Open Collections

Heltzel, Gordon

University of British Columbia

Growing political polarization has fueled calls for people to constructively engage with opponents and better understand their perspectives rather than dismissively avoiding or condemning them. People who heed these calls may be doing their part to benefit democracy, but what about their reputations—will their behavior elevate them or abase them in their allies’ eyes? My dissertation reports ten studies answering this and related questions. Building on my MA thesis, which finds that people usually like allies who constructively engage with opponents’ views, Chapter 2’s Studies 1 and 2 examined why they hold this preference and when it is most likely to emerge. In Chapter 3, Studies 3 and 4 found a case when people prefer the opposite: U.S. Senators’ tweets received more positive feedback when they dismissed opponents compared to engaging with them. Studies 5 and 6 (and Appendix Studies S1-S4) test various explanations for this contradictory pattern, finding that Twitter popularity represents the genuine preferences of a small group of active users with unusual attitudes, as well as inauthentic preferences expressed by everyone else. Drawing on this observation that popular opinion is not represented on (social) media, Chapter 4 considered whether people fail to realize that their allies endorse cross-party engaging. Indeed, Studies 7 and 8 find that people mistakenly think they are alone in preferring allies who engage over those who dismiss. I theorized that perceived polarization causes these misperceptions, but Studies 9 and 10 found that reducing perceived polarization does not reduce misperceptions nor encourage people to engage with opposing views. This work on one hand highlights reputational benefits of engaging with opposing views; on the other, it suggests social media distorts these benefits, and people generally fail to realize them. At the same time, it leaves open how interventions might motivate engagement with opposing views.

Text

2023-11-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86653

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/