Social / CBB Lunch ~ Ashwini Ashokkumar, New York University

Ashwini Ashokkumar Assistant Professor of Psychology, NYU

Topic ~ The Psychological Drivers and Effects of Political Discourse

What are the individual and collective psychological processes that shape political discourse? Drawing on evidence from natural language analysis and experiments, I argue that identity processes can impede constructive political deliberation and discussion. Analyzing conversations within large communities of supporters of the 2016 Presidential candidates —Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton— I show that highly identified members of these communities demonstrate a weaker tendency to engage in deliberative thinking or questioning in political conversations, with deliberation being actively discouraged within these communities. I then present experimental evidence that identity processes can eliminate diverse perspectives from political discourse through censorship and self-censorship. Specifically, I find that partisans prioritize their identities over open and civil discourse, censoring both others' and their own identity-incongruent opinions. Importantly, such self-censorship of opinions can subsequently weaken those opinions, eliminating dissent both from public discourse but also from its source—the dissenting individual. In the final part of the talk, I will discuss ongoing work examining how the content and structure of political discourse influence important social and political outcomes —such as political polarization and progressive social change.