Political coherence and certainty as drivers of interpersonal liking over and above similarity

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abk1909

People with “pure ideology and full of conviction” are attractive, especially to ambivalent people.

Affective polarization and political segregation have become a serious threat to democratic societies.

One standard explanation for these phenomena is that people like and prefer interacting with similar others. However, similarity may not be the only driver of interpersonal liking in the political domain, and other factors, yet to be uncovered, could play an important role.

Here, we hypothesized that beyond the effect of similarity, people show greater preference for individuals with politically coherent and confident opinions. To test this idea, we performed two behavioral studies consisting of one-shot face-to-face pairwise interactions.

We found that people with ambiguous or ambivalent views were nonreciprocally attracted to confident and coherent ingroups. A third experimental study confirmed that politically coherent and confident profiles are rated as more attractive than targets with ambiguous or ambivalent opinions.

Overall, these findings unfold the key drivers of the affability between people who discuss politics.

We say that someone is politically coherent if that person holds either all liberal or all conservative views across a wide range of issues. For example, an individual who supports same-sex marriage and is pro-choice on abortion (i.e., two traditionally liberal views) would be more politically coherent than a pro-life person who supports same-sex marriage (i.e., one conservative and one liberal view).

Given a perceiver who interacts with a target, we define the target’s “ingroup coherence” as the number of opinions that are consistent with the perceiver’s ideology minus the number of ideologically inconsistent opinions. From the perspective of a liberal perceiver, ingroup coherence is computed as the number of liberal opinions held by the target minus the number of conservative opinions. Conversely, from the viewpoint of a conservative perceiver, the highest value of ingroup coherence is achieved when the target holds all conservative and no liberal opinions. This variable, which has also been called “ideological consistency” (15, 16), takes positive values for pairwise interactions between political ingroups (e.g., two people with mostly liberal views) and negative values for interactions between political outgroups (e.g., one individual with mostly liberal views interacting with one holding mostly conservative views).

We also define “attitude certainty” as the number of nonambiguous opinions held by the target. For example, an individual with well-defined liberal or conservative views on all issues would be more politically certain than someone who holds liberal or conservative opinions on some issues but is uncertain about their political views on some other topics.