Conversations about politically contentious issues often break down due to a lack of shared understanding, with language playing a central role in this failure—particularly in discussions of abortion, one of the most polarizing topics in U.S. public life. Mutual understanding requires that speakers achieve high latent semantic similarity (LSS) by using words in similar ways. While extraversion has been linked to higher LSS, likely due to its association with social engagement and attentional focus, semantic alignment also depends on speakers’ capacity for empathic attunement, suggesting that empathy may serve as a key mechanism linking extraversion to LSS. This study examined whether empathy mediates the relationship between extraversion and LSS in computer-mediated conversations between unacquainted dyads ( N = 170) discussing the politically contentious topic of abortion. Results showed that empathy fully mediated this relationship, indicating that empathic attunement—not sociability alone—drives LSS. Findings inform communication theories by underscoring empathy's central role in fostering common ground understanding and highlight LSS as an observable linguistic marker of empathic engagement.
Ta-Johnson et al. (Tue,) studied this question.