Group identity and opinion formation: With applications to political polarization
Identifying the determinants of political polarisation is a pressing issue across the social sciences.
Using an online experiment with nationally-representative participants, deployed the week prior to the 2020 US presidential election, we explore how partisan group identity impacts the process of political opinion formation.
Assessing group identity through ingroup favouritism in monetary allocations, we incentivise subjects to predict policy-sensitive statistics one year post-election, conditional on which candidate becomes president.
Our results show that people who exhibit ingroup favouritism show a stronger partisan gap in initial predictions, spend more resources to avoid articles from politically-opposing sources, and increase their partisan gap more strongly after reading relevant news articles. Exogenously reducing the salience of group identity decreases partisan bias in information avoidance, especially for ingroup-favouring individuals.
We explore the underlying mechanisms in a second wave of the experiment.
Keynote speaker
Yan Chen, University of Michigan
Yan Chen is the Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor in the School of Information at University of Michigan, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Economics at Tsinghua University.
Her research interests are in behavioural and experimental economics, market and mechanism design. She is a former president of the Economic Science Association, an international organization of experimental economists.
Chen has published in leading economics and management journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Theory, and Management Science, and general interest journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She serves as a Department Editor of Management Science.
Organised by
Department of Economics, Monash Business School
BET (Behavioural, Experimental, Theoretical) Research Group, Monash Business School
Monash Laboratory of Experimental Economics (MonLEE), Monash Business School
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Event Details
- Date:
- 26 August 2022 at 12:15 pm – 2:00 pm
- Venue:
- Online - Zoom
- Categories:
- Economics; General
Description
Identifying the determinants of political polarisation is a pressing issue across the social sciences.
Using an online experiment with nationally-representative participants, deployed the week prior to the 2020 US presidential election, we explore how partisan group identity impacts the process of political opinion formation.
Assessing group identity through ingroup favouritism in monetary allocations, we incentivise subjects to predict policy-sensitive statistics one year post-election, conditional on which candidate becomes president.
Our results show that people who exhibit ingroup favouritism show a stronger partisan gap in initial predictions, spend more resources to avoid articles from politically-opposing sources, and increase their partisan gap more strongly after reading relevant news articles. Exogenously reducing the salience of group identity decreases partisan bias in information avoidance, especially for ingroup-favouring individuals.
We explore the underlying mechanisms in a second wave of the experiment.
Keynote speaker
Yan Chen, University of Michigan
Yan Chen is the Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor in the School of Information at University of Michigan, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Economics at Tsinghua University.
Her research interests are in behavioural and experimental economics, market and mechanism design. She is a former president of the Economic Science Association, an international organization of experimental economists.
Chen has published in leading economics and management journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Theory, and Management Science, and general interest journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She serves as a Department Editor of Management Science.