Had the joy of giving two presentations at the 2019 International Communication Association conference in DC. Even the Tuesday session (end of conference) was pleasantly packed.
First presentation focused on a finding where the gender of the author of a political opinion piece was more influential in shaping whether people selected and spent time reading that piece than the stance of its political content! In other words, our cross-partisan identities sometimes matter more than our partisan ones and can foster “reading across party lines.” Work was the product of a collaboration with Dr. Westerwick and Dr. Knobloch-Westerwick, as well as the lab’s talented undergraduate programmers.
My second talk was on belief polarization in response to social exclusion (in collaboration with Dr. Garrett and Dr. Riva). We looked (with a national panel survey) at whether Democrats and Republicans who had just been socially excluded would be more resistant to a political fact check message. The Democrat-targeted message was about Russian tampering with vote counts; the Republican-targeted message was about vote fraud. After exclusion, weaker partisans were just as inaccurate as strong partisans. This both shows that a need to affiliate can drive belief polarization and that even every day social exclusion can have important impacts in a world where news is increasingly consumed on social media.
Lots of good questions at the end of both talks!