Job Market Paper (Draft coming soon)

Breaking the Bubble - The Determinants and Effects of Cross-partisan Contact

Abstract: We study how endogenous selection into intergroup interactions shapes social segregation and the optimal design of policies to address intergroup hostility. We conduct a field experiment in partnership with several non-profit organizations in the context of political polarization in Brazil. Our experiment recruits over 5,000 individuals through apolitical social media ads, combining incentivized measures of aversion to outgroup interactions and beliefs about their costs and benefits with causal evidence on their impact. The most hostile partisans exhibit the strongest aversion to outgroup interactions and overly pessimistic beliefs about their outcomes. We randomize participants into cross-partisan conversations, offering twice the daily minimum wage for compliance. The intervention strongly reduces hostility, with effects twice as large among participants with higher degrees of baseline hostility and larger effects among those with higher outgroup aversion. Participants' reported conversation outcomes strongly exceed predictions, indicating that pessimistic prior beliefs were largely mistaken. The conversations reduce aversion to outgroup interactions, correct beliefs about their outcomes, and reduce political extremity and labor market discrimination. Our findings suggest that endogenous segregation exacerbates cross-partisan hostility, motivating future policy interventions that target individuals with high degrees of hostility and aversion. We show that a scalable, cost-effective alternative policy intervention has similar short-run effects.