Perspective Taking and Reflective Political Judgements

It is normatively desirable that democratic citizens engage in unbiased and reflective political thinking when making political decisions. Yet there is a great deal of empirical evidence that many citizens deviate from this ideal. There is some evidence that structured discussion can create an environment where citizens, after having heard from expert testimonies, learned about different perspectives and discussed the policy issue at length with diverse others, arrive at more reflective decisions. The biggest challenge of this approach, however, is its scalability to the millions of citizens at once. I argue in this paper that we can isolate separate beneficial elements of democratic deliberation and embed them in different other settings of the larger deliberative system. Inspired by expectations of the deliberative democracy scholarship, and the findings of social psychology, thereby, I design a less demanding and efficient debiasing strategy for political judgements: actively contemplating other’s thoughts and feelings. I test this strategy in a nationally representative sample of 2035 UK citizens. These results add to the knowledge of how taking the perspectives of the other side can improve democratic citizenry. Further, my research also contributes to the scholarship within political psychology examining the conditions under which individuals engage in more reflective and even-handed political reasoning. Finally, the findings speak to the scholarship examining the effect of political disagreement in everyday political talk on political attitudes by showing that the process of perspective taking can mitigate potential negative effect of political disagreement on the quality of public attitudes.