Depolarization and its discontents: Experimental evidence on affective polarization and willingness to confront racism and misinformation from two online workshops

Abstract Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of initiatives aimed at reducing partisan polarization in the United States. Many of these initiatives focus on promoting civil dialogue across partisan lines and fostering tolerance for diverse political perspectives. While these are laudable goals, we argue that emphasizing civility and tolerance may have the adverse unintended consequence of diminishing citizens' willingness to engage in conflictive conversations about normatively important but politically divisive subjects. We focus on two especially prominent (but contentious) preoccupations of contemporary American politics: combating racism and countering the spread of misinformation. We test our theory through an experimental evaluation of two scalable online depolarization workshops. Our results suggest that the workshops mitigated affective polarization and negative partisanship among a subsample of participants drawn from a nationally representative voter database. Consistent with our theory, however, the workshops also appear to have diminished these same participants' willingness to confront false or racist speech when doing so would require conflictive conversations with out‐partisans. We conclude by considering the complex practical and normative implications of our results.