Politics at the dinner table

Can socializing with people who disagree with you change your opinions, and reduce political polarization? I answer this question using a shock that induces us to socialize and discuss politics with a more ideologically diverse set of people: Thanksgiving. Using a sample of American and Canadian survey respondents, I show that people converge towards their families’ viewpoints in the week after Thanksgiving, and that this significantly reduces opinion polarization. People with very left-wing family move about 11% of a standard deviation to the left in the week of Thanksgiving, with a slightly larger response in the opposite direction for people with very right-wing family. The probability of having a centrist opinion rises by 3.9% just after Thanksgiving. There are no significant effects on affective polarization. The effects are short lived in this setting, but provide novel quasi-experimental evidence on how real-life interactions can alleviate “echo-chamber effects.”

Religion and Society Interactions · Social and Cultural Dynamics