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The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised newquestions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing analready-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization,affective polarization is defined less by divergent policy preferences and moreby strong negative emotions towards opposing political groups, and thusarguably poses a formidable threat to rational democratic discourse. We exploreif prompting perspective-taking on social media platforms can help enhanceempathy between opposing groups as a first step towards reducing affectivepolarization. Specifically, we deploy a randomized field experiment through abrowser extension to 1,611 participants on Twitter, which enables participantsto randomly replace their feeds with those belonging to accounts whosepolitical views either agree with or diverge from their own. We find thatsimply exposing participants to "outgroup" feeds enhances engagement, but notan understanding of why others hold their political views. On the other hand,framing the experience in familiar, empathic terms by prompting participants torecall a disagreement with a friend does not affect engagement, but doesincrease their ability to understand opposing views. Our findings illustratehow social media platforms might take simple steps that align with businessobjectives to reduce affective polarization.

Perspective-taking to Reduce Affective Polarization on Social Media