During Michaelmas Term, OxTalks will be moving to a new platform (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
For now, continue using the current page and event submission process (freeze period dates to be advised).
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Affective polarisation — intense hostility and distrust across party lines — is a defining feature of contemporary US politics (Iyengar & Krupenkin, 2018). There is growing evidence to support that internet and social media play a role in exacerbating this phenomenon at the individual level (Settle, 2018; Suhay, Bello-Pardo, & Maurer, 2018). Research shows, for example, that being exposed to online comments that explicitly criticise or derogate political opponents drives affective polarisation among party identifiers (Suhay, Bello-Pardo & Maurer, 2018; Gervais, 2015). However the literature has yet to specify whether exposure to in-group praise or forms of collective narcissism online has the same effect on partisan evaluations, and which of these two mechanisms (“in-group love” or “out-group hate”) is the stronger driver of users’ affective responses. The goal of this experiment is to answer these questions.