A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology challenges a common assumption: political opponents are less open to opposing viewpoints than many people think. It was led by psychologist André Mata of the University of Lisbon, with colleagues from Linköping University in Sweden.
Researchers say the work sheds light on the psychological barriers to cross‑party dialogue and whether reframing how we view opponents can encourage conversations across the political divide.
In the first two studies, the team surveyed 198 participants in Portugal and 402 in Sweden. They asked participants to rate their own willingness to listen to contrary opinions on a standard scale, then answered the same questions from the perspective of someone supporting either their most liked political party or their least liked political party, and finally imagined discussing politics with those individuals and whether they would want to talk.
Pattern emerged: people tended to rate themselves as more receptive than the average person and viewed supporters of their own party as more open‑minded than supporters of the opposite side. When the researchers compared these assumptions against the actual self‑reported scores of people from those disliked parties, a wide gap appeared, with opponents consistently underestimated in their willingness to listen to opposing views.
These misperceptions had practical consequences for social interaction. The less receptive participants expected conversations to be frustrating and stressful, and this pessimistic expectation correlated with a lower overall inclination to engage with political opponents.
To test whether correcting these perceptions could boost discussion, the researchers conducted a second study with 600 Swedish participants. They read short descriptions of fictional characters who supported the participants’ least liked party; half the characters were described by coworkers as highly receptive to different values, while the other half were described as completely unreceptive. Participants then rated their expectations and willingness to interact with these fictional opponents.
Manipulating the perceived open‑mindedness of the opponent changed responses. When the opponent was described as receptive to contrary opinions, participants reported more positive expectations about having a political conversation and expressed a greater willingness to engage in both political discussions and casual non‑political interactions, such as talking about hobbies or buying vintage furniture. The receptive opponents were even rated as better colleagues and better union representatives.
A final study involving 120 Portuguese university students tested whether a simple intervention could correct misperceptions in real time. Participants were asked to guess how supporters of their least liked political party had answered the survey questions about open‑mindedness. For half the participants, the researchers provided immediate feedback after each question, showing them the actual average scores that those opponents had provided in the first study; a control group simply made their guesses without seeing the real data.
Seeing the real survey answers successfully adjusted the participants’ views. Those who received the factual feedback began to rate their political opponents as more receptive to different opinions than the control group did. Upgrading their opinion of the outgroup had a ripple effect, leading these participants to expect that political conversations would be less stressful and more informative, and making them more willing to have non‑political conversations with people from the opposing party.
While the experiments demonstrate that viewing opponents as open‑minded increases the desire to talk, the reverse dynamic might also play a role in ordinary life. A person who already dislikes an opponent and wishes to avoid them might convince themselves that the opponent is closed‑minded simply to justify walking away. The relationship between avoiding conversation and assuming the worst about others can run in both directions, making it difficult to untangle cause and effect outside of a controlled laboratory setting.
Readers should also note that political polarization varies greatly depending on the electoral system and culture of a country. These studies focused entirely on European nations with multi‑party systems, and the psychological dynamics do not map perfectly onto the two‑party system of the United States. For instance, the researchers found that right‑leaning participants in these European samples sometimes expressed more optimism about outgroup members than left‑leaning participants did, a pattern that challenges some assumptions from American political psychology.
The study, “People underestimate how receptive other people are to different political opinions,” was authored by André Mata, Towe Nilsson, Arvid Erlandsson, and Rosário Ferreira.
