Taking a Stance: How Overconfidence Inhibits Productive Political Conversation

• In Event: Elite Cues, Policy Information, and Discourse

Abstract

Among the causes and consequences of democratic retrenchment, public opinion scholars have recently lamented a decline in productive discourse among political party adherents. Americans are increasingly making social choices that avoid political discussion, especially if it requires them to engage across party lines (e.g., Iyengar and Westwood 2015). When Americans do have occasion for such social interactions, scholars have found that hostility and anger increasingly characterize the way that partisans communicate with their out-party rivals (e.g., Levendusky and Stecula 2021). Understanding the social dynamics that occur when partisans engage in dialogue, and the root causes of these breakdowns, is therefore an urgent topic in political science research, and an important component of our understanding of democracy’s retrenchment—as well as its reimagination (e.g., Santoro and Broockman 2022).

In the present study, I identify epistemic overconfidence, or the unwarranted belief that one is highly knowledgeable about politics, as a potential driver of the ongoing breakdowns in Americans’ deliberative modes (Anson 2018). Simply put, partisans who think they know a great deal about politics—while actually knowing little—are likely to serve as uniquely disruptive forces in political deliberation due to their rhetorical stance-taking. Overclaiming in the realm of politics is widespread, and it is known to be associated with ideological and partisan polarization. However, no study has investigated the consequences of this overconfident self-regard for polarized political discourse.

Using a mixed-methods research design, I study the consequences of overconfidence for partisans’ willingness towards, and success in, engaging their out-party peers in productive political conversations. In a survey experiment (N = 1,102), I first manipulate overconfidence using a vignette-based treatment designed to reduce overconfident attitudes. Results of this study show that vignettes designed to reduce overconfidence succeed in reducing respondents’ overclaiming behavior. Further, they foster increased openness to discussion of political issues with out-party peers.

Next, in a laboratory experiment (N = 100), I measure how overconfidence structures the verbal communication of small groups of subjects. These groups are asked to discuss contemporary policy issues over a 30-minute span, with the goal of forming a policy recommendation upon which they can all agree. In a pre-experimental survey, I first measure respondents’ political overconfidence, and using this information, assign respondents to small discussion groups with similar distributions of confidence. I then randomly expose a subset of these groups to pre-test vignettes designed to reduce the degree of political overconfidence among group members. Finally, using the transcripts of these discussions, I employ a content analytical strategy to determine each speaker’s verbal stance and hedging behavior, speech volume, tone, and level of agreement (e.g., Biber and Finegan 1989).

Relative to treatment groups, I find that overconfident control group discussion partners will more often escalate conflict, engage in overclaiming, use a more aggressive verbal stance, and hedge and moderate to a lesser degree than their more calibrated peers. The result is a degraded quality of discourse and an increased likelihood of failure to come to an agreement on political proposals.

Taken together, the two studies presented in this project reveal the psychological bases of degraded democratic deliberation in the United States. They suggest that in a cultural context that praises bombastic, decisive, and unambiguous political rhetoric, the inculcation of overclaiming in the political realm is a fundamental danger to productive discourse. But the present treatments offer a potential method for achieving democratic renovation--through the inculcation of intellectual humility among partisans.


Works Cited

Anson, I. G. (2018). Partisanship, political knowledge, and the Dunning‐Kruger effect. Political Psychology, 39(5), 1173-1192.

Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1989). Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text-interdisciplinary journal for the study of discourse, 9(1), 93-124.

Iyengar, S., & Westwood, S. J. (2015). Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization. American journal of political science, 59(3), 690-707.

Levendusky, M. S., & Stecula, D. A. (2021). We need to talk: how cross-party dialogue reduces affective polarization. Cambridge University Press.

Santoro, E., & Broockman, D. E. (2022). The promise and pitfalls of cross-partisan conversations for reducing affective polarization: Evidence from randomized experiments. Science advances, 8(25), https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abn5515

Author

• Ian G. Anson, University of Maryland, Baltimore County