Seek and Ye Shall Be Fine: Attitudes Toward Political-Perspective Seekers

Testing the social pressure hypothesis: Does in-party social pressure reduce out-party empathy?

Empathy is considered one of the most critical components for bridging political divides and reducing animosity between political groups. Yet, empathy between political opponents is rare. There is a growing concern that partisans do not empathize with out-partisans because they feel social pressure from fellow in-partisans not to do so. This article examines this social pressure hypothesis and draws two conclusions. First, on the surface, the hypothesis seems plausible: citizens perceive fellow in-partisans as comparatively disapproving of and reluctant to engage in out-party empathy, and naïve cross-sectional analyses suggest that this perception translates into lower empathy towards out-partisans. Second, however, experimental data suggest that this relationship is not causal. Expecting disapproval from fellow in-party members for empathizing with out-partisans does not lead to a significant reduction in intentions to empathize with out-partisans. Rather, exploratory analyses suggest that social pressure by the in-party increases empathy toward out-partisans and triggers disappointment toward in-partisans. This implies that partisans can resist social pressure from the in-party and might even compensate for in-partisans' lack of out-party empathy. The results are supported by original cross-sectional and experimental survey data ( N = 2,535 ) collected in the United States, an arguably most likely case for in-party social pressure to shape partisans' intentions. The results have important implications for understanding the causes of and viable strategies for building empathy across political divides.

Why Twitter Sometimes Rewards What Most People Disapprove of: The Case of Cross-Party Political Relations

Recent evidence has shown that social-media platforms like Twitter (now X) reward politically divisive content, even though most people disapprove of interparty conflict and negativity. We document this discrepancy and provide the first evidence explaining it, using tweets by U.S. Senators and American adults' responses to them. Studies 1a and 1b examined 6,135 such tweets, finding that dismissing tweets received more Likes and Retweets than tweets that engaged constructively with opponents. In contrast, Studies 2a and 2b (N = 856; 1,968 observations) revealed that the broader public, if anything, prefers politicians' engaging tweets. Studies 3 (N = 323; 4,571 observations) and 4 (N = 261; 2,610 observations) supported two distinct explanations for this disconnect. First, users who frequently react to politicians' tweets are an influential yet unrepresentative minority, rewarding dismissing posts because, unlike most people, they prefer them. Second, the silent majority admit that they too would reward dismissing posts more, despite disapproving of them. These findings help explain why popular online content sometimes distorts true public opinion.

Adults Show Positive Moral Evaluations of Curiosity About Religion

Four experiments investigated the perceived virtue of curiosity about religion. Adults from the United States made moral judgments regarding targets who exhibited curiosity, possessed relevant knowledge, or lacked both curiosity and knowledge about religion and comparison topics (e.g., science). Participants attributed greater moral goodness to targets who displayed curiosity compared with targets who were ignorant or knowledgeable about the domain. This preference was consistent across Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and other Christian participants but was absent when atheists evaluated religious curiosity. Perceptions of effort partially mediated judgments: Participants viewed curious characters as exerting more effort and consequently rated them as more moral. To test causality, we manipulated perceptions of effort and showed that participants viewed curious characters who exerted effort as particularly moral. This work fosters novel insights into the perceived virtue of curiosity and further illuminates similarities and differences between religious and scientific cognition.

Online Interaction Turns the Congeniality Bias Into an Uncongeniality Bias

Online phenomena like echo chambers and polarization are believed to be driven by humans' penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behavior, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online behavior changes when people are given an opportunity to reply to dissenters. Three experiments (total N = 320; convenience student samples from Germany) and an internal meta-analysis show that in a discussion-forum setting where participants can reply to earlier comments larger cognitive conflict between participant attitude and comment attitude predicts higher likelihood to respond (uncongeniality bias). When the discussion climate was friendly (vs. oppositional) to the views of participants, the uncongeniality bias was more pronounced and was also associated with attitude polarization. These results suggest that belief polarization on social media may not only be driven by congeniality but also by conflict.