Tag: Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania

Despite decades of psychology research that shows fostering contact between "us" and "them" is a powerful way to reduce prejudice, scientists are starting to find that you can't just shove people together — online or in person — and expect the interaction to have miraculous effects. That became crystal clear to Christopher Bail, a sociologist who heads the Duke University Polarization Lab, after he designed an experiment to disrupt people's echo chambers on Twitter. After a month, Republicans exposed to the Democratic account became much more conservative, while Democrats exposed to Republican tweets reported slightly more liberal views. He said can't be sure how the tweets had their effect in his study, but he pointed to a recent, counterintuitive body of research chronicling backfire effects. In a second try, one group of people got to see how others answered the question, on average. It’s that communication in a highly polarized context increases polarization," Centola said. "The contact hypothesis," Paluck found, "isn't supported with as much evidence as you thought." But the strength of the effect could depend on the kind of bias — contact was very effective at reducing prejudice against disabled people, for example. Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, recently conducted an experiment in which he surveyed people waiting on commuter rail platforms at rush hour about their views on immigration. “If you think about the situation of American politics, right now,” Enos said, “it’s the exact opposite.” Read more: