Political polarization and trust

FREIDIN, E.; MORO, R.; DEL BIANCO, F.

Washington

Workshop; Trust Measures and Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean; 2019

Banco Inter-Americano de Desarrollo

There is growinginterest in the effects of social sorting based on political preferences oncitizens´ relationships and interactions (e.g., Iyengar & Westwood, 2015;Mason, 2016, 2018a). More specifically, political sorting has been shown toactivate our coalitional psychology and thus elicit a set of cognitions,affections, and behaviors typical of group rivalry and competition(Pietraszewski, Curry, Petersen, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2015). These divisivedispositions are particularly provoked when political elites and partisan mediapublicly refer to and treat rival groups with disrespect and contempt,increasing the public´s affective polarization,namely dislike and intolerance towards those from rival political groups(Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012). Such polarization has been shown to entailsocietal costs, and we here want to explore its effect on the display of trustbetween common citizens as measured using Trust Games (TGs) in the lab. Inaddition, we propose to test whether a normative message reduces the negativeexternalities of political polarization with the goal of deriving public policyrecommendations. With these goalsin mind, we plan to do a laboratory experiment at the Instituto deInvestigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur (IIESS), UNS-CONICET, BahíaBlanca, Argentina, with local university students from a wide range ofdisciplines recruited from different institutions in the city. Importantly,previous sampling of this population before the 2015 presidential election didnot show bias in political preferences in relation to the actual outcome of theelection (Freidin, Senci, Ryan, & Carballo, 2016). The proposedexperiment will have a 2x2 (polarization x normative appeal) between-subjectdesign in which a third factor with 3 levels (information about partner´spolitical preference) will be varied within-subjects. In all conditions, beforeplaying in the TGs, participants will read two contrasting political opinions(one about the 2011-2015 Cristina Fernández´s government, and the other aboutthe 2015-2019 Mauricio Macri´s government). The first factorof the experimental design is about affective polarization and entails varyingthe wording of the political opinions texts to have polarizing andnon-polarizing conditions. Conditions will differ on whether the purportedopinions include demeaning language or not. Uncivil political discourse hasbeen shown to trigger anger in those with opposing views. According to theliterature, anger, in turn, is a key emotion associated with increased affectivepolarization (Mason, 2018a). Participants will have to rate their experiencedemotions after reading each political opinion in the experiment to assess themediating role of emotions in the effect of polarization on trust. The second factorinvolves the presence of a prescriptive normative message which appeals to overcomingpolitical antagonisms to develop fruitful collaborative relationships relativeto a normative message unrelated to politics or cooperation. This factor willbe implemented after the political opinions and before the participants makedecisions in two TGs. These prescriptive and control conditions test for whatcould result in a public policy recommendation to reduce the externalities ofpolitical in-group favoritism and its more fervent version represented in theaffective polarization treatments. The third factor involvesvarying whether the participant´s partner in the game shares his/her politicalpreferences, and will be varied within-subjects. Relying on the strategy method(Selten, 1968), participants will make decisions in two TGs (explained next) asif they have been matched with a supporter of Macri´s government, a supporterof Cristina´s government, or have no political information about their partner. All participantsin all experimental conditions will make decisions in two different TGs. One isthe regular TG, which we here call TG Reciprocity (TG-R), in which trust isexpected to be a function of beliefs about the partner´s reciprocityintentions. The other game is called a TG Competence (TG-C), where theentrustee´s performance in a simple test of cognitive ability (the CognitiveReflection test; Frederick, 2005) determines the efficiency factor whichmultiplies the money sent by the entrustor. The resulting amount isautomatically divided between both partners, so their interests are aligned.Therefore, trust in the TG-C should depend on beliefs about the partner´scompetence in the task. Intentions and competence has been posed as twofundamental dimensions of social cognition (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007).Thus, these two games will allow testing whether political rivalry andpolarization affect expectations in one, the other, or both dimensions.The main expectedeffect for trust should be an interaction between affective polarization andown-other political preference: the in-group/out-group trust differentialshould be larger in the polarizing than in the non-polarizing condition. The noinfo control condition will allow assessing the relative magnitude of thein-group and out-group effects. In terms of the effect of the normativetreatments, we expect to find an overall increasing effect on trust. However,we do not know whether prescriptive norms and polarization treatments mightinteract (e.g., whether the normative effect would be lower in the polarizingcondition). In addition, it will be interesting to explore how participantswithout strong political preferences react to the polarization induction. Thismay determine whether the net effect of polarization is negative.