Moral elevation, an emotion for prosocial cooperation elicited by witnessing altruistic behavior, is moderated by baseline expectations of other people's cooperativeness. In line with the likely payoffs of cooperation to the observer, less elevation is evoked when others are expected to be less reciprocally cooperative. Coalitionality should therefore moderate feelings of elevation inso-far as the coalitional affiliation of the observed is represented as a determinant of likely cooperativeness

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... ith the observer. We assessed the coalitionally contingent character of elevation during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, which, though predominantly peaceful, were depict-ed by conservative media as destructive and antisocial. In two contemporaneous large-scale, pre-registered online studies (total N = 2,172), political orientation strongly moderated feelings of state elevation elicited by BLM protest video stimuli (Studies 1 and 2) as well as Back the Blue (BtB) counter-protest stimuli (Study 2). Political conservatism predicted less elevation following the BLM video and more elevation following the BtB video. Elevation elicited by the BLM video correlated with preferences to defund police, whereas elevation elicited by the BtB video correlated with preferences to increase police funding. These findings extend prior work on elevation to pro-social cooperation under contexts of coalitional conflict.