Article Summary
Introduction
Currently people in the U.S. express high levels of partisan animosity – negative thoughts, feelings, or behaviors towards a political outgroup. Partisan animosity is associated with a host of negative outcomes for both individuals and society, including negative interactions with out-partisans, anti-democratic attitudes, and support for political violence. This article reviews interventions aiming to reduce partisan animosity, organizing them into the TRI framework: thoughts, relationships, and institutions.
Analytical Approach
This article applies micro, meso, and macro analysis to the problem of partisan animosity, yielding interventions focused on thoughts, relationships, and institutions (with the caveat that many interventions may affect more than one of those levels). Interventions that target thoughts may correct misconceptions about the outgroup or highlight commonalities between partisans. Relationship interventions focus on interacting positively with outgroup members and/or increasing productive, meaningful contact. Institutional interventions target the media and political structures that shape our society.
Main Findings
Thoughts. These interventions aim to reduce negative beliefs about the other party. Some focus on correcting misperceptions – people overestimate the extremity of out-partisans’ beliefs, how much their opponents dislike and dehumanize them, and how negatively they would feel after interacting with out-partisans. While some false beliefs are relatively resistant to correction (i.e. conspiracy theories), others, including out-party composition and meta-perceptions (what out-partisans think of one’s own party), can be corrected, yielding positive intergroup results. Another set of thoughts interventions focus on highlighting commonalities. This includes efforts to identify issues with bipartisan support (which are more common than most Americans believe), as well as efforts to make shared identities more salient than opposition partisan identities. Interestingly, some work suggests that interventions targeting more specific shared identities, such as religious ties, sports loyalties, or pop culture interests, may be more successful than those highlighting a broad shared identity like “American”.
Relationships. Other interventions focus on improving the contact partisans have with dissimilar others. Extant psychological research suggests that contact is most likely to improve intergroup relationships when different group members have: 1) equal status in the situation, 2) common goals, 3) cooperation, 4) support of norms/authorities, and 5) possibility of friendship. This review proposes two additional conditions: 6) when there is training in dialogue skills, and 7) when contact is structured to highlight commonalities. Dialogue trainings teach people to intentionally inquire about and signal receptiveness to their opponents’ views, avoid moralizing language, focus on their personal experiences, and be pragmatic. This can lead to more positive interactions, as well as more positive perceptions of out-partisans generally. Other interventions seek to increase meaningful contact between Republicans and Democrats, often in a non-political context.
Institutions. Interventions at this level aim to change broader societal patterns that reproduce partisan animosity. The authors suggest efforts to change communication norms or incentives on social media and reign in hostility between elites, including by changing elite incentive structures. A suggested starting point is to shift discourse norms in more local communities, including schools/universities. They also suggest that mass media could shift discourse norms significantly, as could broader changes to the U.S. political system, such as the introduction of robust additional parties.
Implications
This review synthesized efforts by researchers and practitioners to reduce polarization in the U.S. Referencing practitioner groups specifically is a useful resource. Though many efforts to decrease polarization focus on the micro level (thoughts), this review argues for a broadening of scope to include meso (relationships) and macro (institutions) interventions as well.
Questions left unanswered
The main unanswered questions in this review relate to the macro-level interventions targeting institutions. In some of these domains, it is unclear which interventions the authors think are possible, and/or which are likely to be most effective
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: Study was conducted before 2015
Did the study rely on proxy variables to measure polarization?: N/A
Were standard p-value thresholds used (p<.05 or 95% Confidence Intervals that don’t overlap zero)?: NA
- Largest p-value presented as significant: NA
Were correlational results interpreted with causal language?: NA
Limitations / Weaknesses
As with most reviews, there is a concern about file-drawer bias – only finding evidence of interventions working, rather than of interventions failing. As the authors note, there is a relative lack of data about macro-level interventions. The review might have benefited in that area from further examining current media or political structures as interventions that increase polarization.
Open Data & Analyses
Does the article make the replication data publicly available?: NA
Does the article make the replication analysis scripts publicly available?: NA
Article Citation
Hartman, R., Blakey, W., Womick, J., Bail, C., Finkel, E. J., Han, H., … Gray, K. (2022). Interventions to reduce partisan animosity. Nature Human Behaviour, 6(9), 1194–1205. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01442-3
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@article{Hartman2022,
author = {Hartman, Rachel and Blakey, Will and Womick, Jake and Bail, Chris and Finkel, Eli J. and Han, Hahrie and Sarrouf, John and Schroeder, Juliana and Sheeran, Paschal and {Van Bavel}, Jay J. and Willer, Robb and Gray, Kurt},
doi = {10.1038/s41562-022-01442-3},
file = {:Users/xanni/Documents/Readings for Mendeley/s41562-022-01442-3.pdf:pdf},
issn = {23973374},
journal = {Nature Human Behaviour},
number = {9},
pages = {1194--1205},
pmid = {36123534},
publisher = {Springer US},
title = ,
volume = {6},
year = {2022}
}