Breaking Online Tribalism: Motivated Reasoning, Empathy and Polarization

Abstract

There are growing concerns for online tribalism and division, and many studies link the increasing polarization to the popularity of social media. One of the most widely proposed measure to alleviate online polarization is exposing users to opposing views, which shows conflicting results in the literature. Our study contradicts the conventional belief that people are more likely to accept the rationales of opposing views whenever deep cognitive efforts is engaged. This study addresses: (1) the causal pathway of counter-attitudinal information exposure onto opinion and affective polarization; and (2) how empathy moderates such causal effect and alleviates polarization in social media settings. We first propose a novel conceptual framework to explain the effect of motivated reasoning in user's opinion formation when receiving dissenting information and then conduct experiments to examine the effect of exposure to disconfirming information on polarization where motivation to empathize exhibits a crucial positive moderating effect.