Affective Polarization Amplifies Ideological Polarization
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Uncovering the causes and foundations of increasing political polarization poses a pressing open problem to all social sciences. Here, we report results from an online experiment with a representative sample of the US population, deployed the week before the 2020 US presidential election, to analyze the role of affective polarization and social identity in facilitating ideological polarization at the individual level. Participants were incentivized to predict policy-sensitive statistics a year after the election conditional on its outcome. To update their initial predictions, individuals select or exogenously obtain factually similar articles on the respective topics curated from differently slanted news sources. We employ "political groupiness'' as an empirical measure for individual susceptibility for affective polarization, using behavioral experiments from the economic literature on social identity. We find political groupiness to be systematically associated with ideological polarization, as the partisan biases in both the demand for and processing of information is significantly amplified for groupy subjects. Our results suggest that ideological polarization is founded, at least partly, in the social identity roots of partisanship. Reducing the salience of intergroup distinctions by delabeling information sources decreases the partisan bias in information demand but not in information processing.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | August 13, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Bauer, Kevin |
|---|---|
| Author | Chen, Yan |
| Author | Hett, Florian |
| Author | Kosfeld, Michael |
| Organizer of meeting | Exley, Christine |
| Organizer of meeting | Marquina, Alejandro Martínez |
| Organizer of meeting | Niederle, Muriel |
| Organizer of meeting | Roth, Alvin |
| Organizer of meeting | Vesterlund, Lise |
Subjects
| Subject | economics |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Working paper |
| Genre | Grey literature |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Bauer, K., Chen, Y., Hett, F., and Kosfeld, M. (2022). Affective Polarization Amplifies Ideological Polarization. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/zd394zj9776
Collection
SITE Conference 2021
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- siteworkshop@stanford.edu
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