Depolarization and its discontents
Experimental evidence on affective polarization and willingness to confront racism and misinformation from two online workshops
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7971893 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert A Blair (0000-0001-6054-1421, Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs Brown University Providence Rhode Island USA, corresponding author), Julie Gottlieb (0000-0002-1204-8496, Hobby School of Public Affairs University of Houston Houston Texas USA), Jessica Gottlieb, Marie Schenk (0000-0003-1664-9544, Department of Political Science Lehigh University Bethlehem Pennsylvania USA), Christopher Wood (0000-0003-0382-9685), Christopher Woods (0000-0002-5003-9152, Yale Law School Yale University New Haven Connecticut USA) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-895X • E-ISSN: 1467-9221 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/pops.70046 |
| OpenAlex | W4411434789 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of initiatives aimed at reducing partisan polarization in the United States. Many of these initiatives focus on promoting civil dialogue across partisan lines and fostering tolerance for diverse political perspectives. While these are laudable goals, we argue that emphasizing civility and tolerance may have the adverse unintended consequence of diminishing citizens' willingness to engage in conflictive conversations about normatively important but politically divisive subjects. We focus on two especially prominent (but contentious) preoccupations of contemporary American politics: combating racism and countering the spread of misinformation. We test our theory through an experimental evaluation of two scalable online depolarization workshops. Our results suggest that the workshops mitigated affective polarization and negative partisanship among a subsample of participants drawn from a nationally representative voter database. Consistent with our theory, however, the workshops also appear to have diminished these same participants' willingness to confront false or racist speech when doing so would require conflictive conversations with out‐partisans. We conclude by considering the complex practical and normative implications of our results
Incivility · Misinformation · Normative · Polarization (electrochemistry · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Racism · Sociology · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Gender Studies · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology
The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age
The Harm in Hate Speech
Prejudice Reduction
The promise and pitfalls of cross-partisan conversations for reducing affective polarization
Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization
Mere Civility
Democracy and Its Critics
Gag rules or the politics of omission
Online and Uncivil? Patterns and Determinants of Incivility in Newspaper Website Comments
Radical American Partisanship
Concealment and Exposure
Inclusion reduces political prejudice
The Impact of Racial Microaggressions on Mental Health
Political Homophily in Social Relationships
Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship
How Affective Polarization Undermines Support for Democratic Norms
Deliberative Toleration
Reducing Affective Polarization
Depolarizing within the Comfort of Your Party
Can Interparty Contact Reduce Affective Polarization? A Systematic Test of Different Forms of Intergroup Contact
Couples Therapy for a Divided America
Overcoming Polarization
Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not
Fear and Loathing across Party Lines
The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States
The Value of Civility
I Disrespectfully Agree
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Interventions to reduce partisan animosity
Interventions reducing affective polarization do not necessarily improve anti-democratic attitudes
Demand Effects in Survey Experiments
"Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? Reflections on "America in One Room
Can Deliberation Have Lasting Effects
Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |