DP19753 Talking across the Aisle
This paper presents the results of a large-scale experiment in which U.S. Democrats and Republicans engage in naturalistic face-to-face video conversations focused on political facts. We investigate both self-selection into politically homogeneous conversations and the effects of co- and cross-partisan interactions on information aggregation and affective polarization. We find that participants exhibit a preference for co-partisan conversations that is driven by pessimistic expectations about both the relative informational and hedonic value of cross-partisan interactions. Broadly in line with their beliefs, participants learn slightly less from cross-partisan than from co-partisan conversations. This gap in learning arises not from how knowledge is distributed across party lines, but from a significantly 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, on average, deemed equally enjoyable ex-post. Moreover, cross-partisan interactions lead to a reduction in affective polarization that persists 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 promoting information aggregation may be more successful at the former goal than at the latter.
