Designing Social Media to Promote Productive Political Dialogue on a New Research Platform

Social media are frequently blamed for exacerbating ideological divides. We evaluate whetherit is possible to design a social media platform that instead promotes productive, open-mindeddialogue among users. We recruited 1,043 Americans who expressed willingness to test a newsocial media platform by installing a mobile app we developed for iOS and Android devices.Participants were randomly assigned to spend ten minutes on one of two versions of a simulatedsocial media platform. The first was a control condition designed to resemble typical text-basedsocial media sites, and users were told that people whose posts are liked very often receivea “popular user” badge. The second version was identical to the first, but respondents wereinstead told users receive an “open-minded” badge if they respectfully engage with opposingviewpoints. Participants using both versions were asked to join an ongoing discussion abouteither gun control or immigration. Unbeknownst to them, each participant only interactedwith chatbots powered by generative AI. We find that respondents assigned to the experimentalcondition exhibited more intellectually humble language in their posts and comments andreported experiencing more positive emotions. We do not find significant treatment effects onparticipants’ self-reported intellectual humility, affective polarization, or issue attitudes. Theseresults have important implications for future research on social media and social psychology andintroduce new methods for conducting randomized controlled trials using generative artificialintelligence.