[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-82659-en":3,"doc-seo-82659-105":29,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":91},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":13,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":27,"read_time":28},82659,1649267921044,"Ava Thompson","https://us-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/1800007509477c92dfb?_k=1782875107921204101",8,"Research & Report","Synthetic Contact with AI Reduces Cross-Partisan Animosity","Americans’ warmth toward the opposing political party has dropped sharply over three decades, yet meaningful cross-partisan contact remains rare because people avoid it. Across five preregistered studies (N=3,960 U.S. partisans), brief conversations with AI chatbots representing the political outgroup lower the barrier to engagement, correct misperceptions that drive division, and increase warmth. In behavioral tests, contact also shifts actions toward real cross-party conversation; gains persist briefly and then partially fade.","arXiv :2607 .02 18 1v 1 [ cs .HC] 2 Jul 2026  \nSynthetic Contact with AI Reduces Cross-Partisan Animosity  \nBenjamin Lira Luttges1, ∗ , Noah Castelo2 , Stefano Puntoni1 , Olivier Toubia3  \n1The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. 2Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta. 3 Columbia Business School, Columbia University.  \n∗ Corresponding author: [blira@upenn.edu](blira@upenn.edu).  \nMost recent version: [lirabenjamin.github.io/synthetic-contact](lirabenjamin.github.io/synthetic-contact)  \nAbstract.  \nAmericans’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.  \nThese 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.  \nAmericans increasingly view political opponents with suspicion and dislike. Warmth toward the political outgroup has fallen steadily over the past three decades. 1 This animosity is only one face of polarization. Beyond cold feelings toward the outgroup, partisans also hold systematic misperceptions—inaccurate beliefs about what the other side actually thinks.2–5 Together these trends erode trust in institutions and make cross-partisan cooperation harder in domains from public health to consumer markets. 1,6 Warming partisans toward their political outgroup remains a central challenge for social scientists and practitioners alike.  \nIntergroup contact offers one of the most robust solutions to this animosity. Since Allport, 7 decades of research have established that positive interactions between members of different groups reduce prejudice and increase mutual understanding, 8,9 thoughthe strength of this evidence has been debated. 10 Researchers still debate why contact works. A classic meta-analysis 11 of over 500 effects points to three mediators: contact builds knowledge of the outgroup, lowers intergroup anxiety, and increases empathy. Notably, they find that the two affective routes, anxiety and em-  \npathy, outweigh the effects of gaining knowledge. Recent work extends this framework to politics:  \nbringing Democrats and Republicans together for crossparty discussion reduces affective polarization. 12 Explicitly debating partisan disagreements, however, does not reliably help—Santoro and Broockman 13 found that outpartisans who discussed a","cbCaicXmr2PkPBwv","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaicXmr2PkPBwv","pdf",738816,1,32,"English","en",105,"# Abstract\n## Study Overview\n## Background: Polarization and Intergroup Contact","[{\"question\":\"What problem does the document address regarding U.S. partisanship?\",\"answer\":\"It addresses the sharp decline in warmth toward the opposing political party and the scarcity of meaningful cross-partisan contact due to active avoidance.\"},{\"question\":\"How is “synthetic contact” implemented in these studies?\",\"answer\":\"Participants have brief conversations with AI chatbots that represent the political outgroup, serving as a substitute for human outgroup contact they would otherwise avoid.\"},{\"question\":\"What outcomes does the document report from synthetic contact?\",\"answer\":\"Synthetic contact reduces barriers to engagement, corrects outgroup misperceptions, increases warmth, and in some cases changes behavior toward choosing real cross-party 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