Be my friend: Will levels of political persuasion and affirmation affect openness to intergroup socialisation?

I recently completed my BA in psychology at London Metropolitan University and after graduation I'm intending to pursue an MSc degree in Social Research Methods at London School of Economics and Political Science. My primary areas of interest lie in social and political psychology, with a particular focus on intergroup dynamics and the spread of misinformation, which led me to choosing my undergraduate project in psychology.

Mindful of the divisions on Twitter and other social media between political sides in the UK, I carried out a study investigating openness to socialisation between left- and right-wing leaning individuals. I am interested in techniques that might minimise the divide between them, as well as the factors that might contribute to such division.

 In particular, I wondered whether levels of political persuasion and affirming either an aspect of our self or our group membership would affect how open we are as individuals to socialising with an out-group. So, for example, would a person who is right-wing be more open (or closed) to socialising with a left-wing individual after reflecting on a value important to them or their political ingroup? And would the effects of this also be influenced by how likely this person is to get others to join their political ingroup?

Self-affirmation Theory

In searching the literature I came across Self-affirmation Theory (Steele, 1988) which proposes that individuals who affirm an aspect of themselves maintain their self-integrity and self-worth even when under threat. I became interested in the idea of utilising this theory in hopes of minimising the effects of political polarisation.

Reading around the topic brought me to the technique of group-affirmation, which was supposed to have similar effects as self-affirmation in some instances (Villicana et al., 2018) and even more polarising in others (Ehrlich & Gramzow, 2015). Social identity salience appeared to be the aspect that resulted in further polarisation. People who were more partisan – and therefore connected to their political ingroup – were consequently more biased after group-affirming than those who were not as highly partisan. Ehrlich and Gramzow (2015) argued that this happens because of an increase in identity salience after partaking in group-affirmation.

More partisan individuals are also more likely to try to persuade others into following their group, which may indicate higher identity salience (West & Iyengar, 2022). I thus wondered if there could be another novel characteristic providing further insights into mechanisms behind the use of self-and group-affirmation.

Study design

Therefore, I developed a study where individuals first determined the strength of their political persuasion by completing an online Political Persuasion Scale (Ahmad, 2020). A median split determined whether the score was high or low. After this, the participants were randomly assigned across three groups.

 In Groups 1 and 2, the participants were presented with a set of different values such as 'family', 'concern for others', 'money' etc. They were then asked to either reflect on why one of these values is important to them, which was the task of self-affirmation (Group 1), or important to their political ingroup – left or right-wing individuals – which was the group-affirmation (Group 2).

In Group 3, which was the control group, participants took part in an arbitrary task of listing what they had for lunch in the past 5 days. This was chosen to avoid the chance of the participants unintentionally reflecting on a value and thus taking part in affirmation.

After this, all participants viewed false social media profiles, specially constructed for this study, that displayed fictional individuals offering different political opinions. The participants were asked to determine how open would they be to socialising with the individuals featured. Even though the results were statistically non-significant, which I felt was most likely due to a small sample size, these still provided some interesting insights for future research to explore.

Findings

The participants who affirmed an aspect of themselves were indeed more open to socialising with their outgroup than the control group who had completed the arbitrary task, which was also the case where participants scored low in political persuasion.

However, the results from group-affirmation (Group 2) were intriguing. Left-wing participants who scored high in political persuasion showed less openness to socialisation with their outgroup than the control group after affirming an aspect of their group-identity.

However, right-wing participants who scored high in political persuasion and affirmed their group were the most open to socialisation out of all the groups.

Of course, I realise that non-significant results limit how far one can take these findings, but I believe this could provide interesting potential for understanding intergroup polarisation and might indicate useful techniques to minimise the division. I feel the importance of understanding those who hold different opinions and beliefs will be integral to our success as a society in years to come, especially where divisions risk becoming deeper.

References

Ahmad, S. (2020). 'Political behavior in virtual environment: Role of social media intensity, internet connectivity, and political affiliation in online political persuasion among university students'. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 30(4), 457–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2019.1698485

Ehrlich, G. A., & Gramzow, R. H. (2015). 'The Politics of Affirmation Theory: When Group-Affirmation Leads to Greater Ingroup Bias'. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(8), 1110–1122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167215590986

Steele, C. M. (1988). 'The Psychology of Self-Affirmation: Sustaining the Integrity of the Self'. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 21, pp. 261–302). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60229-4

Villicana, A. J., Rivera, L. M., & Garcia, D. M. (2018). 'When one's group is beneficial: The effect of group-affirmation and subjective group identification on prejudice'. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 21(6), 962–976. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430217690907

West, E. A., & Iyengar, S. (2022). 'Partisanship as a Social Identity: Implications for Polarization'. Political Behavior, 44(2), 807–838. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09637-y

This article is from the Summer 2023 issue of the Political Psychology Section Bulletin.