Republicans Experience "Backfire Effect" in Study on Exposure to Opposite Views

[Julian Englis]

Source: Inverse.com

The so-called “filter bubble” on social media, which leads to people seeing only content with which they ideologically agree, has been criticized in recent years for contributing to the polarization of politics. A new scientific study has turned that hypothesis on its head, with Republicans and Democrats faring differently in the research.

It turns out that exposure to opposing views on social media actually increases political polarization, according to the latest research by Columbia University. The findings were released on Tuesday ahead of their publication in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers surveyed 901 Democrats and 751 Republicans for their experiment, making sure to choose people who used Twitter three times a week. They were paid $11 to follow a custom-made Twitter bot that espoused political messages opposite to their own beliefs, and that bot was busy: It retweeted 24 messages a day from “high-profile elites with opposing political ideologies” for a month straight. Crucially, the respondents were not told what sort of messages the bot would retweet.

After the month-long period, 62 percent of Democrats and 57.2 percent of Republicans agreed to be surveyed about their experience. Republicans “exhibited substantially more conservative views post-treatment,” report the researchers

Read more: https://www.inverse.com/article/48449-republicans-vs-democrats-twitter-scientific-study

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A link to the original study from Columbia University: Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization

[HopeAgain]

1. Makes sense

The more I hear from MAGAts, the more disgusted with them I get.

[unblock]

2. i don't think it as simple as "exposure" to different views.

i think the nature of those views matters.

for instance "i think x and people who think y are idiots" would likely be polarizing to someone who believed in y, but "i used to think y and it makes a lot of sense, but i though about it and did some research and realized that x actually makes even more more sense" is not likely to be seen as polarizing.

both statements would qualify as "exposure to opposing views."

[Squinch]

3. I had to laugh at this part:

"some of our Republican respondents may reflect their beliefs that women should not occupy positions of power.”

That's a big "duh" right there.

[Spartacus101]

4. Why can't I get grant money for this kind of study...

...and published in the NAS Journal...wow.

Next stop, The Institute For Advanced Studies will issue a paper called, "The President's A Loon".

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Conservatives tend to respond to emotional arguments so they emotionally reject alternative views.nt

[msongs]

6. dems need more emotion to advocate our intellectual views. IMO ppl are more

invested when there is positive emotional attachment

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. +1 for accentuating the positives. . . . nt

[paulkienitz]

7. this experiment may actually be measuring the degree of blind ideological willingness to deny facts

but whatever this is really measuring, conservatives clearly have a lot more of it.

[wellst0nev0ter]

9. Did this study control for bullshit propaganda

especially from trumpanzee "influencers"?

I'd definitely turn into a full blown Sandanista if I were subjected to that garbage for more than a week.

[LakeSuperiorView]

10. Twitter is arguably the most stupid form of communication ever.

Did they consider that all of the people studied were just dumber than when they started?

[Julian Englis]

12. No, there's the Free Republic and the Breitbart message boards. n/t

[LakeSuperiorView]

13. Well, can one really say they are forms of communication?

Endless echos of hate don't convey much of a message. Sure their layout and design are crappy, but their content is devoid of any intelligence.

Artificially limited character counts just means smaller turds.

[pansypoo53219]

11. no FEMA camps then.

[summer_in_TX]

14. RW media propaganda's role is probably not recognized

The rightwing system of propaganda includes a very deliberate effort to showcase "liberal media bias" and denigrate all other sources of news outside of their propaganda system. They've stoked distrust. My best guess is that this type of study is likely to find a pretty consistent pattern of response if researchers attempt to replicate it. I wouldn't be surprised if gender and ethnicity of the speaker played a role too, but suspect the strongest factor is the RW media's deliberate effort to ensure distrust of all other sources and messages.