Acknowledging Other People’s Perspectives Encourages their Empathy: Testing the Relational-Interactionist View on Affective Polarization

A number of studies on partisan polarization illustrated that prompting people to consider other people’s perspectives reduced participants’ dislike and distrust toward the other people (affective polarization). However, some other studies demonstrated the opposite effect. Reviewing the literature, we argued that perspective-taking can entail a threat to people’s own values, needs, and identity, so people may be prompted to solidify their perspectives and feel more, not less, polarized in response to perspective-taking tasks. Therefore, along with the effect of perspective-taking it is necessary to consider a complementary effect of perspective-taking from the opponent’s party. We hypothesized that individuals would feel less threatened and therefore less polarized towards their opponents when the opponents acknowledge the individuals’ perspectives. In a survey experiment with 3728 participants focused on the polarized views on supporting Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic, we found a support for the complementary perspective-taking effect. Furthermore, we found that the effect was more pronounced in participants who scored higher on the subscales of dispositional empathic concern and perspective-taking. In other words, these participants were more responsive to acknowledging their perspectives and were less polarized towards their opponents. Discussing these results, we argued for a relational-interactionist account of affective polarization.