Slowing the vicious cycle of polarsation

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Mads Fuglsang Hove, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University.

Research suggests that the news media’s coverage of rising affective polarisation is part of a vicious cycle of polarisation. The media covers affective polarisation, which increases citizens’ perceptions that partisans are polarised, which in turn leads to negative affect for out-group partisans. What is the role of citizens in this vicious cycle? Two lines of research lead to conflicting predictions: that citizens can fuel it or counter it. We put these predictions to the test with an experimental chain transmission design that allows us to observe sharing rates of (de)polarising information and how it affects citizens’ attitudes and knowledge in the two-step information flow from traditional media to peer-to-peer communication. Our results suggest that citizens slow rather than fuel the vicious cycle of polarisation.

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