Political Anonymity May Help Us See Both Sides of a Divisive Issue Online

CLICK HERE - STUDY - PNAS - Social learning and partisan bias in the interpretation of climate trends

techcrunch.com - by Devin Coldewey - September 3, 2018

Some topics are so politically charged that even to attempt a discussion online is to invite toxicity and rigid disagreement among participants. But a new study finds that exposure to the views of others, minus their political affiliation, could help us overcome our own biases.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, led by sociologist Damon Centola, examined how people’s interpretations of some commonly misunderstood climate change data changed after seeing those of people in opposing political parties.

The theory is that by exposing people to information sans partisan affiliation, we might be able to break the “motivated reasoning” that leads us to interpret data in a preconceived way.

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