Politics at the Dinner Table: Thanksgiving and Social Influences on Political Polarisation
Abstract
Abstract Can socialising with people who disagree with you change your opinions and reduce political polarisation? I answer this question using a shock that induces us to socialise and discuss politics with a more ideologically diverse set of people: Thanksgiving. Using a sample of American and Canadian survey respondents, I show that people converge towards their families’ viewpoints in the week after Thanksgiving, and that this significantly reduces opinion polarisation. People with very left-wing family move about 11% of a standard deviation to the left in the week of Thanksgiving, with a slightly larger response in the opposite direction for people with very right-wing family. The probability of having a centrist opinion rises by 3.9% just after Thanksgiving. There are no significant effects on affective polarisation. The effects are short-lived in this setting, but provide novel quasi-experimental evidence on how real-life interactions can alleviate ‘echo chamber effects’.