Partisan contact-phobia: Prevalence, antecedents, consequences, and motives for avoiding direct and indirect contact with the political outgroup.

Political polarization is a viable threat to democratic institutions, and can reveal itself in behaviors such as selective information seeking or expressions of outrage or ridicule towards one’s political outgroup.

This project will focus on a relatively unresearched type of polarizing behavior — the tendency to avoid contact with people or objects that are linked to outgroup partisanship (outgroup distancing) or to approach contact with entities linked to ingroup partisanship (ingroup converging).

Partisanship is a strong social identity, and people avoid contact not only with partisans from their least-liked party (direct distancing), but paradoxically also with non-political ideas or products that are perceived as “contaminated” by their political outgroup (indirect distancing).

This 4-year project with an experimental approach, led by three young researchers with complementing expertise, aim to elucidate direct and indirect distancing and converging from three perspectives:(1) Situational and individual-level antecedents (when and how do different individuals engage in these behaviors?)(2) Consequences (how do different individuals react when observing others engage in these behaviors?)(3) Motives (which psychological mechanisms underlie these behaviors?)Importantly, engaging in or observing distancing behavior will be compared both against other types of hostile behaviors (e.g. insults) and against friendly outgroup behaviors (e.g. common-ground seeking).