research

In conversations and on social media, citizens frequently censor their true political beliefs to avoid social backlash, not only from members of the opposing party but also from friends and co-partisans. We argue that self-censorship in disparate social contexts stems from a common source: exaggerated fears about the severity of social repercussions for honest political discussion. Using a nationwide survey experiment during the 2024 U.S. presidential election (N=17,691), we find that partisans overestimate the likelihood of social sanctions for expressing their views. Experimentally reducing these exaggerated fears significantly reduces aversion to expressing one’s views across diverse social contexts, including inter- and intra-party environments. We use these results to evaluate prominent theories of political conversation, clarifying how asymmetries in partisan factions’ aversion to debate can arise even if social pressure is ubiquitous. These results shed light on interpersonal speech and persuasion in an era of intensified partisan and factional conflict.

A persistent puzzle in the study of public opinion is why political information often produces minimal attitude change despite reliably influencing beliefs. We argue that this duality reflects belief relevance—the extent to which specific beliefs bear on attitudes. Using conversations with large language models (LLMs), we elicit deeply held issue attitudes and the “focal beliefs” people use to justify those attitudes. We then randomly assign participants to receive an LLM-generated counterargument targeting either their focal belief, an issue-relevant but unmentioned belief (“distal belief”), or a placebo. In experiments with two large online convenience samples, counterarguments targeting the aforementioned beliefs successfully decrease belief strength, with effects persisting after 10 days. More importantly, focal belief counterarguments produce larger and more durable attitude change than distal counterarguments. These findings suggest that political information can successfully shift political attitudes and provide new evidence for the role of belief relevance in persuasion.

A long-standing debate in political psychology considers whether individuals update their beliefs and attitudes in the direction of evidence or grow more confident in their convictions when confronted with counter-attitudinal arguments. Though recent studies have shown that instances of the latter tendency, which scholars have termed attitude polarization and “belief backfire,” are rarely observed in settings involving hot-button issues or viral misinformation, we know surprisingly little about how participants respond to information targeting deeply held attitudes, a key condition for triggering attitude polarization. We develop a tailored experimental design that measures participants’ core issue positions and exposes them to personalized counter-attitudinal information using the large language model GPT-3. We find credible evidence of attitude polarization, but only when arguments are contentious and vitriolic. For lower valence counter-attitudinal arguments, attitude polarization is not detected. We conclude by discussing implications for the study of political cognition and the measurement of attitudes.

Political microtargeting has attracted widespread concern, particularly as large language models (LLMs) make it easier to generate personalized messages at scale. Yet existing studies find that ads tailored to voters’ demographic or personality characteristics seldom outperform a single pre-tested, best-performing message. In a two-wave pre-registered experiment, we compare the persuasive effects of LLM-generated audio campaign advertisements tailored to respondents’ demographics, Big Five personality traits, or self-identified issue priorities against an affordability advertisement identified as a top-performing message during the 2024 election. Consistent with prior work, demographic- and personality-based microtargeting using LLMs produce mixed effects on candidate choice in a hypothetical election setting. In stark contrast, ads tailored to respondents’ personally important issues increased candidate support by over 10 percentage points relative to a generic best-performing ad—equivalent to roughly one-fourth the effect of shared partisanship. These findings establish issue-based microtargeting as a meaningful upper bound for evaluating other targeting strategies, demonstrate that personalized, AI-generated campaign materials can be highly persuasive when grounded in voters’ actual priorities, and offer new evidence for the capacity of issue priorities to compete with partisanship in competitive contexts using a novel audio-based conjoint experimental design.