| Popis: |
Affective polarization and political segregation have become a serious threat to democratic societies. One standard explanation for these phenomena is that people like and prefer interacting with similar others. However, similarity may not be the only driver of interpersonal liking in the political domain and other factors, yet to be uncovered, could play an important role. Here, we hypothesized that beyond the effect of similarity, people show greater preference for individuals with politically coherent and confident opinions. To test this idea, we performed two unprecedentedly large-scale behavioral studies consisting in one-shot face-to-face pairwise interactions. We found that that people with uncertain or ambivalent views were non-reciprocally attracted to confident and coherent individuals. A multivariate analysis showed that these two effects were equal or larger than the influence of political similarity. Overall, these findings shed light on the key drivers of the affability or hostility between people who discuss about politics. |
