The story behind the internet’s most viral (and misunderstood) political meme

“The quality of mercy is not strained,” argues Portia in The Merchant of Venice, meaning there should be no limits to being kind and forgiving. But 21st-century culture wars are no Shakespeare play. These days, mercy is a finite resource, and the question is how strained the quality (and quantity) of yours is, for it might reveal your tribal affiliation: liberal or conservative.

Opposite moral universes

At issue is a set of heatmaps from a scientific article exploring the “moral circles” of liberals and conservatives.

A moral circle is a concept in philosophy and the social sciences that represents the groups of people and entities one considers worthy of moral concern.

In the images below, categories like “immediate family” and “closest friends” appear in the innermost rings, while broader categories like “all mammals” and “all things in existence” are placed in the outermost rings, reflecting an expanding scope of moral inclusion.

At first glance, the maps suggest that both ideological tribes inhabit moral universes that aren’t merely different — they’re almost entirely opposite.

Conservatives tend to focus their moral concern on the smaller moral circles, concentrating the most care on family while also extending some toward their country. Meanwhile, liberals seem to care more about the more universal and “distant” categories, including rocks, aliens, and amoebae. Their liberal hearts bleed for people and causes far away — all while ignoring the needs of those who are much nearer, and therefore should be much dearer, to them.

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— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) February 3, 2025

In recent weeks, the maps turned into live ammunition in the ideological firefight over the shutdown of USAID. After all, they seem to perfectly illustrate a conservative point: Liberals (and liberal-inspired institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development) expend Americans’ limited reserves of care and compassion abroad, neglecting needs at home. Why should U.S. taxpayers fund lesbian street theater in Tbilisi when fellow Americans are going hungry in their own country?

Why indeed listen at all to arguments coming from a side of the political spectrum that has its moral priorities so completely, perversely wrong? The heatmaps finally offered scientific proof for what millions of conservatives already thought, summarized by one poster on X as: “Liberals are mentally ill!”

Stupid, middlebrow, and supersmart

This, however, is a rather partisan reading of the data, which was first presented in an article in Nature in 2019 before being weaponized into a meme that has been misinterpreted by countless people on social media.

Arguably the most potent version of that meme merges the heatmaps with a multipurpose version of the IQ bell curve, populated with three “wojaks” on the stupid, middlebrow, and supersmart bits of that curve.

The liberal heatmap is paired with the figure in the meaty middle of the graph, while the conservative one fits with the narrower extremes of the IQ spectrum. The message here: Caring for things far away rather than those close by is typical for “midwits” — people too smart to be really stupid, but also too stupid to be really smart.

Focusing your care and attention on people in one’s immediate surroundings is not just something the very stupid do, but paradoxically it’s also how the very clever roll. (No prizes for guessing which part of the curve the re-posters of this meme identify with.)

“Catnip for conservatives”

It’s hard to argue with something as convincing as a pair of blurry color gradients stuck onto a trio of badly drawn faces, but some have tried nonetheless.

“This graphic is rapidly becoming the most misused and misunderstood image in all of modern history,” hyperbolized podcast host Liv Boeree. “Despite what its spreaders claim, it doesn’t show that liberals care ‘less’ about those close to them (…) It simply shows that they tend to ‘also’ care about further away things as well.”

Referring to the original study, she says the heatmaps “show only the distribution of EDGES of the two groups’ moral circles, NOT the distribution of their FOCUS. And frankly, anyone with an iota of reason could figure that out if they actually sat down and thought about it… There’s basically no one on earth who truly cares about a total stranger or rock or insect MORE than their friends, which is what this chart would imply if interpreted this way.”

“Not even crazy ass wokies have such an inverted moral circle,” she goes on, concluding the heatmaps went viral simply because they feed one tribe’s confirmation bias: “(This is) catnip for conservatives”.

Boeree is correct about a common misunderstanding about the heatmaps: The heatmaps visualize only the size of liberals’ and conservatives’ moral circles — not how they chose to allocate moral concern.

The task that generated the heatmaps told participants that all concentric circles were inclusive of the preceding ones, such that “if you select 10 (all mammals), you are also including numbers 1-9 (up to ‘all people on all continents’) in your moral circle.” So, the heatmaps alone do not show that conservatives or liberals necessarily “care more” about any particular group.

Elsewhere in the paper, however, some key differences between liberals and conservatives do emerge.

Parochial vs. universal

Let’s take a closer look at the studies because they reveal a subtler story — subtle enough that neither tribe can claim the win.

The original Nature article that features the heatmaps examines how the two main political ideologies — liberalism and conservatism — reflect differences in the levels of moral compassion. Across seven studies, the researchers found that conservatives tend to focus their compassion on groups “closer” to them — an attitude they call “parochialism” — while liberals do so toward more general ones: “universalism.”

Study 1b, for example, examines the correspondence between both ideologies and the values of universalism versus nationalism, finding that “conservatism is negatively related to universal love of others, whereas liberalism is positively related to a sense of universal compassion.” (It’s also worth noting that Study 1a found that “very liberal” participants reported stronger feelings of love toward their friends compared to “very conservative” participants, while conservatives expressed greater love for their family. However, the researchers cautioned that these correlations were very small and should be interpreted with caution.)

Study 3a included a survey of 130 U.S. residents (64 liberals, 36 conservatives, 31 moderates), each of whom was given 100 “moral units.” Participants were asked to distribute these units (think of them as “moral currency”) according to their capacity to empathize with and behave morally toward the categories featured in 16 concentric circles, from close to increasingly distant:

(1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, and (9) all people on all continents.

Those first nine categories only concern people — the next six only deal with nonhuman entities; animals and inanimate objects:

(10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks, and (16) all things in existence.

Inclusive or exclusive circles

The result does indeed show a remarkable moral difference between both ideological outlooks, with the conservative one prioritizing the nine inner circles, while the liberal one focuses more on the outer circles.

An alternative reading of these images is that, as Liv Boeree suggests, rather than being its mirror image, liberal compassion extends further than conservative mercy.

The crucial question for interpreting these maps is: Are these moral circles inclusive or exclusive? In other words: If you place your moral chips on, say, level 10 (all mammals), does that mean you also care for all the levels below, or that you don’t?

Here’s how the researchers instructed the participants in Study 3a: “These categories (are) non-overlapping, such that giving to one category (e.g., extended family) would not include an inclusive category (e.g., immediate family).” So, this allocation task differed from the task that generated the heatmaps because it was exclusive — allocating moral units toward, say, plants and trees within one of the outer rings did not mean that those units also applied to your family.

Altogether, this would support the conservative reading of the results, indicating that liberals (misguidedly, in the conservative view) prioritize faraway needs over nearby ones. But another interpretation remains possible. The participants were asked “to think about your capacity to help, to give, to be charitable, to show empathy, and to be generous—in other words, your capacity to behave morally.”

“An artificial constraint”

As per that instruction, your choice for an outer circle could mean that you think your compassion would make a greater difference in a place in greater need of it — assuming, somewhat prejudicially but not entirely without evidence, that this need increases the further away you go.

Whichever interpretation you choose, study 3a suffers from a fundamental problem: Its subjects were given no more than 100 moral units to dispense — restricting the quantity of their mercy, so to speak.

“(This forced) participants to distribute moral concern in a zero-sum fashion (i.e., the more concern they allocate to one circle, the less they can allocate to another circle)”, the researchers admit. “Although research suggests that people indeed do distribute empathy and moral concern in a zero-sum fashion, this feature of Study 3a imposes an artificial constraint.”

Hence study 3b, which examined the moral leanings of another group of respondents, this time without a limit on the moral units they were allowed to allocate. As the lines show, a similar pattern does emerge, with liberals showing empathy mainly toward broader circles (“nonhumans”), while conservatives do so towards the closer ones (“humans”).

But as the distribution of blue (liberal) and red (conservative) dots illustrates, the division is rather more diffuse, and less stark than in study 3a.

Are you steak or avocado?

“These findings demonstrate that liberals and conservatives differ not in the total amount of moral regard per se but rather they differ in their patterns of how they distribute their moral regard,” the article concludes.

While not exactly Shakespeare, that conclusion is a bit more thoughtful than the meme into which the heatmaps were distilled. It sees both moral universes as similarly imperfect — if only because it assumes (as is merely suggested by other research) that the quality of our mercy is, indeed, strained.

Hence Scott Alexander’s tongue-in-cheek point:

“I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.”

As time goes on, it is probably the meme (rather than the minutia of the study) that will survive — perhaps in this, one of its more amusing manifestations: a steak and an avocado laid out on two plates, in the shape of the liberal and conservative moral circles.

Naturally, the steak refers to the conservative heatmap, and the avocado to the liberal one. Heavily implied: The steak eater cares for family, friends, and other Americans. The avocado muncher, though, hates all people in those categories, and will not rest until Tbilisi is flooded with lesbian street theater.

Strange Maps #1270

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Original article in full: Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle – Adam Waytz e.a. in Nature Communications, 26 September 2019.