Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

If I describe you as a moderate, you'll believe me. (But you're not.)

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton at a presidential debate

Researchers conducted an experiment with people attending the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in September 2016. The result: Most people were were open to moderating their viewpoints.

Pool/Getty Images

Researchers from Canada and Sweden are offering the results of a newly published study as a sign there may be hope for easing the harsh political polarization that has left the United States and its governing institutions in perpetual gridlock.

All it takes is a little trickery and a little nudge.


Working with doctoral students from Lund University in Sweden and McGill University in Montreal, researchers approached 136 people at the first presidential debate in September 2016 in New York.

Participants completed a survey evaluating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on a number of personality traits, such as "visionary" and "courageous." For each category they were asked to place a mark on a sliding scale closer to the candidate they thought was stronger for that trait.

About three-fourths of the responses favored one candidate.

Then the researchers secretly changed the surveys so the majority of the responses were more in the middle. A similar experiment was done online with a more diverse sample of 498 participants.

More than 9 in 10 from the first group accepted the changed results as their own — and provided more moderate views to match those results.

One person who had initially favored Clinton said after the change: "I guess I fall somewhere in the middle — I'd like to think I'm a little moderate."

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Another person who favored Trump said after the results were moderated that "Trump is more exact and confident in his decisions, so that could be viewed as being decisive. But then Hillary has a track record in which she's changed her mind about a lot of issues, but that's kind of like her educating herself and having developed thought."

At the end of the experiment, participants were asked to rate the overall competence of each candidate and still stuck with their original choice.

Researcher Jay Olson, a doctoral student at McGill, said in an interview that he found it hopeful that people were willing to express open-minded views. He didn't see it as proof that people can be easily manipulated.

Olson said he started working with principal author Thomas Strandberg of Lund University because the two happened to be stationed next to each other during the presentation of papers at several conferences.

The paper, published last week, concludes that the "us versus them" mentality in American politics may be exaggerated: "Our study reveals that American voters at either end of the political spectrum are willing to endorse more open views about political candidates. Here, suggesting to people that they are more open-minded removed their political blunders and nudged them to consider and argue for more moderate views."



Read More

Members of Congress standing next to a poster about Project 2025

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Patty Murray look at their Project 2025 poster during a press conference on Sept. 12.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Project 2025 policies are on the Nov. 5 ballot

Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.

It’s becoming crystal clear, as we near the Nov. 5 presidential election, that voters need to seriously check out the radical government reformation policies contained within the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Here’s why.

The right-wing think tank has written not one, not two, but nine “Mandate for Leadership” documents for Republican presidential candidates, with its first playbook published in 1981. The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million —serious money — in 2023 to create Project 2025 for Donald Trump to implement.

Keep ReadingShow less
‘There is a diffused climate of threats and intimidation’: A conversation with Daniel Stid
Daniel Stid

‘There is a diffused climate of threats and intimidation’: A conversation with Daniel Stid

Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the ninth in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."

The problem of polarization has been on Daniel Stid’s mind for a while.

Trained as a political scientist, Stid has spent time working in government (as a staffer for former Rep. Dick Armey), business (at Boston Consulting Group) and the nonprofit sector (at the Bridgespan Group). But Stid is perhaps best known for founding and leading the Hewlett Foundation’s U.S. democracy program. From 2013 to 2022, Stid helped give away $180 million in grants to combat polarization and shore up American democracy. Since leaving Hewlett, he has created a new organization, Lyceum Labs, and launched a blog, The Art of Association, where he writes frequently about civil society and American politics.

Keep ReadingShow less
screenshot of Steve Kornacki

You don't need to be Steve Kornacki to know which states (and counties) to watch on election night.

YouTube screenshot

How to win a bar bet on election night

Klug served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 1999. He hosts the political podcast “Lost in the Middle: America’s Political Orphans.”

The odds are you don’t go to sleep at night and dream of precinct maps and tabulation deadlines like NBC’s breathless election guru Steve Kornacki. Watch him on election night and you will be dazzled and exhausted by his machine-gun-like sharing of statistics and crosstabs.

Keep ReadingShow less
The word "meritocracy" on a chalkboard
bowie15

The propaganda of 'meritocracy'

Degefe is a research associate in Duke University's Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity. Ince is an assistant sociology professor at the University of Washington.

Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) recently launched the Merit Caucus to prevent diversity, equity, and inclusion from dominating education. Owens, chairman of the Education and Workplace subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, argued that the left is waging a "war on meritocracy" and is threatening America’s excellence, all in the name of equity.

Such sentiment is clearly becoming more prevalent, as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s decision to effectively end race-conscious admission programs at colleges and universities and by Texas, Florida, Alabama and Utah banning the use of state dollars for DEI programs in public universities, effectively closing these offices.

Keep ReadingShow less