Synthetic Contact with AI Reduces Cross-Partisan Animosity

2026-07-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the growing animosity between supporters of the two major U.S. political parties amid scarce real-world cross-partisan interaction. It innovatively introduces AI-powered chatbots to simulate intergroup dialogue and provides the first empirical validation that “synthetic contact” can serve as a scalable, behaviorally effective, and widely acceptable substitute for genuine cross-partisan engagement. Through a preregistered experiment combining behavioral measures and content analysis, the authors demonstrate that a single ten-minute conversation significantly reduces political misperceptions, increases affective warmth, and leads 6% more participants to express willingness to interact with actual out-party members. These effects partially persist in the short term, with more pronounced residual impacts observed among individuals holding extreme political views.

Abstract

Americans' warmth toward members of the opposing political party has fallen sharply over the past three decades -- yet meaningful cross-partisan contact remains scarce, in part because people actively avoid it. Across five preregistered studies (total N = 3,960 U.S. partisans), we test whether brief conversations with AI chatbots representing the political outgroup can substitute for the contact people shun. Synthetic contact first lowers the barrier to entry: partisans would endure almost twice as long contemplating their own mortality to avoid a human outgroup partner as an AI one. These conversations then correct the misperceptions that fuel division. At baseline, Democrats placed Republicans more than a standard deviation past their actual position on environmental consumption attitudes -- enough to flip the average Republican from supportive to opposed -- and a single ten-minute conversation with an outgroup chatbot corrected those beliefs and warmed affect in a within-person study of both parties. A three-arm experiment ruled out pure engagement and sociality as drivers. Synthetic contact also moved behavior, in a sample of both parties and on a more affectively charged issue: participants who spoke with an outgroup bot about immigration were six percentage points more likely than controls to choose to have a real conversation with a partisan from the other side. A final study tested whether these gains last: the warmth effect replicated immediately in a new sample; most of it faded within a week, with a small residual concentrated among the most extreme partisans. Analyzing conversation content showed that information, more than friendliness, distinguishes outgroup bots from control chatbots. Together, these findings establish synthetic contact as a scalable, behaviorally consequential, and -- unlike face-to-face contact -- widely acceptable form of cross-partisan engagement.

Problem

• cross-partisan animosity
• political polarization
• intergroup contact
• synthetic contact
• partisan misperception

Innovation

• synthetic contact
• AI chatbots
• cross-partisan animosity
• attitude correction
• scalable intervention