Depolarizing Within: A Field Experiment on Depolarization via Ingroup Policing

• In Event: Putting Social Identities to Work for Democracy

Abstract

A key contributing factor to the recent trend of increasing partisan polarization in the United States is increased partisan sorting in physical and online spaces. Most voters live with little to no exposure to voters from the other party. Geographic partisan clustering has not been this extreme since the Civil War. While growing partisan polarization has spawned a wide array of organizations and interventions aiming to counteract it, most existing attempts to reduce partisan animus involve or promote intergroup contact. But physical and online sorting means that intergroup contact will involve (often costly) organization and (often futile) persuasion as people are largely averse to spending time with out-party members. In this study, we evaluate one type of depolarizing intervention that entirely sidesteps this concern. The intervention is designed explicitly around changing behaviors within rather than across partisan groups. In particular, we evaluate an online workshop that teaches participants skills to ``depolarize within''. These skills involve first recognizing one's own tendency toward outgroup animus, challenging that tendency, learning how to use non-polarizing language when talking about the outgroup, and learning skills to challenge ingroup members when they use polarizing language. These skills could be taught in a homogeneous or mixed-partisan setting. But, importantly, they are best practiced in the real world among ingroup members. We present rigorous evidence from a randomized control trial that you can meaningfully impact affective polarization without leaving the comfort of your own group. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that decreases in affective polarization among the treatment group is driven by declining outgroup animus and not by increasing warmth toward the ingroup. Given the increasing physical and online sorting of partisans in our country, these findings suggest that more energies should be invested in developing and implementing depolarizing interventions that focus on changing ingroup norms and behaviors.

Authors

• Robert A. Blair, Brown University

• Jessica Gottlieb, University of Houston

• Marie Schenk, Lehigh University

• Christopher Woods, Brown University