Seeing Opposites: How Partisan Counter-Projection Fuels False Polarization

Americans tend to overestimate the ideological extremity of Democrats' and Republicans' attitudes, exacerbating cross-partisan antipathy and undermining democratic norms. Combating such "false polarization" requires an understanding of the inferential processes underlying partisan perceptions. To this end, the present work leverages four nationally-representative datasets to illuminate sources of error in cross-party judgment. We first examine the role of partisanship itself in distorting perceptions of political outgroups, finding that outparty judgments are less accurate than inparty judgments and that partisans err more than independents when judging what outpartisans believe. Then, using West and Kenny’s (2011) Truth and Bias (T&B) model, we trace partisans' outparty judgments to their underlying inferential processes. Our results suggest that inaccuracy in outparty judgment is driven largely by processes of counter-projection—in which perceivers ascribe the opposite of their own beliefs, and of the beliefs they attribute to the inparty, to their partisan opponents. Finally, we link counter-projection processes to intergroup affect, revealing that self-based counter-projection is associated with dislike for the outparty whereas inparty-based counter-projection is associated with affinity for the inparty. To close, we discuss how our findings illuminate the causes of false polarization and inform strategies to reduce it.