People tend to see supporters of rival political parties as unwilling to consider different viewpoints. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that this assumption is often wrong—and that learning so can make people more willing to engage with political opponents.
Researchers led by psychologist André Mata of the University of Lisbon surveyed 198 participants in Portugal and 402 in Sweden. Participants rated their own openness to opposing views, then estimated how open-minded supporters of their preferred and least-liked parties would be. They also considered whether they would want to speak with those people.
Participants generally saw themselves as more receptive than other people, and viewed supporters of their preferred party as more open-minded than supporters of their least-liked party. But when researchers compared those estimates with opponents’ own survey responses, participants had substantially underestimated how willing the opposing group was to listen to different views.
The more closed-minded participants expected an opponent to be, the more they anticipated that a conversation would be unpleasant or stressful—and the less willing they were to have one.
In another study, 600 Swedish participants read descriptions of fictional supporters of their least-liked party. Some characters were described as receptive to different values; others as unreceptive. Participants who read about receptive opponents expected political conversations to go better and were more willing to interact with them, including in non-political situations.
A final study tested whether direct feedback could correct the misperception. Among 120 Portuguese university students, some were shown the actual average responses given by supporters of their least-liked party after guessing how those people had answered questions about open-mindedness. Compared with a control group, participants who saw the data rated their opponents as more receptive and expected conversations to be less stressful and more informative. They also showed greater willingness to have non-political conversations with them.
The researchers caution that the relationship may work both ways: people who already want to avoid an opponent could be more likely to assume that person is closed-minded. The studies also involved European countries with multiparty systems, so the findings may not apply directly to political systems with different structures, such as the United States’ two-party system.
Sources: PsyPost.