Significance Prominent events, such as the 2021 US Capitol attack, have brought politically motivated violence to the forefront of Americans’ minds. Yet, the causes of support for partisan violence remain poorly understood. Across four studies, we found evidence that exaggerated perceptions of rival partisans’ support for violence are a major cause of partisans’ own support for partisan violence. Further, correcting these false beliefs reduces partisans’ support for and willingness to engage in violence, especially among those with the largest misperceptions, and this effect endured for 1 mo. These findings suggest that a simple correction of partisans’ misperceptions could be a practical and scalable way to durably reduce Americans’ support for, and intentions to engage in, partisan violence.

There is widespread concern that rising affective polarization – dislike for members of the opposing party – is exacerbating a range of anti-democratic attitudes, such as support for undemocratic practices, undemocratic candidates, and partisan violence. Accordingly, scholars and practitioners alike have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions, and several promising interventions have been identified that successfully reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce consequential anti-democratic attitudes, versus merely changing sentiments toward outpartisans. In this paper, we address this question with high-power experimental tests of two previously established depolarization interventions, one a correction of misperceptions of the views of outpartisans, the other an invitation to think about interpartisan friendships (total n = 4,512). We find that the depolarization interventions reliably reduce affective polarization, but this reduction does not reliably translate into reduced support for undemocratic practices, undemocratic candidates, or partisan violence. Thus, efforts to strengthen pro-democratic attitudes should target these outcomes directly, rather than following the current practice of focusing on affective polarization as a proxy. More broadly, these findings call into question the previously assumed causal link of affective polarization on anti-democratic attitudes.

Interventions reducing affective polarization do not necessarily improve anti-democratic attitudes. Nature Human Behaviour.

Deep partisan conflict in the mass public threatens the stability of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy (n=32,059) testing 25 interventions designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes. We find nearly every intervention reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighting sympathetic and relatable individuals with different political beliefs. We also identify several interventions that reduced support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence, most strongly by correcting misperceptions of outpartisans’ views – showing that anti-democratic attitudes, although difficult to move, are not intractable. Furthermore, both factor analysis and patterns of intervention effect sizes provide convergent evidence for limited overlap between these sets of outcomes, suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, different strategies are most effective for reducing partisan animosity versus anti-democratic attitudes. Taken together, our findings provide a toolkit of promising strategies for practitioners and shed new theoretical light on challenges facing American democracy.

Scholars, policy makers, and the general public have expressed growing concern about the possibility of large-scale political violence in the United States. These worries find support in studies revealing that many American partisans support the use of violence against rival partisans. Here we propose that support for partisan violence is based in part on greatly exaggerated perceptions of rival partisans’ support for violence. We also predict that correcting these inaccurate “metaperceptions” can reduce partisans’ own support for partisan violence. We test these hypotheses in a series of pre-registered, nationally representative, correlational, longitudinal, and experimental studies (total n = 4,741), collected both before and after the 2020 U.S. Presidential election and the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack. In Studies 1 and 2 we found that both Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of their rival partisans’ support for violence and willingness to engage in violence were very inaccurate, with estimates ranging from 239% to 489% higher than actual levels. Further, we find that a brief, informational correction of these misperceptions reduced support for violence by 37% (Study 3) and willingness to engage in violence by 44% (Study 4). In the latter study, a follow-up survey revealed the correction continued to significantly reduce support for violence approximately one month following the study. Together, these results suggest that support for partisan violence in the United States stems in part from systematic overestimations of rival partisans’ support for violence, and that correcting these misperceptions can durably reduce support for partisan violence in the mass public.