Group identity and belief formation: A decomposition of political polarization

Kevin Bauer, Yan Chen, Florian Hett and Michael Kosfeld

No 409, SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE

Abstract: How does group identity affect belief formation? To address this question, we conduct a series of online experiments with a representative sample of individuals in the US. Using the setting of the 2020 US presidential election, we find evidence of intergroup preference across three distinct components of the belief formation cycle: a biased prior belief, avoidance of outgroup information sources, and a belief-updating process that places greater (less) weight on prior (new) information. We further find that an intervention reducing the salience of information sources decreases outgroup information avoidance by 50%. In a social learning context in wave 2, we find participants place 33% more weight on ingroup than outgroup guesses. Through two waves of interventions, we identify source utility as the mechanism driving group effects in belief formation. Our analyses indicate that our observed effects are driven by groupy participants who exhibit stable and consistent intergroup preferences in both allocation decisions and belief formation across all three waves. These results suggest that policymakers could reduce the salience of group and partisan identity associated with a policy to decrease outgroup information avoidance and increase policy uptake.

Keywords: group identity; information demand; information processing; political polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C92 D47 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:safewp:280966

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4670473

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