Ulric B. and Evelyn L. Bray Social Sciences Seminar

Abstract: This paper presents the results of an experiment featuring natural face-to-face video conversations between Democrats and Republicans in the United States. We investigate both the drivers of self-selection into politically homogeneous conversations (echo chambers) and the effects of co- versus cross-partisan conversations on information aggregation and affective polarization. We identify a relative preference for co-partisan conversations that is explained by participants' pessimism about the hedonic and informational value of cross-partisan conversations. Participants' pessimistic expectations about the extent to which they can learn from counter-partisans are qualitatively correct, as they do by and large learn less in cross-partisan conversations. We show that this gap in learning is driven not by a lower potential for learning anchored in the way knowledge is distributed across party lines, but by the greater difficulty of extracting knowledge from counter-partisans. Participants' pessimism about the hedonic value of conversations is less warranted, as co- and cross-partisan conversations are deemed equally enjoyable ex-post. Moreover, cross-partisan interactions lead to a reduction in affective polarization that lasts for more than three months after the end of our experiment. Taken together, our findings suggest that policies that encourage cross-partisan interactions with the aim of reducing affective polarization and fostering information aggregation might be more successful at the former than the latter objective.

Written with Luca Braghieri and Egon Tripodi.