Allyship Motivations: Injustice and Morality Pathways to Supporting LGBTQ+ Rights

Public support plays an important role in adopting LGBTQ+ rights, including anti‐discrimination and political rights. Their support by advantaged group members may stem from (a) positive appraisal and empathy for the marginalised group and (b) injustice perception and anger at social inequality. We propose a novel dual‐pathway model that assumes that positive perceptions and empathy may motivate people to support anti‐discrimination rights and that perceptions of injustice and anger predict support for political rights. We also explored whether political orientation predicted engagement in support of LGBTQ+ rights along different paths. In two cross‐sectional studies (Hungary N = 350; US N = 381) among cisgender, heterosexual participants, we identified initial evidence for a dual‐pathway model distinguishing morality and injustice pathways. We found that liberals were motivated primarily by perceptions of injustice, whereas support by conservatives was dependent on perceptions of the moral standing of the LGBTQ+ community as well. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the psychology of supporting LGBTQ+ rights along the political spectrum, highlighting the diversity of attitudes and motivations within different political and social contexts. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's .