期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2021
卷号：118
期号：52
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2112552118
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
Informal political discussions with peers can increase trust in democracy and improve understanding of self and others. However, these benefits do not often materialize because people tend to shy away from political discussions and because friendship networks rarely expose highly divergent political views. In a large-scale experiment, we overcome these limitations by matching participants to peers selected for sharing common interests and demographics and exposing them to a personal message about a divisive political topic: wealth redistribution. As a result, support for redistributive policies increased and polarization decreased. Furthermore, feeling close to a peer greatly increased the assimilation of a political message. Our results suggest that incidental similarities may cold-start cross-cutting political arguments and increase consensus on divisive topics.
In a large-scale, preregistered experiment on informal political communication, we algorithmically matched participants, varying two dimensions: 1) the degree of incidental similarity on nonpolitical features; and 2) their stance agreement on a contentious political topic. Matched participants were first shown a computer-generated social media profile of their match highlighting all the shared nonpolitical features; then, they read a short, personal, but argumentative, essay written by their match about the reduction of inequality via redistribution of wealth by the government. We show that support for redistribution increased and polarization decreased for participants with both mild and strong views, regardless of their political leaning. We further show that feeling close to the match is associated with an 86% increase in the probability of assimilation of political views. Our analysis also uncovers an asymmetry: Interacting with someone with opposite views greatly reduced feelings of closeness; however, interacting with someone with consistent views only moderately increased them. By extending previous work about the effects of incidental similarity and shared identity on affect into the domain of political opinion change, our results bear real-world implications for the (re)-design of social media platforms. Because many people prefer to keep politics outside of their social networks, encouraging cross-cutting political communication based on nonpolitical commonalities is a potential solution for fostering consensus on potentially divisive and partisan topics.
关键词：online experiment; incidental similarities; polarization; inequality; social influence
