Why Can't You All Just Get Along?: Effects of Political Conflict among Outgroups Pre-Analysis Plan

Abstract

This document contains the motivation, theory, hypotheses, design, and analysis plan for a survey experiment regarding the effects of political conflict among outgroups. The study draws on balance theory from social psychology to make predictions about a) the consequences of political disputes among two social groups toward which an individual feels positively and b) the role of cognitive dissonance in mediating these effects. We randomly assign participants to one of four experimental conditions, separately manipulating the presence of political conflict and the opportunity to attribute the resulting dissonance to an unrelated source