Listening to someone who disagrees with you on a controversial topic, but shares basic values, might not change your mind - but it could moderate an extreme position, reducing polarization, new Cornell economics research finds.
The research shows that contrary to popular narratives about media and political echo chambers - where people primarily interact with like-minded partisans - Americans are more willing to engage with opposing opinions than generally presumed. Doing so likely helps people think through stances on complex issues, the researchers propose.
And among those who listen to different viewpoints, perceived common ground with the other side helps a small, but meaningful, percentage shift to a less polarized outlook.
"Willingness to engage with different views on controversial subjects is actually quite high," said Michèle Belot, professor in the Department of Economics. "The question is whether people are then willing to engage with what they hear. Promoting common values is not a miracle cure, but our evidence indicates people being more willing to reconsider their views if they know the other person shares common values."
Belot is the corresponding author of "Breaking Echo Chambers: An Experimental Study on the Willingness to Listen to Opposite Views," published June 8 in The Economic Journal. Guglielmo Briscese, an economist formerly at the University of Chicago, now at Vanguard, is the co-author.
Research on echo chambers' influence on polarization has focused on social media's role, and on interpretations of objective facts rather than policies. Introducing common goals has been shown to reduce bias, but typically in settings that force people with differing opinions to interact - something they might avoid in real life.
Belot, who holds appointments in the ILR School and the College of Arts and Sciences, and Briscese set out to investigate how much people would engage with opposing viewpoints voluntarily, and to see if stressing common ground - a foundation of the decades-old "contact hypothesis" - would increase engagement and editing of one's views.
The main experiment surveyed a representative sample of roughly 2,500 Americans, soliciting views on three divisive issues: abortion, gun laws and immigration. Participants then were offered the opportunity to listen to up to three brief audio recordings, collected in a separate survey, of someone with an opposite opinion on one of those issues, based on a 1-10 scale.
"We tried to make it very clear that they were not required to listen," Belot said, "to be as close as possible to their daily environment, where they're not forced to look at, say, CNN or Fox News, if they don't want to."
In addition to a control group, one group learned that the person on the recording held similar views about selected statements from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (e.g., "Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.") Another group learned the recorded person agreed about basic etiquette rules (e.g., saying "please" and "thank you," being on time, waiting one's turn.). Participants agreed broadly about both human rights and etiquette.
Results showed that nearly 70% of participants listened to all three recordings, and 18% to two. A follow-up experiment further stressing that listening was optional produced lower totals but still found engagement to be "relatively high, even when self-sorting into listening requires a more active choice," the authors said.
Shared values did not significantly affect that willingness to listen. But compared to the control group, participants aware of common values or etiquette standards were more likely to adjust their views after listening to the other side. About 10% shifted to a less extreme score concerning abortion and immigration, but not on gun laws - the least divisive of the three issues.
"They become a little bit closer to the middle," Belot said. "Views become a little bit less polarized."
The high willingness to listen may stem from basic curiosity, the researchers said, and a desire to clarify one's thinking about an issue - the same impulses that motivate friends or family to rehash presidential debates. Such interaction won't impart new information - they watched the same debate - but listening to someone with whom one feels common ground could be helpful in processing information and thinking through issues.
Belot said the findings could be useful to initiatives already seeking to ease polarization, citing the work of two nonprofits, Braver Angels and StoryCorp's One Small Step, as examples. Individuals could also give more weight to shared beliefs that don't typically merit attention in the media or political campaigns.
"There's a lot more we can do to emphasize things we have in common, even if we disagree strongly on topic," Belot said. "It's always good to remember when we listen to others who seem to be thinking very differently that there's probably a ton of things we still agree on, and sometimes that gets lost."
