Depolarizing American voters: Democrats and Republicans are equally susceptible to false attitude feedback

Depolarizing American voters: Democrats and Republicans are equally susceptible to false attitude feedback. Thomas Strandberg et al. PLOS, February 5, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226799

Abstract: American politics is becoming increasingly polarized, which biases decision-making and reduces open-minded debate. In two experiments, we demonstrate that despite this polarization, a simple manipulation can make people express and endorse less polarized views about competing political candidates. In Study 1, we approached 136 participants at the first 2016 presidential debate and on the streets of New York City. Participants completed a survey evaluating Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on various personality traits; 72% gave responses favoring a single candidate. We then covertly manipulated their surveys so that the majority of their responses became moderate instead. Participants only noticed and corrected a few of these manipulations. When asked to explain their responses, 94% accepted the manipulated responses as their own and rationalized this neutral position accordingly, even though they reported more polarized views moments earlier. In Study 2, we replicated the experiment online with a more politically diverse sample of 498 participants. Both Clinton and Trump supporters showed nearly identical rates of acceptance and rationalization of their manipulated-to-neutral positions. These studies demonstrate how false feedback can powerfully shape the expression of political views. More generally, our findings reveal the potential for open-minded discussion even in a fundamentally divided political climate.

Discussion

There is an ongoing quest to create a less polarized and more open-minded political climate in the United States [2, 23–25]. We believe this to be an important effort for several reasons. Studies show that polarization can bias information processing and decision making in detrimental ways [5–6, 48]. As a result, it often leads to fear, anger, and animosity towards the opposition [1, 9–10]. Polarization is also associated with dogmatic intolerance, which in turn increases the propensity to behave antisocially and to deny free speech [49]. Furthermore, polarization erodes central parts of civic society, such as trust in the government and media [50]. However, for a depolarization movement to be effective, we need to advance our theories on political attitude change and better understand the mechanisms underlying depolarization.
To contribute to this effort, we tested the choice blindness paradigm [26] with American voters just before the 2016 American general election. Our aim was to investigate whether participants could become less polarized in their political views. Study 1 was conducted during the week of the first presidential debate; Study 2 was conducted online with a larger and more representative sample. Participants responded to a survey comparing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on various leadership traits. In both studies, the participants in our sample were clearly polarized when entering the study. Participants that favored either of the candidates had on average only 2 to 3 “open-minded” responses out of 12, defined by a response in the middle 30% of the visual analog scales. Participants then received false feedback about their responses: we nearly doubled the number of items that participants had in the open-minded category. Only a few of these manipulations were detected and corrected, which resulted in an overall score that made it appear as if the participants were more open-minded in their views towards the candidates. When asked to explain their score, the great majority of the participants accepted and justified their apparent open-mindedness, even though they had reported more polarized views moments earlier.

Supporters of Clinton and Trump are similarly susceptible to false feedback

In Experiment 2, both Clinton and Trump supporters behaved similarly on the experimental measures: they had similar correction rates to the choice blindness manipulations and justified their open-minded score to similar degrees. This is the first study we are aware of that demonstrates that liberals and conservatives are equally susceptible to false feedback about their own attitudes. Given previous findings that acceptance and justification of false survey feedback can lead to lasting changes in political attitudes [30], we see the lack of difference between Trump supporters and Clinton supporters as contributing to the ongoing research on the psychology of ideology. So far, this line of research indicates that liberals and conservatives are different in some aspects, such as personality [33], values [35–36], and thinking styles [38–39]. However, they are both similarly susceptible to cognitive biases [42–43]. Our findings show that choice blindness applies equally to conservatives and liberals. More generally, choice blindness offers a useful tool to test how liberals and conservatives reason—or rationalize—when presented with false information.

Choice blindness as a method to study depolarization

The current study was not intended as a practical method to influence voters but rather as a novel investigation of experimental depolarization in the political domain. We find that giving people false feedback can be an effective way to, at least momentarily, make them perceive themselves as more open towards competing candidates. This shows that even deeply held beliefs depend on situational factors and can be flexible under certain circumstances. From a theoretical perspective, we believe that participants interpret their own behavior—in this case their survey responses—and infer the reasons behind these responses [51–54]. Choice blindness could therefore be useful to study the depolarization of extreme views. For example, we could measure how susceptibility to choice blindness and confabulation are affected by the direction of the manipulation, such as going from polarized to moderate, or vice versa. This could help us understand whether being moderate or undecided is a distinct pole of its own. If so, we could explore whether these moderate views are more or less susceptible to false information. Here, the framing of moderate views may play an important role. In our studies, participants received positive false feedback about their survey responses. Instead of suggesting to people that they are open-minded, we might have found different results if participants had been told that they were “wishy-washy”, “flip-flopping”, “uncertain”, “centrist”, or even “moderate”. Future work could examine how participants behave when they are given false negative or more neutral feedback as well.
The effectiveness of choice blindness in the political domain distinguishes it from many other forms of persuasion, such as perspective-taking [55–56]. In a recent study, Catapano and colleagues [57] found that such methods are less effective for deep-seated attitudes, such as those relating to politics. In fact, imagining the perspectives of out-group members can even backfire and hinder subsequent attitude change. This could partially be explained by the fact that in those paradigms, participants are fully aware that the perspective they consider is not their own and that the arguments they express are hypothetical. In choice blindness experiments, however, participants often believe that the response they are asked to explain reflects their own true attitude.

Limitations and future studies

In Experiment 1, only 12% of all manipulations were corrected, but in Experiment 2, 41% of them were. The reasons behind this difference are difficult to isolate given the variation in design between the two studies (such as the number of manipulations, the instructions for revisiting their responses, and verbal versus written explanations). One potential explanation is the plausibility of the manipulation. In Experiment 1, the manipulations were performed using a magic trick, which is extremely improbable in the context of a typical political opinion survey. Likely none of the participants had ever filled out a pen-and-paper survey that changed seconds later. Thus, if the participants lack perfect access to their own attitudes (or if political attitudes are not stored for us to access; [58–59]), then the manipulated survey responses ought to function as a prime source of evidence about their own attitudes [51–52]. The (presumably non-conscious) inference may look something like: “I wrote these responses, so either they must be my true attitudes, or else I made several large errors”. So, if people see themselves as competent at answering a simple questionnaire, making a series of large errors would seem less plausible. In contrast, in Experiment 2, even though we attempted to replicate the general procedure of the original trick, participants were faced with a far less magical procedure. People are familiar with malfunctioning computer programs and websites, and thus our participants would have had little difficulty in concluding that there may have simply been a software error when saving their responses that needs correcting.
Another explanation might be the difference between verbally explaining versus silently revising the manipulations. While participants in Experiment 2 were also confronted with the manipulations, they did not have to engage in the mental task of having to recall or generate arguments for them. On the face of it, one might expect this additional reasoning process to generate more corrections, presumably by helping participants think more deeply about the issue and discovering that they do not agree with the manipulated position. However, if deliberation serves not as attitudinal fact-checking but as a way for participants to further commit to and defend their own ostensible attitudes, the reasoning process might lead to fewer corrections [53–54]. A third explanation could be simply that Experiment 2 was conducted closer to the election compared to Experiment 1, and that a larger proportion of the participants in Experiment 2 had firmly decided who they would vote for. Finally, it could also have been that the cover story in Experiment 2—telling participants to check their responses in case they had been affected by presentation order—may have primed participants be more attentive and to search for inconsistencies.
Prior to the current study, choice blindness had only been used to study what might be called “repolarization”—for example by shifting people from agreeing to disagreeing with a statement. Here, for the first time, we show that it is possible to use the same methodology to depolarize people, by making them adopt the idea that they are more “open-minded”.
In future studies, we could also explore more global attitude shifts. In the two experiments presented here, the manipulations did not influence the candidate competency/favorability ratings. Had this been found, it would have been a unique case of attitude generalization where manipulation on some character judgments would bleed over and affect another more general trait. Perhaps political competency is judged somewhat independently of the specific traits in our survey.