A New Path to Depolarization: Media That Brings Us Together

As we face ever-growing partisan polarization in American society, the need for large-scale action becomes increasingly urgent. As James Coan and I have written about in the Fulcrum during my time at More Like US, there are approaches grounded in a significant body of social psychological research that can help address this rapidly growing problem, namely different variations of social contact theory, especially vicarious contact. Until recently, much of the research and thus much of the basis for our articles has been focused on applying social contact theory to other problems facing society: prejudice against members of the LGBTQ community, individuals with autism, and immigrant schoolchildren, among other examples.

It was therefore exciting when last fall I saw the publication of an article in Political Science Research and Methods titled "Content That's as Good as Contact?: Vicarious Intergroup Contact and the Promise of Depolarization at Scale." The study, conducted in 2022 in conjunction with YouGov, finally attempted to measure the effectiveness of indirect contact as a path to depolarization, primarily through the vicarious experience of productive political conversation. Encompassing over 2,000 participants gathered from a nationally representative sample recruited by YouGov’s online panel, the study looked to test affective polarization, measured attitudinally, and interest and investment in depolarization, measured behaviorally. To this end, the study tested multiple media interventions, namely a 50-minute Braver Angels documentary featuring a “Red-Blue” depolarization workshop; a 50-minute placebo nature documentary about wildebeest migration; a 5-minute version of the Braver Angels documentary; a second 5-minute version that emphasized partisan misperception correction; and a pure control group, with no treatment.

So, with this design, what did the results show? In terms of attitudinal effects, the long-form documentary, their primary intervention, reduced affective polarization by up to 0.163 standard deviations. Belief in the efficacy of dialogue increased by 0.457 standard deviations. Both held up 50 days later at ~80% strength. On the behavioral side, viewers were 7.7 percentage points more likely to click a link to sign up for the Braver Angels newsletter.

Now, these numbers aren’t necessarily staggering, but they represent the positive potential of such an intervention. As the authors noted, the 50-minute documentary was roughly 76% as effective as a full-day in-person Braver Angels workshop, which operates at a much smaller scale and has a significantly higher cost per participant. Furthermore, as the authors noted, the power of the same fiscal investment can be rather striking: 1,000 workshops, at Braver Angels' current cost, would reach 32,000 people with an expense of $1.13M, while that same budget, paying viewers $10 (above the minimum wage) to watch the film, would reach 113,000 Americans.

I believe there is potential to further scale the main intervention cost-effectively. Even more exciting, at least to me, was the 5-minute intervention, which yielded results comparable to those of the long documentary in reducing polarization. A format requiring just 1/10th the duration can increase feasibility and reduce costs at scale, and is better suited to a short(er)-form video content ecosystem, especially among younger audiences. As an aside, being an 18-year-old, I know a few young people who would willingly embark on a journey to watch a 50-minute documentary about political polarization. We need to think in terms of effective, scalable solutions.

Beyond the duration of the intervention, there is also the promise of adjusting the form of media used. While a documentary was used in this study, there have been incredibly successful reductions of prejudice, notably in reducing post-war tensions in Rwanda and improving attitudes towards Arab Americans in the United States, using entertainment-media-driven approaches. These approaches rely on the same mechanisms, namely indirect contact through parasocial relationships and vicarious experiences, as the documentary format. To this end, many promising television shows, such as The Conners, have been shown to successfully reduce partisan antipathy through implicit, healthy, cross-partisan contact. Entertainment media, which is already consumed at scale and much more palatable to the average American than a documentary, has significant promise as a tool to address rising partisan polarization in the U.S. and should serve as a further area for exploration, both in research and in application.

This is not to say that the approaches tested in the study are not valuable. They clearly are. But to me, they are the first step in a much larger movement. In a moment when the media is so often cast as the engine of our division, it's worth sitting with what this research points to: that the same tools driving us apart may be our best shot at pulling us back together.

Imre Huss is a Democracy Architects Council Fellow and emerged as a standout member of the inaugural class of Carnegie Young Leaders, a national initiative by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars that elevates youth-led civic innovation across the United States.