Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Department of Statistical Science, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2023 Sep;7(9):1454-1461. doi: 10.1038/s41562-023-01655-0. Epub 2023 Aug 21.
Do anonymous online conversations between people with different political views exacerbate or mitigate partisan polarization? We created a mobile chat platform to study the impact of such discussions. Our study recruited Republicans and Democrats in the United States to complete a survey about their political views. We later randomized them into treatment conditions where they were offered financial incentives to use our platform to discuss a contentious policy issue with an opposing partisan. We found that people who engage in anonymous cross-party conversations about political topics exhibit substantial decreases in polarization compared with a placebo group that wrote an essay using the same conversation prompts. Moreover, these depolarizing effects were correlated with the civility of dialogue between study participants. Our findings demonstrate the potential for well-designed social media platforms to mitigate political polarization and underscore the need for a flexible platform for scientific research on social media.
人们在网络上进行匿名的跨党派对话，会加剧还是缓和党派极化现象？我们创建了一个移动聊天平台来研究此类讨论的影响。我们的研究招募了美国的共和党人和民主党人来完成一份关于他们政治观点的调查。之后，我们将他们随机分配到不同的处理条件下，他们可以获得经济激励，使用我们的平台与对立党派的人讨论一个有争议的政策问题。我们发现，与使用相同对话提示写一篇文章的对照组相比，那些参与关于政治话题的匿名跨党派对话的人表现出了明显的极化程度降低。此外，这些去极化效应与研究参与者之间对话的文明程度相关。我们的研究结果表明，精心设计的社交媒体平台有可能缓解政治极化现象，并强调需要一个灵活的平台来进行社交媒体的科学研究。
