Replication Data for: Outgroup Avoidance

Encouraging engagement with outgroup perspectives is a popular strategy to improve intergroup relations. But in deeply divided societies, individuals often actively avoid outgroup members. In a Facebook field experiment, we embedded Palestinian posts in Jewish Israelis’ Facebook timelines for a period of 14 days. We find no effect on attitudes toward the outgroup and a modest decrease in subsequent consumption of outgroup content, a pattern we attribute to participants’ avoidance of constructive engagement. To better understand this avoidance, we conducted a set of survey-embedded behavioral tasks. Results suggest that outgroup avoidance online is widespread, associated with outgroup prejudice, explained by feelings of discomfort, anger, mistrust in outgroups, and pessimism, and challenging to overcome. Our findings indicate that avoidance is a barrier to constructive intergroup engagement in naturalistic settings, rendering many interventions that may be effective in controlled environments difficult to implement or scale in practice.