Perceived gender and political persuasion: a social media field experiment during the 2020 US Democratic presidential primary election.

Women have less influence than men in a variety of settings. Does this result from stereotypes that depict women as less capable, or biased interpretations of gender differences in behavior? We present a field experiment that-unbeknownst to the participants-randomized the gender of avatars assigned to Democrats using a social media platform we created to facilitate discussion about the 2020 Primary Election. We find that misrepresenting a man as a woman undermines his influence, but misrepresenting a woman as a man does not increase hers.

Reducing political polarization in the United States with a mobile chat platform.

Do anonymous online conversations between people with different political views exacerbate or mitigate partisan polarization? We created a mobile chat platform to study the impact of such discussions. Our study recruited Republicans and Democrats in the United States to complete a survey about their political views. We later randomized them into treatment conditions where they were offered financial incentives to use our platform to discuss a contentious policy issue with an opposing partisan.