However, the treatment we investigate goes beyond incidental conversations between friends in two respects: first, by exposing people to the views of strangers, and second, by choosing the conversation topic for them. By systematically matching people in order to create variation in similarity with respect to personal traits, our experiment captures a key mechanism underlying the efficacy of incidental conversations, namely, that conversations occur between individuals who share experiences, preferences, and attributes that are unrelated to politics. Second, they differed on a number of demographic and biographical features, such as age, gender, hometown, university, sports teams, personal interests, and idiosyncratic quirks. First, participants differed with respect to their attitudes about a “focal,” political issue: governmental redistribution of wealth. In this paper, we build on the idea that incidental similarities between interlocutors can reduce opinion polarization in a large-scale, preregistered experiment in which participants read essays written by other participants who varied in similarity along two dimensions ( Fig. 1). And because they take place between individuals who have other (i.e., nonpolitical) reasons to like, respect, and trust one another, incidental conversations may survive the tension of disagreement better than political conversations that are entered into by strangers and may be more likely to lead to opinion change.
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Because friendship networks exhibit greater diversity of political views than is apparent even to their members ( 14, 15), these incidental conversations have the effect of exposing interlocutors to diverse viewpoints. Conversations in these networks are therefore mostly apolitical, but occasionally stray into politics in an incidental manner. According to the incidental model, friendship networks arise mostly out of some combination of shared social contexts (e.g., school, work, or church) ( 12) and mutual friendships ( 13), neither of which are explicitly political in nature. One potential solution to these problems is inspired by recent work on “incidental” political discussions among individuals who are already friends ( 11).
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Because many people prefer to keep politics outside of their social networks, encouraging cross-cutting political communication based on nonpolitical commonalities is a potential solution for fostering consensus on potentially divisive and partisan topics. By extending previous work about the effects of incidental similarity and shared identity on affect into the domain of political opinion change, our results bear real-world implications for the (re)-design of social media platforms. Our analysis also uncovers an asymmetry: Interacting with someone with opposite views greatly reduced feelings of closeness however, interacting with someone with consistent views only moderately increased them.
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We further show that feeling close to the match is associated with an 86% increase in the probability of assimilation of political views. We show that support for redistribution increased and polarization decreased for participants with both mild and strong views, regardless of their political leaning. Matched participants were first shown a computer-generated social media profile of their match highlighting all the shared nonpolitical features then, they read a short, personal, but argumentative, essay written by their match about the reduction of inequality via redistribution of wealth by the government.
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In a large-scale, preregistered experiment on informal political communication, we algorithmically matched participants, varying two dimensions: 1) the degree of incidental similarity on nonpolitical features and 2) their stance agreement on a contentious political topic.