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Category: Project

Description: Political segregation is a significant social problem and a contributor to intergroup conflict and prejudice. Recent work suggests that one driver of segregation is political acrophily, peo-ple’s tendency to affiliate with others of their own political group who have more extreme (rather than more moderate) political views. However, acrophily has only been examined in controlled settings, where participants were exposed to hypothetical peers. The goal of the current project was to examine the role of acrophily in natural interactions on social media. In Study 1 (N = 1,992), we validated that people preferred tweets produced by more politically extreme users compared to more moderate users of their political group. In Study 2, we ana-lyzed a large network of users on Twitter (3,898,327 unique ties), and found that users tended to affiliate with peers who were more politically extreme than other available users. Findings provide important out-of-the-lab evidence for acrophily.