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Excited to share our new paper: Challenging Partisan Expectations Reduces Political Polarization
We find that political conversations reduce polarization most when they challenge what people expect about partisan boundaries.
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Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.15901
#polisky
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Most effects faded after about a month. So durable depolarization likely requires repeated exposure.
Still, our findings suggest that challenging partisan expectations may be a key mechanism through which political conversations reduce polarization.
arxiv.org
Political conversations are often proposed as a remedy for political polarization, yet their effectiveness remains inconsistent. We argue that this inconsistency partly reflects a neglected feature of...
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Partisans often assume:
- Democrats and Republicans disagree
- Co-partisans agree
- Political identity predicts political opinions
So what happens when those expectations are challenged?
We tested this in a preregistered experiment with 1,983 U.S. partisans.
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Political conversations are often proposed as a remedy for polarization. But the evidence is mixed. Some conversations reduce polarization. Others do little. Some even backfire.
Why? We argue that a missing piece is the expectations people bring into the conversation.
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But the mechanism depended on which expectation was challenged.
An agreeing outgroup member made people:
→ feel warmer toward outgroup members
→ perceive less distance from them
A disagreeing ingroup member made people:
→ feel less warmth toward ingroup members
→ perceive more distance from them
Do Won Kim
Do Won Kim
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Expectation-challenging conversations had lower:
- affective polarization
- perceived issue polarization
relative to expectation-confirming conversations.
Do Won Kim
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There was also a tradeoff. Expectation-challenging conversations reduced polarization, but participants generally found them less satisfying and were less eager to have similar discussions in the future.
