Sude, D. J., & Knobloch-Westerwick, S (2023). When we have to get along: Depolarizing impacts of cross-cutting social media. International Journal of Communication. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/19019/4296
Is political polarization inevitable? This article tests the novel theorizing that we are in fact motivated to view “the other side” warmly, to the extent that we feel dependent on them to get things done.
“Sides” were operationalized in terms of partisanship – Republicans and Demorats in this US context. “Dependence” was operationalized in terms of perceived national support for the political parties. The less support we feel for our own side, the more we view the other side warmly.
Further, while the effect was weak, finding oneself in the minority on a custom-programmed web-forum led to perceiving less public support for one’s political party, with subsequent increase in warmth toward’s “the other side.” This is notable, as real world stimuli were employed, harvested from Reddit and classified according to likely political orientation by the work of Bond and Sweitzer (2022).
External Reference:
Bond, R. M., & Sweitzer, M. D. (2022). Political homophily in a large-scale online communication network. Communication Research, 49(1), 93-115.
Daniel Sude Consulting 