Reducing opinion polarization: Effects of exposure to similar people with differing political views

In a large-scale, preregistered experiment on informal political communication, we algorithmically matched participants, varying two dimensions: 1) the degree of incidental similarity on nonpolitical features; and 2) their stance agreement on a contentious political topic. Matched participants were first shown a computer-generated social media profile of their match highlighting all the shared nonpolitical features; then, they read a short, personal, but argumentative, essay written by their match about the reduction of inequality via redistribution of wealth by the government. We show that support for redistribution increased and polarization decreased for participants with both mild and strong views, regardless of their political leaning. We further show that feeling close to the match is associated with an 86% increase in the probability of assimilation of political views. Our analysis also uncovers an asymmetry: Interacting with someone with opposite views greatly reduced feelings of closeness; however, interacting with someone with consistent views only moderately increased them. By extending previous work about the effects of incidental similarity and shared identity on affect into the domain of political opinion change, our results bear real-world implications for the (re)-design of social media platforms. Because many people prefer to keep politics outside of their social networks, encouraging cross-cutting political communication based on nonpolitical commonalities is a potential solution for fostering consensus on potentially divisive and partisan topics.

Elements of Social Engineering Methodology Used During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The article focuses on elements of social engineering (SI) that could be used by the states in their own interests during the COVID-19 pandemic. These elements were used to form negative public opinion, change the political landscape, and reduce citizens’ trust in their own governments. These elements are influence and persuasion. Traditional media and social networks play a major role in the use of these SI elements. SI has a long history of theoretical study as a scientific phenomenon. Practical elements of SI have a large arsenal, from government tools to influencing individuals. The article aims to demonstrate using SI elements, influence, and persuasion by the interested states and governments to obtain certain preferences for both foreign and domestic policies.

Intermittent brain network reconfigurations and the resistance to social media influence

Since their development, social media has grown as a source of information and has a significant impact on opinion formation. Individuals interact with others and content via social media platforms in a variety of ways but it remains unclear how decision making and associated neural processes are impacted by the online sharing of informational content, from factual to fabricated. Here, we use EEG to estimate dynamic reconfigurations of brain networks and probe the neural changes underlying opinion change (or formation) within individuals interacting with a simulated social media platform. Our findings indicate that the individuals who show more malleable opinions are characterized by less frequent network reconfigurations while those with more rigid opinions tend to have more flexible brain networks with frequent reconfigurations. The nature of these frequent network configurations suggests a fundamentally different thought process between the individuals who are more easily influenced by social media and those who are not. We also show that these reconfigurations are distinct to the brain dynamics during an in-person discussion with strangers on the same content. Together, these findings suggest that network reconfigurations in the brain may not only be diagnostic to the informational context but also the underlie opinion formation.

Polarization and tipping points

Research has documented increasing partisan division and extremist positions that are more pronounced among political elites than among voters. Attention has now begun to focus on how polarization might be attenuated. We use a general model of opinion change to see if the self-reinforcing dynamics of influence and homophily may be characterized by tipping points that make reversibility problematic. The model applies to a legislative body or other small, densely connected organization, but does not assume country-specific institutional arrangements that would obscure the identification of fundamental regularities in the phase transitions. Agents in the model have initially random locations in a multidimensional issue space consisting of membership in one of two equal-sized parties and positions on 10 issues. Agents then update their issue positions by moving closer to nearby neighbors and farther from those with whom they disagree, depending on the agents’ tolerance of disagreement and strength of party identification compared to their ideological commitment to the issues. We conducted computational experiments in which we manipulated agents’ tolerance for disagreement and strength of party identification. Importantly, we also introduced exogenous shocks corresponding to events that create a shared interest against a common threat (e.g., a global pandemic). Phase diagrams of political polarization reveal difficult-to-predict transitions that can be irreversible due to asymmetric hysteresis trajectories. We conclude that future empirical research needs to pay much closer attention to the identification of tipping points and the effectiveness of possible countermeasures.

Movement Means Changing Politics

Chapter 5 reports on the political impacts of the movement thus far, including the way it has reshaped public discourse and political meanings, transformed public opinion, and influenced public policy. This chapter contains extensive empirical data, including records of public opinion change over time, maps of where progressive prosecutors have been elected across the United States, lists of policies aimed at “defunding the police” or what abolitionist call nonreformist reforms, which emphasize divesting from police and prisons and investing in social support, policies that are under consideration or have been adopted by state and municipal legislatures.

Public Opinion Change and the Uniqueness of Gay Rights

Chapter 8 demonstrates that support for marriage equality is the fastest liberalizing attitude in the history of American public opinion. Abortion rights and gay rights divide the American public along similar lines (by region, religiosity, and party affiliation), but gay rights has undergone a remarkable transformation, while attitudes toward abortion rights are relatively static. One reason for the difference is that gay people have come out of the closet, while abortion histories remain closeted. Chapter 8 also shows that support for marriage equality seems to have made Americans more appreciative of all kinds of queer rights, including transgender rights. Marriage equality reduced the stigmas faced by all queer people and paved the way for more appreciation of all kinds of gay rights, exactly as the proponents of marriage equality said that it would.

Effective strategies for changing public opinion: A literature review

Social movements often try to affect public opinion as a lever for legislation and other social change. This report provides a broad overview of research relating to (1) whether advocates can successfully influence public opinion and how they can do so most effectively, and (2) what the other causes of public opinion change are and how advocates can harness them. Key findings include that direct persuasion attempts to change attitudes (rather than behavior) tend to have “small” or “very small” short-term effects, but advocates may be able to have lasting indirect effects on public opinion via policy change or reframing the issues. We list factors that affect how persuasive messages are and make tentative suggestions for how advocates can cost-effectively leverage external influences on public opinion such as the media, celebrities, politicians, and policy.

The Importance of Context and the Effect of Information and Deliberation on Opinion Change Regarding Environmental Issues in Citizens’ Juries

Citizens’ juries have become a popular method for engaging citizens in deliberation about complex public policy issues, such as climate action and sustainable development. Empirical evidence routinely indicates that jurors change their minds throughout the process. What is less clear is when and why this occurs and whether the causes are consistent across juries that consider the same topic but are situated within different contexts. We present evidence of opinion change in citizens’ juries through a natural experiment, contrasting three local contexts of onshore windfarm development in Scotland; viz. existing, planned, and absent. Jurors’ individual opinions of climate change, wind energy, and windfarms were measured through questionnaires at four time points: the start, following information-giving, reflection, and deliberation. Statistical examination of jurors’ responses, through paired sample t-tests, Wilcoxon sign-tests, and Generalised Least Squares regression, reveals to what extent substantive changes were associated with different phases and locational contexts. In all three juries, opinion change occurs throughout the process, on different topics, and to different degrees. While the information phase consistently influences jurors’ opinions the most, jury composition affects the magnitude and direction of opinion change, with outcomes contingent on contexts. Our findings are important for informing how mini-publics are designed and used to inform environmental policy-making at different scales.

A spatiotemporal approach for social media sentiment analysis

The rapid growth of user-generated unstructured data through social media has raised several challenges and research opportunities. These data constitute a rich source of information for sentiment analysis and help the understanding of spontaneously expressed opinions. In the past few years, many scientific proposals have addressed sentiment analysis issues. However, most of them do not take into account both spatial and temporal dimensions, which would enable a more accurate analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this approach has not received much attention in the literature. In this article, we formalized a spatiotemporal sentiment analysis technique and applied this technique to a case study of tweets about the FIFA 2014 World Cup. Our approach exploits the summarization of sentiment analysis using the spatial and temporal dimensions and automatically generates opinion change flow maps through both dimensions. The results enable the tracking of opinion change flow maps through spatial and temporal analysis.

The Effects and Antecedents of Perceived Fairness in the Deliberative Process for Sustainable Citizens’ Participation

Based on the data from Korean citizen’s deliberation experiments, we examined the effects and antecedents of perceived fairness of the deliberative process. Our empirical study tested whether the perceived fairness of the deliberative process was associated with the outcomes of deliberation (changes in civic participants’ opinions) and explored antecedents that facilitated the perceived fairness of the deliberative process. We found that perceived fairness of the deliberative process positively increased civic participants’ opinion change, information reliability, and culture of acceptance in the deliberative process cultivated the perceived fairness of deliberative process when we controlled personal orientation and characteristics (e.g., political orientation, gender, age and etc.). These results identified conditions for effectively facilitating deliberative civic engagement in the policy decision-making process.