Benjamin A. Lyons , Christina E. Farhart, Michael P. Hall, John Kotcher, Matthew Levendusky, Joanne M. Miller, Brendan Nyhan, Kaitlin T. Raimi, Jason Reifler, Kyle L. Saunders, Rasmus Skytte, and Xiaoquan Zhao
Strong attachments to partisan identities can fuel a number outcomes troubling for democracy. These may range from affective polarisation — dislike for the voters on the other side — to conspiracy beliefs, to run-of-the-mill misperceptions about climate change or any other number of issues on which facts have become partisan.
One way psychologists have proposed to reduce people’s reliance on their partisanship when forming beliefs and attitudes is through self-affirmation. Self-affirmation refers to the process of recalling and reflecting on aspects of personal identity that one is proud of. The idea behind applying self-affirmation to politics is that it can reduce the need to resort to defensive reactions and reliance on group identity when evaluating information, people, or groups that might seem threatening. In other words, an alternative route to bolstered self-worth in the face of threatening information can reduce the need to rely on defensive biases. In practice, this is achieved in self-affirmation experiments by way of writing prompts that ask respondents to reflect on important values or characteristics they hold, and describe experiences in which these were exhibited or played an important role in their life.
In the past few decades, several studies have been published that support the notion that self-affirmation can be effective in political domains. As such, my co-authors and I were eager to test self-affirmation’s potential for a number of outcomes of interest to us — partisan conspiracy beliefs, affective polarization, belief that one’s views are superior to others’, biased news evaluations and various forms of party-aligned factual beliefs.
In our article, we collect results from 8 research teams who worked independently of one another, but each of which were excited about the promise of this sort of treatment. We conducted a total of 11 experiments between 2008 and 2016 with a range of participants, ranging from convenience samples to large nationally representative ones. Each of our studies failed to show consistent effects for self-affirmation, however. Self-affirmation effects should be found for those who care more about politics or those most threatened by inconvenient claims or by interactions with their political opponents. In this collection of studies, however, we offer evidence of a number of scenarios in which self-affirmation does not seem to improve outcomes, even among these subgroups.
Though we were inspired to test these potential applications of self-affirmation based on prior work, it is also worthwhile to reflect on the evidentiary value of those studies. In our article, we present a summary of prior work that suggests most of these studies may be under-powered, with samples sizes too small to be reliable. In clearing out the “file-drawer” of unpublished studies in this literature, though, our article can help the scientific record better reflect the evidence in favor (or not) of the underlying phenomenon.
Ultimately, while we each would have liked to show that we can mitigate the power of partisanship over the way we think and feel, we can at least suggest that self-affirmation is one route we should spend less time and money pursuing.