People See Political Opponents as More Stupid Than Evil

Learning From Aggregated Opinion

The capacity to leverage information from others' opinions is a hallmark of human cognition. Consequently, past research has investigated how we learn from others' testimony. Yet a distinct form of social information-aggregated opinion-increasingly guides our judgments and decisions. We investigated how people learn from such information by conducting three experiments with participants recruited online within the United States (N = 886) comparing the predictions of three computational models: a Bayesian solution to this problem that can be implemented by a simple strategy for combining proportions with prior beliefs, and two alternatives from epistemology and economics. Across all studies, we found the strongest concordance between participants' judgments and the predictions of the Bayesian model, though some participants' judgments were better captured by alternative strategies. These findings lay the groundwork for future research and show that people draw systematic inferences from aggregated opinion, often in line with a Bayesian solution.

People believe political opponents accept blatant moral wrongs, fueling partisan divides

Efforts to bridge political divides often focus on navigating complex and divisive issues, but eight studies reveal that we should also focus on a more basic misperception: that political opponents are willing to accept basic moral wrongs. In the United States, Democrats, and Republicans overestimate the number of political outgroup members who approve of blatant immorality (e.g. child pornography, embezzlement). This "basic morality bias" is tied to political dehumanization and is revealed by multiple methods, including natural language analyses from a large social media corpus and a survey with a representative sample of Americans. Importantly, the basic morality bias can be corrected with a brief, scalable intervention. Providing information that just one political opponent condemns blatant wrongs increases willingness to work with political opponents and substantially decreases political dehumanization.

Social media feedback and extreme opinion expression

On popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok, the quantitative feedback received by content producers is asymmetric: counts of positive reactions such as 'likes,' or 'retweets,' are easily observed but similar counts of negative reactions are not directly available. We study how this design feature of social media platforms affects the expression of extreme opinions. Using simulations of a learning model, we compare two feedback environments that differ in terms of the availability of negative reaction counts. We find that expressed opinions are generally more extreme when negative reaction counts are not available than when they are. We rely on analyses of Twitter data and several online experiments to provide empirical support for key model assumptions and test model predictions. Our findings suggest that a simple design change might limit, under certain conditions, the expression of extreme opinions on social media.

Political (Meta-)Dehumanization in Mental Representations: Divergent Emphases in the Minds of Liberals Versus Conservatives

We conducted two reverse-correlation studies, as well as two pilot studies reported in the online supplement (total N = 1,411), on the topics of (a) whether liberals and conservatives differ in the types of dehumanization that they cognitively emphasize when mentally representing one another, and if so, (b) whether liberals and conservatives are sensitive to how they are represented in the minds of political outgroup members. Results suggest that partisans indeed differ in the types of dehumanization that they cognitively emphasize when mentally representing one another: whereas conservatives' dehumanization of liberals emphasizes immaturity (vs. savagery), liberals' dehumanization of conservatives more strongly emphasizes savagery (vs. immaturity). In addition, results suggest that partisans may be sensitive to how they are represented. That is, partisans' meta-representations-their representations of how the outgroup represents the ingroup-appear to accurately index the relative emphases of these two dimensions in the minds of political outgroup members.

Top Management Team Political Polarization and Its Implications for Strategic Decision-Making

Small teams’ decisions play a major role in shaping business and society. As political differences permeate our lives, their influence is increasingly being felt throughout organizations. Yet, little is known about how executives’ political differences influence the Top Management Team’s decision-making processes. We integrate literatures on executive diversity, political polarization, and small teams to develop a new construct, Top Management Team political polarization, and examine how this team characteristic influences two critical parts of the strategic decision-making process: comprehensiveness and speed. We also propose behavioral integration reduces polarization’s drawbacks, offering improvements to decision-making processes in these polarizing times.

When Do Observers Deprioritize Due Process for the Perpetrator and Prioritize Safety for the Victim in Response to Information-Poor Allegations of Harm?

We examined how observers assess information-poor allegations of harm (e.g., "my word against yours" cases), in which the outcomes of procedurally fair investigations may favor the alleged perpetrator because the evidentiary standards are unmet. Yet this lack of evidence does not mean no harm occurred, and some observers may be charged with deciding whether the allegation is actionable within a collective. On the basis of theories of moral typecasting, procedural justice, and uncertainty management, we hypothesized that observers would be more likely to prioritize the victim's safety (vs. to prioritize due process for the perpetrator) and view the allegation as actionable when the victim-alleged perpetrator dyad members exhibit features that align with stereotypes of victims and perpetrators. We supported our hypothesis with four studies using various contexts, sources of perceived prototypicality, due-process prioritization, and samples (students from New Zealand, Ns = 137 and 114; Mechanical Turk workers from the United States; Ns = 260 and 336).