Agreeing to Disagree
Reducing Affective Polarization: Warm Group Relations or Policy Compromise?
Leonie Huddy & Omer Yair
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Hostility between rival political partisans, referred to as affective polarization, has increased in the United States over the last several decades generating considerable interest in its reduction. The current study examines two distinct sets of factors that potentially reduce affective polarization, drawn respectively from a group‐based and a policy‐based model of its origins. Specifically, we contrast the degree to which warm social relations and policy compromise reduce affective polarization. In two experimental studies (N = 937), respondents read a mock news story about an observed interaction between Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader, and Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader. The leaders either interact in a warm or hostile manner and independently compromise, or fail to compromise, on immigration matters. In both studies, warm leader relations reduced affective polarization whereas policy compromise did not. We consider the implications of these findings for the study of affective polarization and its reduction.
Strategy News Is Good News: How Journalistic Coverage of Politics Reduces Affective Polarization
Alon Zoizner et al.
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
What role does news content play in explaining inter-party hostility? We argue that affective polarization is influenced by exposure to one of the most dominant ways to cover politics: strategy coverage. While previous studies have pointed to the negative consequences of covering politicians’ strategies and campaign tactics, we find that this reporting style decreases out-party hostility. Our findings are based on two separate studies: (1) a survey experiment and (2) a cross-sectional analysis that increases external validity by combining survey data with computational content analysis of the articles respondents were exposed to by their primary news sources throughout the 2016 US presidential campaign (415,604 articles from 157 American news outlets). The results demonstrate that despite the wide criticism of the tendency of journalists to focus on political strategies, such coverage may ease inter-party tensions in American politics.
The 'Fake News' Effect: Experimentally Identifying Motivated Reasoning Using Trust in News
Michael Thaler
Harvard Working Paper, October 2020
Abstract:
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people enter into the experiment with endogenously different beliefs. It analyzes how subjects assess the veracity of information sources that tell them the median of their belief distribution is too high or too low. A Bayesian would infer nothing about the source veracity from this message, but a motivated reasoner would believe the source were more truthful when it reports the direction that he is more motivated to believe. Experimental results show evidence for politically-motivated reasoning about immigration, income mobility, crime, racial discrimination, gender, climate change, and gun laws. Motivated reasoning from these messages leads people's beliefs to become more polarized and less accurate, even though the messages are uninformative.
Opinion Change and Learning in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: Evidence from a Panel Survey Combined with Direct Observation of Social Media Activity
Gregory Eady et al.
NYU Working Paper, September 2020
Abstract:
The role of the media in influencing people’s attitudes and opinions is difficult to demonstrate because media consumption by survey respondents is usually unobserved in datasets containing information on attitudes and vote choice. This paper leverages behavioral data combined with responses from a multi-wave panel to test whether Democrats who see more stories from liberal news sources on Twitter develop more liberal positions over time and, conversely, whether Republicans are more likely to revise their views in a conservative direction if they are exposed to more news on Twitter from conservative media sources. We find evidence that exposure to ideologically framed information and arguments changes voters’ own positions, but has a limited impact on perceptions of where the candidates stand on the issues.
More Accurate, But No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public
Nathan Lee et al.
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies of the American public demonstrate that partisans often diverge not only on questions of opinion but also on matters of fact. However, little is known about partisan divergence in factual beliefs among the government officials who make real policy decisions, or how it compares to belief polarization among the public. This letter describes the first systematic comparison of factual belief polarization between the public and government officials, which we conducted using a paired survey approach. The results indicate that political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public across a wide range of politically contentious facts. However, this increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policy making.
Evaluating the scale, growth, and origins of right-wing echo chambers on YouTube
Homa Hosseinmardi et al.
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, November 2020
Abstract:
Although it is understudied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube's outsize influence has sparked concerns that its recommendation algorithm systematically directs users to radical right-wing content. Here we investigate these concerns with large scale longitudinal data of individuals' browsing behavior spanning January 2016 through December 2019. Consistent with previous work, we find that political news content accounts for a relatively small fraction (11%) of consumption on YouTube, and is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. However, we also find evidence for a small but growing "echo chamber" of far-right content consumption. Users in this community show higher engagement and greater "stickiness" than users who consume any other category of content. Moreover, YouTube accounts for an increasing fraction of these users' overall online news consumption. Finally, while the size, intensity, and growth of this echo chamber present real concerns, we find no evidence that they are caused by YouTube recommendations. Rather, consumption of radical content on YouTube appears to reflect broader patterns of news consumption across the web. Our results emphasize the importance of measuring consumption directly rather than inferring it from recommendations.
Screw Those Guys: Polarization, Empathy, and Attitudes About Out‐Partisans
Maxwell Allamong & David Peterson
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Empathic ability is the ability to interpret the emotional state of others. In today's highly partisan and polarized environment, empathic ability may play a key role in determining how partisans respond emotionally to changes in public policy and those helped or harmed by the policy. Utilizing Baron‐Cohen et al.'s (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241–251, 2001) “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test to measure empathic ability, we conduct a survey experiment where we asked participants to read about a partisan individual who may lose their health insurance if the Affordable Care Act were to be repealed. We show that empathic ability shapes attitudes about people and policies, but that the effects are contingent upon the respondent's partisanship, the target's partisanship, and an interaction of the two. Empathic ability produces more positive affect and policy support among Democrats but reduces positive affect among Republicans. The divergent effects of empathic ability on Democrats and Republicans are further exacerbated when the target is an out‐partisan.
Issue Alignment and Partisanship in the American Public: Revisiting the 'Partisans without Constraint' Thesis
Austin Kozlowski & James Murphy
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior studies of American polarization suggest that the public gradually sorted themselves into partisan camps in the late 20th century while remaining largely non-ideological. Drawing on more recent data, we reassess these trends and discover a striking increase in the ideological organization of American public opinion in the beginning of the 21st century. Using a broad set of issues from the American National Election Studies, we identify rapid growth in the correlations between political attitudes from 2004 to 2016. This emergence of issue alignment is most pronounced within the economic and civil rights domains, challenging the notion that current “culture wars” are grounded in moral issues. While elite subpopulations show the greatest gains, we find that economic issues become more highly correlated across the electorate. We also find accelerated growth in the association between issue attitudes and partisanship during this period. These findings paint a new picture of the American electorate as not only highly partisan but increasingly ideological.
All the News That’s Fit to Fabricate: AI-Generated Text as a Tool of Media Misinformation
Sarah Kreps, Miles McCain & Miles Brundage
Journal of Experimental Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Online misinformation has become a constant; only the way actors create and distribute that information is changing. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) such as GPT-2 mean that actors can now synthetically generate text in ways that mimic the style and substance of human-created news stories. We carried out three original experiments to study whether these AI-generated texts are credible and can influence opinions on foreign policy. The first evaluated human perceptions of AI-generated text relative to an original story. The second investigated the interaction between partisanship and AI-generated news. The third examined the distributions of perceived credibility across different AI model sizes. We find that individuals are largely incapable of distinguishing between AI- and human-generated text; partisanship affects the perceived credibility of the story; and exposure to the text does little to change individuals’ policy views. The findings have important implications in understanding AI in online misinformation campaigns.
Hearing From Both Sides: Differences Between Liberal and Conservative Attitudes Toward Scientific and Experiential Evidence
Randy Stein, Alexander Swan & Michelle Sarraf
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two studies examined how political ideology relates to attitudes towards opposing scientific and nonscientific perspectives on apolitical topics. Participants read an article excerpt containing quotes from a researcher debunking a common misconception, such as the existence of lucky streaks in games of chance. They also read the perspective of someone who rejected the researcher in favor of personal experience, either in the form of a quote in the article from a relevant professional (e.g., a casino manager, Study 1) or a comment from a purported previous respondent with no clear expertise (Study 2). In both studies, conservatives, compared to liberals, evaluated the views of the scientist and the person rejecting the science as closer in legitimacy. Differences in evaluation of the science rejecter were mediated by conservatives' heightened intuitive thinking. By spotlighting how partisans evaluate nonscientific perspectives alongside science and by focusing on apolitical topics, these results bring new clarity to the debate on whether conservatives are more biased than liberals in attitudes towards science.
Trustworthiness and Ideological Similarity (But Not Ideology) Promote Empathy
Samantha Stevens et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current highly polarized U.S. political culture impedes people’s ability to live and work together effectively. Here we examine one factor that may play a role: selective empathy based on shared political ideology. Across seven studies (N = 3,476), participants read about a hypothetical politician and his political ideology, trustworthiness, or both. Participants reported their empathy for the politician after learning he was fined (Studies 1–6) or injured (Study 7). When trustworthiness alone was manipulated, liberals and conservatives expressed similar levels of empathy, with greater empathy for the more trustworthy politician. However, when the politician’s ideology alone was manipulated, participants reported greater empathy for the politician who shared their ideology. When trustworthiness and ideology were manipulated, selective empathy was observed when the politician was trustworthy. Participant ideology alone had little effect on empathy. The results suggest that empathy is sensitive to both trustworthiness and ideological match, but not ideology itself.