in the US since the 1990s. Simultaneously, cash-based welfare policies have frayed, support for public assistance has fallen on the political right, and prejudice against recipients of welfare has remained high. Yet, in recent years Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained traction, a policy proposing to give all citizens cash sufficient to meet basic needs with no strings attached. We hypothesized that UBI can mitigate the partisanship and prejudice that define the existing welfare paradigm in the US but that this potential depends critically on the narratives attached to it. Indeed, across three online experiments with US adults (total N = 1888), we found that communicating the novel policy features of UBI alone were not sufficient to achieve bipartisan support for UBI or overcome negative stereotyping of its recipients. However, when UBI was described as advancing the more conservative value of financial freedom, conservatives perceived the policy to be more aligned with their values and were less opposed to the policy (meta-analytic effect on policy support: d = 0.36 [95% CI: 0.27 to 0.46]). Extending the literatures on moral reframing and cultural match, we further find that this values-aligned policy narrative mitigated prejudice among conservatives, reducing negative welfare-related stereotyping of policy recipients (meta-analytic effect d = −0.27 [95% CI: −0.38 to −0.16]), while increasing affiliation with them. Together, these findings point to moral reframing as a promising means by which institutional narratives can be used to bridge partisan divides and reduce prejudice.

自 1990 年代以来，美国的不平等和深度贫困急剧上升。与此同时，以现金为基础的福利政策已经破裂，对公共援助的支持落到了政治右翼的头上，对福利接受者的偏见仍然很高。然而，近年来，全民基本收入 (UBI) 获得了关注，这项政策提议向所有公民提供足够的现金以满足基本需求，而且不附加任何条件。我们假设 UBI 可以减轻定义美国现有福利范式的党派偏见和偏见，但这种潜力主要取决于与之相关的叙述。事实上，在针对美国成年人的三个在线实验中（总N  = 1888 年），我们发现仅仅传达 UBI 的新颖政策特征不足以实现两党对 UBI 的支持或克服对其接受者的负面刻板印象。然而，当 UBI 被描述为推进更保守的财务自由价值时，保守派认为该政策更符合他们的价值观并且更少反对该政策（对政策支持的元分析效果：d  =  0.36 [95% CI : 0.27 至 0.46])。扩展关于道德重构和文化匹配的文献，我们进一步发现，这种与价值观一致的政策叙述减轻了保守派的偏见，减少了政策接受者与福利相关的负面刻板印象（元分析效应d  = −0.27 [95% CI: −0.38 to −0.16]), 同时增加与他们的联系。总之，这些发现表明道德重构是一种很有前途的手段，制度叙事可以用来弥合党派分歧和减少偏见。