Political polarization in the United States is a major problem, as Republicans and Democrats increasingly live separate realities on subjects as diverse as election results and infectious diseases. Some of these differences seem to be rooted in actual segregation, as members of both parties tend to live in relatively homogeneous communities, cluster together on social media, and rely on disparate news sources.
It is not a recipe for a functioning society, much research has been expended to explore the effects of polarization and possible means of mitigating it. Now, the researchers tested whether social media could improve the situation by getting people with opposing political leanings to discuss controversial topics with each other. While this greatly reduced polarization, it appeared to be more effective for Republican participants.
Anonymity is key
The researchers focused on two concepts to design their approach. The first is the idea that simply letting people communicate across political divides might alleviate the feeling that at least some of our adversaries are not as extreme as they often seem. Second, anonymity allows people to focus on what they are discussing rather than worrying about whether what they say can be traced.
Of course, they also recognize that this can backfire badly. Online communication is already generally less polite than face-to-face interaction, and anonymity allows you to participate in communication without being affected.
Researchers found that they had no control over conversations on existing social networks. So they built their own application and hired experts to do the graphics, support and moderation. The software was placed in both Google and Apple’s app stores and handled asynchronous text-based messaging. All messages were private to her two users exchanging. This was described to the user as a new platform for his one-on-one discussions on controversial topics named DiscussIt.
The researchers also tried not to make participants aware that using the app was part of the study. So they used YouGov to recruit people who had participated in other studies and had already expressed their party preferences as part of it. As part of a study aimed at exploring other issues, sentiments toward political opponents and politically controversial topics (gun control and immigration) were explored before and after using the app.
Participants were induced to participate through payment for downloading and using the app.
calming conversation
People were randomly assigned to some condition. Others didn’t use the app at all and were simply asked to write an essay on one of the topics under consideration (immigration or gun control). The remaining participants were asked to converse on the platform about one of these topics. Participants in these conversations were all paired with members of opposing political parties. Their partners were either unlabeled, labeled as belonging to the opposition, or labeled as belonging to the same political party (although the latter is not true). .
Both before and after using the app, participants answered questions about their views on politicized issues, members of their party, and political opponents. These were analyzed in terms of problems and social impacts and combined into a single indicator of polarization for analysis.
