Crossing the Aisle
Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
Emily Kubin et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 9 February 2021
Abstract:
Both liberals and conservatives believe that using facts in political discussions helps to foster mutual respect, but 15 studies - across multiple methodologies and issues - show that these beliefs are mistaken. Political opponents respect moral beliefs more when they are supported by personal experiences, not facts. The respect-inducing power of personal experiences is revealed by survey studies across various political topics, a field study of conversations about guns, an analysis of YouTube comments from abortion opinion videos, and an archival analysis of 137 interview transcripts from Fox News and CNN. The personal experiences most likely to encourage respect from opponents are issue-relevant and involve harm. Mediation analyses reveal that these harm-related personal experiences increase respect by increasing perceptions of rationality: everyone can appreciate that avoiding harm is rational, even in people who hold different beliefs about guns, taxes, immigration, and the environment. Studies show that people believe in the truth of both facts and personal experiences in nonmoral disagreement; however, in moral disagreements, subjective experiences seem truer (i.e., are doubted less) than objective facts. These results provide a concrete demonstration of how to bridge moral divides while also revealing how our intuitions can lead us astray. Stretching back to the Enlightenment, philosophers and scientists have privileged objective facts over experiences in the pursuit of truth. However, furnishing perceptions of truth within moral disagreements is better accomplished by sharing subjective experiences, not by providing facts.
Trumping Hate on Twitter? Online Hate Speech in the 2016 U.S. Election Campaign and its Aftermath
Alexandra Siegel et al.
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, January 2021, Pages 71-104
Abstract:
To what extent did online hate speech and white nationalist rhetoric on Twitter increase over the course of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign and its immediate aftermath? The prevailing narrative suggests that Trump's political rise - and his unexpected victory - lent legitimacy to and popularized bigoted rhetoric that was once relegated to the dark corners of the Internet. However, our analysis of over 750 million tweets related to the election, in addition to almost 400 million tweets from a random sample of American Twitter users, provides systematic evidence that hate speech did not increase on Twitter over this period. Using both machine-learning-augmented dictionary-based methods and a novel classification approach leveraging data from Reddit communities associated with the alt-right movement, we observe no persistent increase in hate speech or white nationalist language either over the course of the campaign or in the six months following Trump's election. While key campaign events and policy announcements produced brief spikes in hateful language, these bursts quickly dissipated. Overall we find no empirical support for the proposition that Trump's divisive campaign or election increased hate speech on Twitter.
Panel Study of the MAGA Movement
Rachel Blum & Christopher Sebastian Parker
University of Washington Working Paper, February 2021
"Collected in late December, data from Wave 1 of our survey interrogates respondents on a range of issues, including attitudes toward: BLM, protests in general, Covid-19 attitudes, beliefs about the 2020 election outcomes, political mobilization, racism, sexism, and nativism, among other things. We followed up Wave 1 roughly three weeks later, re-interviewing the same respondents, in the aftermath of the Capitol Riots. In Wave 2, we repeated many of the same items from Wave 1, as a means of assessing post-riot opinion change. However, we also included an extensive battery of questions on democracy, and attitudes toward the riot, as well as a few experiments, ones that manipulated alternative explanations of the riot. As the results make clear, the MAGA movement is a clear and present danger to American democracy."
Preregistered Replication of "Feeling Superior Is a Bipartisan Issue: Extremity (Not Direction) of Political Views Predicts Perceived Belief Superiority"
Elizabeth Harris & Jay Van Bavel
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is currently a debate in political psychology about whether dogmatism and belief superiority are symmetric or asymmetric across the ideological spectrum. Toner, Leary, Asher, and Jongman-Sereno (2013) found that dogmatism was higher among conservatives than liberals, but both conservatives and liberals with extreme attitudes reported higher perceived superiority of beliefs. In the current study, we conducted a preregistered direct and conceptual replication of this previous research using a large nationally representative sample. Consistent with Toner et al.'s findings, our results showed that conservatives had higher dogmatism scores than liberals, whereas both conservative and liberal extreme attitudes were associated with higher belief superiority compared with more moderate attitudes. As in their study, we also found that whether conservative or liberal attitudes were associated with higher belief superiority was topic dependent. Contrasting Toner et al.'s findings, our results also showed that ideologically extreme individuals had higher dogmatism. We discuss implications of these results for theoretical debates in political psychology.
Social penumbras predict political attitudes
Andrew Gelman & Yotam Margalit
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 9 February 2021
Abstract:
To explain the political clout of different social groups, traditional accounts typically focus on the group's size, resources, or commonality and intensity of its members' interests. We contend that a group's penumbra - the set of individuals who are personally familiar with people in that group - is another important explanatory factor that merits systematic analysis. To this end, we designed a panel study that allows us to learn about the characteristics of the penumbras of politically relevant groups such as gay people, the unemployed, or recent immigrants. Our study reveals major and systematic differences in the penumbras of various social groups, even ones of similar size. Moreover, we find evidence that entering a group's penumbra is associated with a change in attitude on group-related policy questions. Taken together, our findings suggest that penumbras are pertinent for understanding variation in the political standing of different groups in society.
The Authoritarian Dynamic During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Effects on Nationalism and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
Todd Hartman et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research has demonstrated that situational factors such as perceived threats to the social order activate latent authoritarianism. The deadly COVID-19 pandemic presents a rare opportunity to test whether existential threat stemming from an indiscriminate virus moderates the relationship between authoritarianism and political attitudes toward the nation and out-groups. Using data from two large nationally representative samples of adults in the United Kingdom (N = 2,025) and Republic of Ireland (N = 1,041) collected during the initial phases of strict lockdown measures in both countries, we find that the associations between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and (1) nationalism and (2) anti-immigrant attitudes are conditional on levels of perceived threat. As anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic increases, so too does the effect of RWA on those political outcomes. Thus, it appears that existential threats to humanity from the COVID-19 pandemic moderate expressions of authoritarianism in society.
News Media Use, Talk Networks, and Anti-Elitism across Geographic Location: Evidence from Wisconsin
Chris Wells et al.
International Journal of Press/Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
A certain social-political geography recurs across European and North American societies: As post-industrialization and mechanization of agriculture have disrupted economies, rural and nonmetropolitan areas are aging and declining in population, leading to widening political and cultural gaps between metropolitan and rural communities. Yet political communication research tends to focus on national or cross-national levels, often emphasizing networked digital media and an implicitly global information order. We contend that geographic place still provides a powerful grounding for individuals' lifeworld experiences, identities, and orientations to political communications and politics. Focusing on the U.S. state of Wisconsin, and presenting data gathered in 2018, this study demonstrates significant, though often small, differences between geographic locations in terms of their patterns of media consumption, political talk, and anti-elite attitudes. Importantly, television news continues to play a major role in citizens' repertoires across locations, suggesting we must continue to pay attention to this broadcast medium. Residents of more metropolitan communities consume significantly more national and international news from prestige sources such as the New York Times, and their talk networks are more cleanly sorted by partisanship. Running against common stereotypes of news media use, residents of small towns and rural areas consume no more conservative media than other citizens, even without controlling for partisanship. Our theoretical model and empirical results call for further attention to the intersections of place and politics in understanding news consumption behaviors and the meanings citizens draw from media content.
Within-firm Labor Heterogeneity and Firm Performance: Evidence from Employee Political Ideology Conflicts
Xiao Ren
University of Georgia Working Paper, December 2020
Abstract:
This paper explores the implication of within-firm labor heterogeneity for firm performance through the lens of employee political ideology. Using individual campaign donation information to capture political ideology, I find that political ideology conflicts, both those within employees and those between CEOs and employees, are negatively associated with firms' future operating performance. This effect is stronger for firms whose employees are more geographically concentrated and more sophisticated. The reduced labor productivity and abnormal employee turnover are two plausible mechanisms through which employee political ideology conflicts hurt firm performance. To establish causality, I use an instrumental variable approach which relies on the exogenous variation in political ideology caused by local television station ownership changes.
The Dynamics of Distortion: How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News
Shiri Melumad, Robert Meyer & Yoon Duk Kim
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this work we advance and test a theory of how news information evolves as it is successively retold by consumers. Drawing on data from almost 11,000 participants across ten experiments, we offer evidence that when news is repeatedly retold it undergoes a stylistic transformation termed disagreeable personalization, wherein original facts are increasingly supplanted by opinions and interpretations, with a slant toward negativity. Specifically, the central thesis of the work is that, when retellers believe that they are more (vs. less) knowledgeable than their recipient about the information they are relaying, they feel more compelled to provide guidance on its meaning, and to do so in a persuasive manner. This enhanced motivation to guide persuasively, in turn, leads retellers to not only select the subset of facts they deem most essential but, critically, to provide their interpretations and opinions on those facts, with negativity being used as a means of grabbing the audience's attention. Implications of the work for prior research on retelling and consumer information diffusion are explored.
Timing matters when correcting fake news
Nadia Brashier et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2 February 2021
Abstract:
Countering misinformation can reduce belief in the moment, but corrective messages quickly fade from memory. We tested whether the longer-term impact of fact-checks depends on when people receive them. In two experiments (total N = 2,683), participants read true and false headlines taken from social media. In the treatment conditions, "true" and "false" tags appeared before, during, or after participants read each headline. Participants in a control condition received no information about veracity. One week later, participants in all conditions rated the same headlines' accuracy. Providing fact-checks after headlines (debunking) improved subsequent truth discernment more than providing the same information during (labeling) or before (prebunking) exposure. This finding informs the cognitive science of belief revision and has practical implications for social media platform designers.
Shared partisanship dramatically increases social tie formation in a Twitter field experiment
Mohsen Mosleh et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 February 2021
Abstract:
Americans are much more likely to be socially connected to copartisans, both in daily life and on social media. However, this observation does not necessarily mean that shared partisanship per se drives social tie formation, because partisanship is confounded with many other factors. Here, we test the causal effect of shared partisanship on the formation of social ties in a field experiment on Twitter. We created bot accounts that self-identified as people who favored the Democratic or Republican party and that varied in the strength of that identification. We then randomly assigned 842 Twitter users to be followed by one of our accounts. Users were roughly three times more likely to reciprocally follow-back bots whose partisanship matched their own, and this was true regardless of the bot's strength of identification. Interestingly, there was no partisan asymmetry in this preferential follow-back behavior: Democrats and Republicans alike were much more likely to reciprocate follows from copartisans. These results demonstrate a strong causal effect of shared partisanship on the formation of social ties in an ecologically valid field setting and have important implications for political psychology, social media, and the politically polarized state of the American public.