Our analysis also uncovers an asymmetry: Interacting with someone with opposite views greatly reduced feelings of closeness however, interacting with someone with consistent views only moderately increased them. We further show that feeling close to the match is associated with an 86% increase in the probability of assimilation of political views. We show that support for redistribution increased and polarization decreased for participants with both mild and strong views, regardless of their political leaning. Matched participants were first shown a computer-generated social media profile of their match highlighting all the shared nonpolitical features then, they read a short, personal, but argumentative, essay written by their match about the reduction of inequality via redistribution of wealth by the government.
In a large-scale, preregistered experiment on informal political communication, we algorithmically matched participants, varying two dimensions: 1) the degree of incidental similarity on nonpolitical features and 2) their stance agreement on a contentious political topic.
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