Actual and anticipated reactions to engaging with and dismissing political opponents : who and where they come from, and why they matter

Growing political polarization has fueled calls for people to constructively engage with opponents and better understand their perspectives rather than dismissively avoiding or condemning them. People who heed these calls may be doing their part to benefit democracy, but what about their reputations—will their behavior elevate them or abase them in their allies’ eyes? My dissertation reports ten studies answering this and related questions. Building on my MA thesis, which finds that people usually like allies who constructively engage with opponents’ views, Chapter 2’s Studies 1 and 2 examined why they hold this preference and when it is most likely to emerge. In Chapter 3, Studies 3 and 4 found a case when people prefer the opposite: U.S. Senators’ tweets received more positive feedback when they dismissed opponents compared to engaging with them. Studies 5 and 6 (and Appendix Studies S1-S4) test various explanations for this contradictory pattern, finding that Twitter popularity represents the genuine preferences of a small group of active users with unusual attitudes, as well as inauthentic preferences expressed by everyone else. Drawing on this observation that popular opinion is not represented on (social) media, Chapter 4 considered whether people fail to realize that their allies endorse cross-party engaging. Indeed, Studies 7 and 8 find that people mistakenly think they are alone in preferring allies who engage over those who dismiss. I theorized that perceived polarization causes these misperceptions, but Studies 9 and 10 found that reducing perceived polarization does not reduce misperceptions nor encourage people to engage with opposing views. This work on one hand highlights reputational benefits of engaging with opposing views; on the other, it suggests social media distorts these benefits, and people generally fail to realize them. At the same time, it leaves open how interventions might motivate engagement with opposing views.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat

Seek and ye shall be fine : attitudes towards political perspective-seekers

Over the past two decades, growing political polarization has led to increasing calls for people to seek out and try to understand opposing political views. Although seeking out opposing views is objectively desirable behavior, do we find it socially desirable when people who agree with us nonetheless seek out views that we oppose? We find that observers strongly prefer individuals who seek out, rather than avoid, political views that the observer opposes. Across nine online studies we find a large preference for these political perspective-seekers, and in a lab study, 73% of participants chose to interact with a perspective-seeking confederate. This preference is weakly moderated by the direction of participants’ ideology and the strength of their beliefs. Moreover, it is robust regardless of why the individual seeks or avoids opposing views, and emerges even when the perspective-seeker is undecided and not already committed to participants’ own views. However, the preference disappears when a perspective-seeker attends only to the perspective that observers disagree with, disregarding the observer’s side. These findings suggest that, despite growing polarization, people still think it is important to understand and tolerate political opponents. This work also informs future interventions, which could leverage social pressures to promote political perspective-seeking and combat selective-exposure, thus improving political relations.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat

Seek and ye shall be fine: Attitudes toward political perspective-seekers

Six pre-registered studies (N = 2421) examine how people respond to co-partisan political perspective-seekers: political allies who attempt to hear from shared opponents and better understand their views. We find North American adults and students generally like co-partisan seekers (meta-analytic Cohen’s d = .83 across 4231 participants, including an emptied file drawer). People like co-partisan seekers because they seem tolerant, cooperative, and rational, but this liking is diminished because seekers seem to validate—and may even adopt—opponents’ illegitimate views. Participants liked co-partisan seekers across a range of different motivations guiding these seekers’ actions but, consistent with our theorizing, their liking decreased (though rarely disappeared entirely) when seekers lacked partisan commitments, or when they sought especially illegitimate beliefs. Despite evidence of rising political intolerance in recent decades, these findings suggest people nonetheless celebrate political allies who tolerate and seriously consider their opponents’ views