Across the millennia, human groups have evolved specific cultural and psychological adaptations to cope with collective threats, from terrorism to natural disasters to pathogens. In particular, cultural tightness, characterized by strict social norms and punishments, as one key adaptation that helps groups coordinate to survive collective threats. However, interferences with threat signals that facilitate tightening can lead to cultural mismatches—either too much or not enough tightening. Michele Gelfand discusses two examples of cultural mismatches: the COVID-19 pandemic (a case in which collective threat is real, but there is a resistance to tightening) and the rise of populist movements (a case in which exaggerated threat leads to unnecessary tightening), and highlight theoretical and practical implications of cultural mismatch theory. Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor of Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business School and Professor of Psychology by Courtesy. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences. Her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World was published by Scribner in 2018. She is the Past President of the International Association for Conflict Management. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

People are enculturated actors, shaped by their sociocultural and socioecological contexts. A vast empirical literature has documented that, in Global North contexts that afford greater choice and material abundance, selves are more independent–prioritizing personal interests and autonomy in their preferences and behavior. However, the social psychological literature suffers from glaring gaps in low resource Global South contexts where selves are likely higher in interdependence–prioritizing relationships, roles and obligations in their preferences and behavior (Thomas & Markus, 2023). An agenda on ‘culturally wise’ interventions seeks to fill this gap by experimentally comparing different culturally grounded approaches across diverse sociocultural contexts. Building on theoretical principles of wise interventions (Walton & Wilson, 2018) and culture match (Stephens et al., 2012), culturally wise interventions are attuned to how culturally specific models of self, motivation, and relationality can exert powerful effects on meaning making and behavior. Through experimental evaluations of such intervention approaches in understudied contexts, this research agenda seeks to advance a more comprehensive account of human behavior as well as strategies for promoting psychosocial and economic well-being around the globe. This talk will focus on how culturally wise approaches in sub-Saharan Africa can be leveraged to mitigate poverty and inequality.

As individuals and political leaders increasingly take to online networks for social interactions, it is important to understand how the platforms that host them can shape social knowledge of morality and politics. In this work, I propose that features of social media environments including dysfunctional human-algorithm interactions may be conducive to misperceptions of moral emotions at the individual and group level with consequences for intergroup conflict. Utilizing a Twitter field survey, I measured authors’ outrage in real time and compared author reports to judgments made by observers. I find that social media users tend to overperceive moral outrage expression at the individual-level, inferring more intense outrage experiences from messages than the authors of those messages themselves actually report. Individual-level overperceptions were also associated with greater social media use to learn about politics. Follow-up experiments find that these individual misperceptions cause misperceptions of collective outrage, which also amplifies perceptions of hostile communication norms, group affective polarization and ideological extremity. Together, these results highlight how individual-level misperceptions of online emotions produce collective misperceptions that have the potential to exacerbate intergroup conflict. I end considerations for content moderation on digital social platforms.

In studies of partisan political polarization, it is common to mis-specify the relationships among partisanship, issue-positions, and candidate evaluations. Partisanship is a complex phenomenon that requires attention to various factors that affect mass public opinion about political leaders. This research carefully specifies a theory and empirical model of partisanship that can account for dynamics in the reputations of political parties, the potential changes in policy preferences of people, and in people’s evaluations of politicians. The empirical results show that central to understanding partisanship dynamics are movements of parties in ideological space as perceived by the mass public. Thus, partisanship change is more of an elite-driven process than a bottom-up driven process.  The findings have important implications for understanding contemporary polarization of American politics. This is joint research with John E. Jackson.

Whether people adopt conclusions and misinformation that support their political preferences is often thought to be a product of intellectual ability. However, studies suggest that cognitive ability has little to do with whether people endorse politically-friendly falsehoods. I discuss research suggesting that emotional dynamics are very much relevant to false beliefs, such as conspiracy theories, that people adopt in favor of their political leanings. It also underlies motivated reasoning in support of those beliefs.  David Dunning (BA, Michigan State; PhD, Stanford) is a social psychologist focusing primarily on the psychology underlying human misbelief.  His most cited work shows that people hold flattering self-opinions that cannot be justified from objective evidence, work supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation. He has served as president of both the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the Society for the Science of Motivation. 

In a time of affective polarization and partisan division, how can Americans be encouraged to cooperate with the opposing side? I consider how emotional reactions to politics motivate people to consider compromise. While negative emotions like anger can lead people to rally in support of their partisan side, I argue that another negative emotion – embarrassment – can instead encourage people to think about politics in more principled ways. In recent years, many Americans have said that politics makes them feel embarrassed. I show that these feelings of embarrassment can be a civic good, encouraging people to move past their partisan commitments. As a reaction to a sense of violated social norms, embarrassment affects how people think politics should be practiced. I draw on both experimental and survey evidence to demonstrate that when people feel embarrassed, they are more likely to defend the democratic norm of compromise. Dr. Jennifer Wolak is a professor of political science at Michigan State University. She studies how Americans understand politics and what motivates their political behavior. Much of her work focuses on political psychology, including the effects of emotions on political decision-making and the effects of personality and socialization on the development of political attitudes. She is the author of Compromise in an Age of Party Polarization, published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

Stories of polarization in the media have often focused on anecdotes about people who have stopped speaking with friends and family due to political differences -- e.g. “unfriended” others due to politics. The possibility that politics has shifted long-term individual relationships has broad social implications. Therefore, we analyze why and when people are most likely to “unfriend.” We argue that political disagreement is often the final step in a general breakdown of a relationship. In other words, when political disagreements occur, people are more likely to “unfriend” those whom they found unpleasant prior to the disagreement. Our results come from four national experiments. The first tracks the relative frequency of “unfriending” over political disagreement versus other types of interactions. The second considers whether it is political disagreement specifically that leads to “unfriending.” The final two studies combine these ideas, tracking the conditions that are most likely to produce “unfriending" in different contexts of political extremity and polarization. Yanna Krupnikov is Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on political communication, in particular attention to news, political expression and social interactions. 

Political polarization characterized by increasing dislike, even hatred, of opponent party members has risen to a fever pitch in contemporary American society. However, a surprising degree of common ground may be obscured by an illusory conviction that most opponents hold extreme and noxious views. I describe my lab’s research considering how the contemporary media and social media ecosystem selects for and amplifies the most extreme and threatening exemplars of opponents, fueling partisans’ caricatured views of the other side and producing a false polarization that outstrips real divisions. We consider the downstream consequences of these misperceptions, including animosity, refusal to engage with opponents, hesitation to voice ingroup dissent, and acceptance of anti-democratic tactics. We also examine ways to mitigate these effects and disrupt the cycle of polarization. Beginning with the insight that extreme voices tend to be disproportionately active, visible, and shared on social media (contributing to overestimations of the prevalence of noxious views), we examine whether exposure to ingroup dissenters who challenge their co-partisans’ extreme views online can mitigate these effects. We find that exposure to a single extreme tweet substantially increased opponents’ prevalence overestimates (assumptions that the fringe view is widespread). Next, we examined whether exposure to one or several moderate, dissenting tweets attenuated misperceptions and mitigated the cycle of hostility they provoke. Anne E. Wilson is a professor in the Psychology Department at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is an expert on individual and collective identity over time, with a recent focus on intergroup processes underlying political polarization. She received her PhD in social psychology from the University of Waterloo in 2000, is a former Canada Research Chair in Social Psychology, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Successful Societies program.

Shanto Iyengar is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Iyengar’s areas of interest include the role of mass media in democratic societies, public opinion, and political psychology. Iyengar’s research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Hewlett Foundation. Iyengar is Co-Principal Investigator of the American National Election Studies, and Co-Director of the Polarization Research Laboratory. Iyengar is author or co-author of several books, including News That Matters (University of Chicago Press, 1987), Is Anyone Responsible? (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Explorations in Political Psychology (Duke University Press, 1995), Going Negative (Free Press, 1995), and Media Politics: A Citizen’s Guide (Norton, 2022).

According to legend, Ben Franklin informed a Philadelphia lady in 1787 that the Constitutional Convention had created a republic rather than a monarchy—“if you can keep it.” But what can individual citizens do to “keep” a republic? In his Farewell Address nine years later, George Washington offered a potential answer: resist extreme partisanship. This presentation considers whether partisanship in America today poses a threat to the Republic. Ideological and policy disagreement among American partisans is modest, but feelings toward opposing partisans is curdling from dislike into hatred. A major foundation for this hatred is a distorted perception of opposing partisans, which means that we may be fighting phantoms rather than adversaries. There are many ways to mitigate the most corrosive elements of our politics, but they will be difficult to implement insofar as we—the individuals who make up America’s body politic—prize partisan victory over democratic norms.

Many scholars doubt that televised partisan media's audience is large enough, persuadable enough, or sufficiently isolated from cross-cutting sources for partisan media to meaningfully influence public opinion. However, limitations of survey measures of media consumption have left such doubts difficult to assess. We report findings from four novel data sources which each link behavioral measures of television consumption to political administrative and survey data. First, approximately 1 in 7 Americans consume over 8 hours/month of partisan television, outnumbering the US Black population. Second, consistent with selective exposure, about two-thirds of partisan media viewers are aligned partisans; however, partisan media viewers have fairly similar attitudes to partisans generally, suggesting partisan media's audience is not likely to be less persuadable than partisans generally. Finally, few partisan media consumers consume cross-cutting television channels, consistent with partisan echo chambers. Concerns about partisan media's potential to further polarize Americans cannot be easily dismissed. Joshua Kalla is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University with a secondary appointment in Statistics and Data Science. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. His research studies political persuasion, prejudice reduction, and decision-making among voters and political elites, primarily through the use of randomized field experiments.

A popular explanation for rising partisan animosity and declining faith in democracy in the United States is that Republicans and Democrats misperceive each other to hold extreme policy attitudes. Yet, perceptions of group attitudes vary along other dimensions, and these perceptions are likely as important to democracy. In particular, Americans may underestimate the diversity of Democrats' and Republicans' attitudes to harmful effect. This paper uses surveys and pre-registered experiments with representative and convenience samples (N = 6,158) to assess the extent to which Americans misperceive that each party holds ``all the same'' attitudes and, furthermore, the consequences of these perceptions. Contrary to existing research, we find that American partisans do not consistently overestimate how radical the ``average'' Republican or Democrat is. However, Republicans and Democrats do vastly underestimate the diversity of each party's attitudes. Correcting these misperceptions of within-party attitude diversity reduces partisan animosity and the perceived threat posed by the opposing party.