Note: This segment is a rebroadcast from September 5, 2018.
A team of researchers led by Duke University sociologist Christopher Bail ran an experiment to expose a group of Twitter users to political views that were in opposition to their own. The study was aimed at gauging whether stepping out of a social media silo and reading about political perspectives from a broader ideological spectrum helped shift people’s own political leanings.
The results found that Democrats who were exposed to Republican content tended to veer further left (though not by a statistically significant degree) and Republicans who were exposed to Democratic content veered further right. Host Frank Stasio speaks with Bail about the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
