How personal commonalities foster closeness of political views

We naturally feel close to people who are similar to us, who share our interests or partake in related activities. This natural feeling of closeness can be funneled to reduce political differences and increase consensus on political topics. That is a discovery made by an international team of researchers.

Their findings are important not just in the field of politics but in business as well.

In an online study, scientists investigated the circumstances under which people change their own attitude towards a certain topic. According to the study, having points in common helps people to move towards one another, even in the case of extremely divisive political issues and despite strong personal convictions.

What the researchers say: “Scholars have long assumed that the informal, respectful exchange between individuals with differing political views contributes to strengthening trust in democracy and avoiding societal division. That is particularly true regarding discussions between people who are friends and come from a similar social background. Conversely, when people are suddenly confronted with the political view of strangers, as particularly happens in the social media, the resultant discussions often take a negative turn,” explained the lead author of the study.

The team explored the question of whether individuals change their attitude towards polarizing political issues on the basis of personal commonalities, even if they are not acquainted.

The researchers drafted an online experiment on the focus topic of inequality and redistribution of wealth. The first phase began with asking the participants about their personal characteristics, their political leanings and the topic of the experiment. They then composed a short, argumentative essay in order to persuade “a friend” to assimilate their attitude regarding inequality and redistribution.

A second phase was carried out around six months later with a new group of participants. With the aid of an algorithm, they were allocated to a partner from the first cohort of the experiment based on incidental similarities like age, gender, interests or characteristics, as well as their attitude to the focus topic. They received a computer-generated social media profile of their partner, showing what they had in common, and then read their essay.

In the last stage, the researchers again asked the two partners about their view of the focus topic and how close they felt towards one another.

“Surprisingly, both participants with strong convictions and those with mild convictions changed their opinion about the focus topic in the direction of the opinion of their partner – independently of their political leanings. This led to a decline in polarization and, overall, an increase in support for redistributive policies,” the researchers said. If the two partners felt close based on shared personal features, the probability of assimilating the opinions of their partner rose by 86 percent. In the long term, the researchers want to discover whether this mechanism based on random similarities can also be used to design social media platforms to counteract hate and disinformation and to foster a respectful exchange of opinion and subsequent consensus-building.

So, what? I don’t want to say, “I told you so,” but I did tell you so. Alicia and I have long maintained that in order to have a functioning team, united organization or an integrated and diverse workforce the first thing that must happen is that people have to establish the things they share in common with each other.

The more people have in common, the more they will trust each other and the more they trust each other, the more they will be committed to the relationship. Once that commitment has been established—and it can happen quite quickly—they will merge their views so that the relationship will not be damaged.

Commonalities are discovered when people socialize, when they indulge in “trivial” conversation. This gossip makes up some 70% of all human dialogue and is the most important part of it. From this, culture arises and from a shared culture comes collaboration and, to the human mind, safety. It’s all part of our neurogenetic design specs.

For more on commonality click here.