Replication Materials: Reflective political reasoning: political disagreement and empathy

As political polarization increases across many of the world's established democracies, many citizens are unwilling to appreciate and consider the viewpoints of those who disagree with them. Previous research shows that this lack of reflection can undermine democratic accountability. The purpose of this paper is to study whether empathy for the other can motivate people to reason reflectively about politics. Extant studies have largely studied trait-level differences in the ability and inclination of individuals to engage in reflection. Most of these studies focus on observational moderators, which makes it difficult to make strong claims about the effects of being in a reflective state on political decision making. We extend this research by using a survey experiment with a large and heterogeneous sample of UK citizens (N = 2014) to investigate whether a simple empathy intervention can induce people to consider opposing viewpoints and incorporate those views in their opinion about a pressing political issue. We find that actively imagining the feelings and thoughts of someone one disagrees with prompts more reflection in the way that people reason about political issues as well as elicits empathic feelings of concern toward those with opposing viewpoints. We further examine whether empathy facilitates openness to attitude change in the counter-attitudinal direction and find that exposure to an opposing perspective (without its empathy component) per se is enough to prompt attitude change. Our study paints a more nuanced picture of the relationship between empathy, reflection and policy attitudes.

在全球诸多成熟民主国家中，政治极化（political polarization）态势愈演愈烈，多数公民不愿接纳并审慎考量与自身立场相悖的观点。既有研究表明，这种缺乏反思的现象会削弱民主问责制（democratic accountability）。本文旨在探究对对立立场者的共情能否促使人们对政治议题展开审慎反思。现有相关研究大多聚焦于个体参与反思的能力与倾向层面的特质差异，且多数研究关注观察性调节变量（observational moderators），这使得我们难以确凿论证处于反思状态对政治决策的影响。我们通过一项针对英国公民、样本量N=2014的大样本异质性调查实验（survey experiment）拓展了该领域的研究，以探究简单的共情干预（empathy intervention）是否能促使人们审视对立观点，并将这些观点纳入对某一紧迫政治议题的态度考量之中。研究结果显示，主动想象与自身持对立立场者的情感与想法，不仅能激发人们在思考政治议题时更为审慎的反思，还能唤起对持对立观点群体的共情式关切。我们进一步检验了共情是否会推动人们在与自身态度相悖的方向（counter-attitudinal direction）上开放态度改变，结果发现，仅接触对立立场的观点（不含共情干预环节）本身就足以引发态度改变。本研究为共情、反思与政策态度之间的关联提供了更为精细的阐释。