Conservatives and liberals get along, have more meaningful and productive discussions when using the video conferencing service, study shows
LOS ANGELES – It’s no secret that US politics has become more and more polarizing in recent years. See the article : The Senate confirms Steve Dettelbach as Biden’s choice to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. There seems to be less and less room for hearty debate and discourse between conservatives and liberals, but fascinating new research from California finds that it’s still possible to find some common ground — at least digitally.
Researchers at UCLA report that a group of liberals and conservatives were able to have meaningful and enjoyable political discussions when these conversations took place on the video chat platform Zoom.
These findings are particularly interesting given how toxic political discourse has become in most online environments, including social media. However, talking face-to-face on Zoom is quite different from arguing with an anonymous user on Twitter. Study authors explain that most study participants, when asked to speak one-on-one with a person with different political views via Zoom, instinctively connected with that person and generally reported having a better experience than they expected.
What’s more, the volunteers reported leaving their chats with a greater understanding of the other person’s views and even said they felt less rigid about their own opinions.
Political rivals can be pretty nice people too
Overall, researchers say their work suggests that video chatting could be a very useful tool for bridging the current political divide in the United States. However, they add that there are a number of caveats to consider. This may interest you : The Contemporary Clinic #2: Politics in the Clinic – Notes. For example, whether an audience observed the conversations and whether they appeared to affect the amount of conflict between the participants.
“Most studies on cross-ideological communication are either written retrospectively about past experiences or speculatively, but almost none have looked at what happens when people actually have the conversation,” says UCLA psychology professor and study author Matthew Lieberman in a university release.
“As far as we know, this is the first time researchers have used Zoom to have these conversations,” he adds. “We use it as the experimental platform, and we experimentally manipulated whether people had an audience on the platform or not.”
The research team brought together a group of volunteers with either strong liberal or conservative political opinions from across the United States. The team asked each person to imagine how a conversation with a political opponent would go, and how they would probably feel afterwards. Predictably, most participants were not so excited about their “political contradictions” and usually predicted conflict and rage during the conversation, followed by a bad mood afterwards.
To begin with, each participant chatted over Zoom with someone with similar political views. Then they talked to their political opposite. During about half of these cross-ideological conversations, the “in-group members” that the participants spoke to first (a conservative and a liberal) were asked to quietly observe the next conversation on a particular hot-button topic.
Researchers recorded all the conversations. This allowed the team to compare the chats with the participants’ subjective assessments after the conversation. The conversations were about one of the following opinions:
Chats get ugly when our political peers are watching
When two participants spoke privately, the chats usually started very politely and remained largely pleasant. However, several became quite heated. Some of these discussions were similar to how family members dance around a sensitive political issue during a holiday gathering, study authors note.
Nevertheless, the average participant told the researchers that they spent less time in conflict during the conversation, and found it more fun, less stressful and easier than they had predicted. Many said they liked the opposite more than they expected and found them less emotional and more logical than they expected. On the same subject : Politics Puts Business Before the American People – CentralMaine.com. This trend held true among couples who had fierce quarrels.
More importantly, however, more conflict arose in conversations when people knew their fellow conservatives or liberals were quietly watching. Knowing that these political allies were watching seemed to make it much more difficult for people to find common ground with their political opposites. When a member of the group watched, both participants and researchers rated the conversations as more stressful and difficult.
Even when there was a silent observer, participants still reported having a better time than they expected and came away with generally positive impressions of their interlocutors.
Now Prof. Lieberman’s team near-infrared spectroscopy to continue their work. Chat partners will wear a cap with sensors that measure blood oxygen levels, providing insight into brain activity and synchronization during cross-ideological Zoom conversations.
The findings appear in the journal PLoS ONE.
