Haidt argues, in he and his collaborator’s “Moral foundations theory” that the answer is something close to ‘yes’.
They posit 6 axes, and he suggests that ‘liberals’ (and liberal theories of society, social policy, etc.) are based on an emphasis on three of them, while more conservative outlooks result from a greater emphasis on the axes that liberals are unconcerned with.
I don’t know what he makes of things like the fact that ‘libertarians’ and ‘liberals’ are both in favor of ‘fairness’; but mean totally different things by it, or why he describes conservatism as including all six, rather than considering flavors of conservatism based on fewer than that (or where one of the values is considered salient; but inverted, as in fascism’s enthusiasm for crushing the weak). It also isn’t clear how these axes interact with ingroup/outgroup scopes (Is, say, a liberal actually less in-group centric and hostile to outgroups than a conservative, or is the liberal no more ‘tolerant’ of things that he genuinely considers alien; but just can’t even understand why people would get worked up about homosexuals and hispanics or something.)
On the whole, I’m dubiously convinced (but I’m also not a social psychologist, and working from a tiny data set consisting mostly of anecdotes and my own opinions); but Hait struck me as a salient character in that he essentially does say that conservatives offend more easily(since they’ve got three axes you can tweak that a liberal would barely notice); but his treatment is not primarily troglodyte sniping, which is fun but distracting.
