Moral judgment is politically situational—people are more forgiving of transgressive copartisans and more likely to behave punitively and unethically toward political opponents. Such differences are widely observed, but not fully explained. If moral values are nonnegotiable first‐principle beliefs about right and wrong, why do similar transgressions elicit different moral judgment in the personal and political realm? We argue this pattern arises from the same forces intuitionist frameworks of moral psychology use to explain the origins of morality: the adaptive need to suppress individual behavior to ensure ingroup success. We hypothesize ingroups serve as moral boundaries, that the relative tight constraints morality exerts over ingroup relations loosen in competitive group environments because doing so also serves ingroup interests. We find support for this hypothesis in four independent samples and also find that group antipathy—internalized dislike of the outgroup—pushes personal and political moral boundaries farther apart.

Physical disability is remarkably common among Americans, with more than one in four affected, yet candidates with physical disabilities remain rare. Prior work suggests disability compounds with other marginalized identities to produce a "double disability." Using a large visual conjoint experiment crossing candidate disability, race, and gender, I find no evidence of this pattern, as disability does not reliably compound racial or gender disadvantage. I argue instead that disability imposes a distinct cognitive burden, activating competing schemas of competence, deservingness, and health, and that dehumanization functions as a burden-resolving mechanism converting this ambiguity into electoral penalty. This effect is selective. Dehumanization predicts reduced support for disabled candidates specifically, not for female or Black candidates, even among voters who dehumanize those groups. The penalty also holds consistently across ideology despite ideological differences in dehumanization's prevalence, suggesting disability occupies a distinct position in political cognition.

Research on attitudes toward people with physical disabilities in positions of authority has concentrated on the electoral evaluation of political candidates, leaving open whether public skepticism is specific to politics or extends across other roles of public trust. In this study, I compare attitudes toward people with physical disabilities across three spheres of institutional authority: political candidate, military officer, and classroom teacher. In an online survey (N = 605), respondents were randomly assigned to one of three versions, each framing all items around a single sphere, and rated the disabled person on general capacity, role-specific fitness, appearance-based expectations, and behavioral willingness, alongside an implicit measure and a general disability-attitudes scale. Evaluation patterns differed sharply by sphere: for military officers, confidence in role fitness was lowest while appearance-based expectations were highest; teachers showed the reverse pattern; political candidates showed neither, and sphere differences held net of general disability attitudes. Disabled and nondisabled respondents diverged most broadly within the political sphere, though a comparable gap emerged for general capacity in the military sphere. Ideology shaped stated attitudes only in the military and teaching spheres, and automatic associations only in the political sphere. These findings suggest public attitudes create domain-specific, not uniform, barriers to inclusion—with standards for political candidates the least clearly defined, notably because, unlike military and teaching appointments, the public’s own evaluations directly determine access to political office.