Hatred Takes An Ideologue: Recognizable Belief Patterns Lead to More Animosity and Disagreement

Abstract An expanding body of evidence indicates that substantive disagreement fuels political animosity. However, pundits often use terms like ’ideological disagreement’ to describe a broad range of phenomena, diverging from how the concept is understood in classical Conversian literature on beliefs and their structures. This literature suggests that individuals do not uniformly hold or organize their opinions. Building on this foundation, I argue for a critical distinction between disagreements among ideologues—who are opinionated and aligned in their beliefs—and disagreements among others. I hypothesize that disagreements among ideologues result in higher expected disagreement and greater mutual animosity. To test this hypothesis, I conducted two survey experiments with representative U.S. samples (N = 2,000 each, in January 2024 and May 2024). Using evaluations of hypothetical profiles of fellow citizens, I demonstrate that opinionatedness and ideological alignment of beliefs significantly reduce interpersonal affinity in contexts of disagreement. In the first study, disagreements with centrists elicit nearly four times less animosity than disagreements with opinionated counterparts. Furthermore, ideological alignment generates almost three times more intense feelings at equivalent levels of substantive (dis)agreement. In the second study, I find that ideologically aligned individuals anticipate higher levels of disagreement with one another compared to non-ideologues, when they observe the same level of disagreement as them. This effect is particularly pronounced among ideologues capable of recognizing ideological patterns in others’ beliefs. These findings highlight the role of opinionatedness and recognizable belief structures, offering a new approach that is generalizable to other divided democracies.