Talking Across the Aisle

Luca Braghieri, Peter Schwardmann and Egon Tripodi
Additional contact information
Luca Braghieri: Bocconi University
Peter Schwardmann: Carnegie Mellon University

No 575, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: We conduct an experiment that engages U.S. Democrats and Republicans in video conversations about policy-relevant facts. We study self-selection into conversations and their effect on information aggregation and affective polarization. Participants prefer co-partisan conversations, believing cross-partisan conversations to be less informative and less pleasant. There is more to learn from counter-partisans, but participants find it harder to extract knowledge from them. Our rich audiovisual data reveal that co- and cross-partisan conversations are strikingly similar in content and tone. Yet, knowledge extraction is impeded by participants' persistent lack of trust in the knowledge of counter-partisans. In contrast, cross-partisan interactions prove more enjoyable than anticipated and significantly reduce affective polarization, an effect that persists in an obfuscated follow-up survey three months later. More emotionally engaged conversations produce larger reductions in affective polarization. Policies encouraging cross-partisan interactions may be more successful at reducing affective polarization than at promoting information aggregation.

Keywords: cross-partisan interactions; partisan sorting; echo chambers; information diffusion; affective polarization; misperceptions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D83 D9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/ ... ussion_paper/575.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Talking across the Aisle (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rco:dpaper:575

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Viviana Lalli ().