The Nature of Online Talk: Incivility of Opposing Views and Affective Polarization

Abstract

Affective polarization is on the rise in the Canadian context. Increasing polarization is commonly attributed to the nature of political discussion on social media platforms, but little is known about the affective consequences of the incivility of online discussion. We adopt a classic trust game to consider whether people punish the incivility of co-partisans and out-party individuals and whether there are gender-related differences in punishment. We also examine whether incivility can have spill-over effects on people’s out-party evaluations. Five pre-registered hypotheses were tested with a survey experiment fielded to a sample (N=974) of adult Canadian citizens who report some level of attachment to Canada’s three major parties (Liberal, Conservative, New Democratic Party). The study provides evidence for some of our hypotheses, but not all. Our findings support the theory that people punish the out-party for their politically-challenging views, regardless of how they are stated. There may however be some spillover effects of incivility on affective orientations towards the out-party. Interestingly, the incivility of co-partisans is punished, at least to the extent that it extinguishes the reward for an aligned viewpoint. Finally, we did not find evidence that women are more likely to be punished for incivility, and we see no evidence that the effects we observe vary across other dimensions we might think are important, like strength of partisanship, affective orientations, or political knowledge or interest. Our findings highlight significant nuance with respect to the effects of incivility on affective polarization, but overall they invite the inference that people do hold certain expectations of civility for individuals online and that when this norm is violated, there can be consequences.