Abstract
Political polarization between conservatives and liberals threatens democratic societies. Ameliorating liberal research participants’ negative feelings, evaluations, and stereotypes towards conservatives might be one step into the direction of a political depolarization. In a sample of U.S.-American liberal research participants recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 271), we randomly assigned participants in a pre-post-design either to a clinical-psychological, metacognitive-intervention (MCT), an educational, or a no-treatment-no-pre-measurement-control-condition. In the MCT-condition, participants were first asked seemingly simple questions that frequently elicited incorrect responses, followed by corrective information. In the educational condition, information was conveyed in a simple narrative form. MCT was significantly more effective in ameliorating liberal participants’ negative feelings, evaluations, and stereotypes towards conservatives compared to the other two control-conditions. Further, MCT-participants significantly reduced their negative feelings, negative evaluations, and perceptions of threat from pre- to post-measurement, significantly more than participants in the educational condition. The results of our preliminary study and its implications are discussed, and recommendations for further research are made.
Highlights
Political polarization between conservatives and liberals threatens democratic societies
“Democrats are the party of crime” (“Trump calls Democrats the 'party of crime'”, 2018), the former liberal U.S president Barack Obama claims that “[t]he politics of division and resentment and paranoia has found a home in the Republican Party“ (Stracqualursi, 2018)
We conducted a repeated-measures analysis in a 2 within-subjects x 2 (MCT vs. education) between-subjects design in order to investigate whether MCT significantly ameliorated negative feelings, evaluation, and perception of threat compared to the education control group
Summary
Political polarization between conservatives and liberals threatens democratic societies. With regard to the political sphere, polarization processes inhere a dangerous potential as the political opponent is increasingly associated with negative emotions, disapproved of, perceived as threatening, and stereotyped (Cohn, 2014; Iyengar & Krupenkin, 2018; Pew Research Center, 2014, 2016, 2017) Symptoms of these political polarization processes can be currently observed in the U.S.: Whereas the conservative U.S President Donald Trump has claimed that “Democrats are the party of crime” (“Trump calls Democrats the 'party of crime'”, 2018), the former liberal U.S president Barack Obama claims that “[t]he politics of division and resentment and paranoia has found a home in the Republican Party“ (Stracqualursi, 2018). Notwithstanding its importance, there is little research on the group of liberals in social psychology and how tensions can be overcome or soothed (Crawford & Jussim, 2018; Duarte et al, 2015)
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