João Areal

In sum, our findings highlight that even if (dis)affect may be hard to change, stereotypes can change how people *reason* about the political other. Emphasising the diversity of political opponents can go some way towards countering conflicts that are based on imagined or exaggerated differences.

We also speculate that, in a multiparty system, stereotypes about opponents can be a source of similarities rather than differences. Though tentative, we do find some evidence that emphasising the political ideas of ideologically proximate political camps *can* improve feelings towards out-voters.

Priming respondents to consider the social make-up of their political opponents consistently altered how people *reason* about out-voters: group primes decrease feelings of homogenisation (“they are all the same)” and increased cross-cutting perceptions (“out-voters and I are alike in some ways”)

We found no evidence that different stereotype domains polarise more than others. Priming respondents to think of the political “other” in terms of the sort of person they are (traits), their ideas (issues) or social-make up (groups) did not change how people *feel* about out-voters. However….

We asked 1,693 Dutch respondents to describe voters of their least-liked-party (out-voters) through an open-ended question, emphasising one of those three stereotype domains. We then measured affect towards out-voters, as well as cognitive mechanisms linking stereotypes to affect

New working paper with @eelcoharteveld.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/so...

Does thinking of political opponents in terms of their ideas, personality traits or social make-up change how we feel and reason about them? We explore this question through a pre-registered experiment in the Netherlands 👇

🚨 New working paper

(highly recommend reading open-ended answers about politics btw. A good reality check if nothing else)