Interacting as Equals: How Contact Can Promote Tolerance Among Opposing Partisans

Abstract

In many contemporary democracies, political polarization increasingly involves deep-seated intolerance of opposing partisans. The decades-old contact hypothesis suggests that cross-partisan interactions might reduce intolerance if individuals interact with equal social status. We test this idea by implementing collaborative contact between more than one thousand pairs of citizens with opposing partisan sympathies, using the online medium to credibly randomize participants’ relative social status within the interaction. Interacting under both equal and unequal status enhanced tolerant behavior immediately after contact; however, three weeks later, only the salutary effects of equal contact endured. These results demonstrate that a simple, scalable intervention that puts people on equal footing can reduce partisan intolerance and make online contact into a prosocial force.

Keywords: affective polarization, equal status, prejudice reduction, intergroup contact, contact hypothesis

JEL Classification: C93, D83, J15, O54, Z13, Z18