Deliberating alone: deliberative bias and giving up on political talk

Abstract

In our research examining how people think and talk about immigration, we consistently find that people want to have a reasonable conversation about politics, but they often decide that productive conversations are not possible because other people are uninformed, irrational, close-minded, and uncivil. We argue that self-serving biases and phenomenological experiences lead to the biased perception that the self is far more capable of adhering to the ideals of rational deliberation than others, a process that we refer to as deliberative bias. In Study 1, we use data from in-depth interviews to develop the concept of deliberative bias. In Study 2, we use a survey to demonstrate that perceptions that other people are uninformed, irrational, close-minded, and uncivil are related to a decreased likelihood of talking politics with loose ties or those with opposing perspectives. These results suggest that deliberative bias may be a significant impediment to productive political conversations.