Many families have long heeded the maxim to never discuss politics at the dinner table. That advice may be more relevant than ever today amid growing polarisation on either end of the political spectrum. Beyond awkward silences or raised voices over the dessert course, political polarisation has been shown to aggravate intergroup conflict and, in extreme forms, can harm democratic institutions. It also implies worsening attitudes towards outgroups.

When we think of those who harbour extreme political views, it’s easy to conjure an image of a card-carrying extremist who writes scathing letters to the editor, takes to the streets in protest or joins radical groups. Such archetypes may seem unlikely to moderate their views over time. Indeed, when asked to define extremism, people tend to mention an unwillingness to listen to others, inflexibility and close-mindedness.

In a new paper, my co-author Olga Stavrova (University of Lübeck and Tilburg University) and I (Nadav Klein) investigated whether individuals at the far ends of the political spectrum are resistant to change – which, if true, could further deepen the political divide.

Shifting to the centre

Focusing on the United States and the Netherlands, we analysed data spanning multi-year periods of up to 13 years to discern attitude change. We used the General Social Survey from the US and the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences from the Netherlands. This allowed us to track changes in attitudes, and the extent of such changes, over time.

We tested two questions. First, whether those with extreme political views are more or less likely to change policy attitudes than moderates; and second, when extremists do change, whether the direction of change tends towards the extreme or the middle. To gauge this, we measured attitudes towards specific socio-political issues including gender egalitarianism, support for affirmative action, support for redistribution, support for contraception for teens and support of gays and lesbians.

Contrary to popular belief, we found that those with extreme political attitudes were more likely to change their views over time compared to moderates, and the direction of that change was in fact towards the centre. Conservative extremists were the most volatile, followed by liberal extremists. Moderates showed the most attitude stability. 

Interestingly, these results run counter to the findings of one of our experiments. We asked participants to weigh in on the likelihood that extremists and moderates would change their views over time. Across all policy issues, participants perceived extremists as less likely to change than moderates, regardless of whether the person being asked opposed or supported the policy issue themselves.

The potential for change

The reasons for adopting extreme views are varied, and not all of them imply resistance to change. Some people take on such positions because of transient factors, such as idiosyncratic life events or social influence. For example, new parents might adopt a “tough on crime” stance because they fear for the safety of their children. Others could adopt extreme attitudes as a way of virtue-signalling rather than actually having these moral values.

Additionally, extremists can in fact be persuaded by solid counterarguments and information from the other side. People will generally interpret information in ways that support their favoured conclusions only when such interpretations are reasonably justifiable. Research suggests that mechanistically explaining policy issues can make people adopt more moderate attitudes. 

It’s also possible that extremists identify with and follow their chosen political parties more strongly than moderates. This would mean that when the party changes its views or makes political compromises, these hardliners would also tweak theirs to toe the party line. 

Finally, people may adopt extreme attitudes to stand out from the mainstream (political extremists tend to score lower on conformity traits). Since what is considered mainstream can change over time, extremists might abandon their positions on issues if they anticipate that their (originally extreme) views will become more conventional or common – the same way early adopters abandon fashion items that become mainstream.

Indeed, despite perceptions of extremists as resistant to change, our study suggests that they can and do alter their policy stances over long periods of time. Future research could examine why this occurs.

One explanation could be related to persuadability: Although people are known to forcefully resist opinions they disagree with, this resistance is not without bounds. It’s therefore important to understand how contrarian information can lead to attitude change, and by how much. Another potential reason revolves around the idea of personality maturation in developmental psychology, wherein individuals are assumed to become more agreeable as they age, and hence more receptive to others’ arguments.

Our research also raises the question of when and why societies will tend towards moderation or extremism. Studies have shown that not all kinds of polarisation have increased in the past decades. Moreover, public interest in disputed socio-political issues ebb and flow over long periods of time. The process of identifying and ultimately resolving issues of conflict can explain how current extremists can become more moderate, while new extremists pop up with respect to newly identified issues. As new generations join society and enter the political discourse, they may be more extreme in their views than people who have been interested in and informed about politics for many years.

Policy issues vs. political rivals

We restricted our study to views about socio-political issues and did not examine attitudes towards outgroups. Although our analysis suggests that extremists in terms of policy issues tend to moderate, data from our research implies that this may not be the case when it comes to attitudes towards outgroups.

People seem to increasingly dislike those who disagree with them, whether or not those disagreements are becoming smaller or larger. Existing research, in fact, suggests that people tend to overestimate the amount of disagreement between themselves and political rivals.

This suggests that there are two types of polarisation that are often conflated: One in policy issues and one in attitudes towards political rivals, which may be driven by different psychological processes. Attitudes towards policies are underscored by moral values. In contrast, attitudes towards outgroups (and ingroups) are explained through social identity theory – the sense of belonging to a social group and the motivation to bolster one’s own group and devalue a competing one.

Which is the “right” way of looking at polarisation – policy issues or dislike among rivals? On the one hand, political discourse exists to clarify and decide on public policies and should therefore be prioritised. On the other hand, intense dislike among political rivals may cloud the policy debate to such an extent as to render it fruitless.

Setting aside our personal feelings about those who disagree with us is wise if we want to come to policy agreements, but doing so is easier said than done. In any case, it’s helpful to be aware that growing polarisation depicted in the media or elsewhere may be expressions of mutual dislike among political rivals more than policy disagreements.

The major worry about political polarisation is that those who lie at the extremes will remain stubbornly attached to their views and resistant to change, at least when it comes to policy positions. Our results suggest that this is not the case. Perhaps, then, the full picture of the state of political disagreement is more complex than is often assumed – and the prospects for conflict mitigation may be better than many believe.