- Library Home /
- Search Collections /
- Open Collections /
- Browse Collections /
- UBC Theses and Dissertations /
- Seek and ye shall be fine : attitudes towards political...
Open Collections
UBC Theses and Dissertations
UBC Theses and Dissertations
Seek and ye shall be fine : attitudes towards political perspective-seekers Heltzel, Gordon
Abstract
Over the past two decades, growing political polarization has led to increasing calls for people to seek out and try to understand opposing political views. Although seeking out opposing views is objectively desirable behavior, do we find it socially desirable when people who agree with us nonetheless seek out views that we oppose? We find that observers strongly prefer individuals who seek out, rather than avoid, political views that the observer opposes. Across nine online studies we find a large preference for these political perspective-seekers, and in a lab study, 73% of participants chose to interact with a perspective-seeking confederate. This preference is weakly moderated by the direction of participants’ ideology and the strength of their beliefs. Moreover, it is robust regardless of why the individual seeks or avoids opposing views, and emerges even when the perspective-seeker is undecided and not already committed to participants’ own views. However, the preference disappears when a perspective-seeker attends only to the perspective that observers disagree with, disregarding the observer’s side. These findings suggest that, despite growing polarization, people still think it is important to understand and tolerate political opponents. This work also informs future interventions, which could leverage social pressures to promote political perspective-seeking and combat selective-exposure, thus improving political relations.
Item Metadata
Title |
Seek and ye shall be fine : attitudes towards political perspective-seekers
|
Creator | |
Publisher |
University of British Columbia
|
Date Issued |
2019
|
Description |
Over the past two decades, growing political polarization has led to increasing calls for people to seek out and try to understand opposing political views. Although seeking out opposing views is objectively desirable behavior, do we find it socially desirable when people who agree with us nonetheless seek out views that we oppose? We find that observers strongly prefer individuals who seek out, rather than avoid, political views that the observer opposes. Across nine online studies we find a large preference for these political perspective-seekers, and in a lab study, 73% of participants chose to interact with a perspective-seeking confederate. This preference is weakly moderated by the direction of participants’ ideology and the strength of their beliefs. Moreover, it is robust regardless of why the individual seeks or avoids opposing views, and emerges even when the perspective-seeker is undecided and not already committed to participants’ own views. However, the preference disappears when a perspective-seeker attends only to the perspective that observers disagree with, disregarding the observer’s side. These findings suggest that, despite growing polarization, people still think it is important to understand and tolerate political opponents. This work also informs future interventions, which could leverage social pressures to promote political perspective-seeking and combat selective-exposure, thus improving political relations.
|
Genre | |
Type | |
Language |
eng
|
Date Available |
2019-08-22
|
Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
|
Rights |
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
|
DOI |
10.14288/1.0380549
|
URI | |
Degree | |
Program | |
Affiliation | |
Degree Grantor |
University of British Columbia
|
Graduation Date |
2019-09
|
Campus | |
Scholarly Level |
Graduate
|
Rights URI | |
Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
|
Item Media
Item Citations and Data
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International