Can birds of different feathers flock surprisingly well together? Expected versus actual consequences of discussing divisive viewpoints

People’s preference for similar others (Byrne, 1961) suggests that people may expect the experience of discussing topics of disagreement with others to be aversive. Across three experiments, we test whether people systematically overestimate how negative the experience of discussing a topic of disagreement will be, and whether this overestimation is larger than it is for discussing a topic of agreement. We find that people systematically overestimate how unpleasant discussing a political topic of disagreement will be to a greater degree than a topic of agreement (Experiment 1). However, when discussing non-political topics, this overestimation does not differ nearly as much between topics of agreement versus disagreement (Experiment 2). This different pattern of expectations seems to be driven in part by differences in the moral conviction that people feel toward political versus non-political topics (Experiment 3).