Accepting Violence? A Laboratory Experiment of the Violent Consequences of Deliberation in Politically Aggrieved Enclaves

Echo chambers, in which politically aggrieved groups reinforce, amplify, and exaggerate their shared attitudes, have been invoked to explain many phenomena and events such as populism, polarization, Islamic terrorism, and recently the storming of the U.S. Capitol. An experiment conducted by Steffen Selmer Andersen at COBE Lab sheds light on the link between echo chambers and political violence.

Enclave deliberation and political violence

Echo chambers (or enclaves, as they are known in the research literature) are closed settings in which like-minded individuals reinforce shared beliefs through communication and repetition. Discussion in echo chambers (called enclave deliberation) has been shown to lead to group polarization, with enclave members amplifying and exaggerating their common viewpoints, leading to more extreme attitudes.

If enclave deliberation leads to more extreme or even extremist viewpoints, does it also make politically aggrieved groups more accepting of political violence? This is what Steffen Selmer Andersen sought to find out.

Experimental procedure

188 participants were recruited for an experiment at COBE Lab. Following an online pre-screening survey, participants were divided into two groups based on their stances on two hot-button issues, immigration and climate policy: those who supported loose immigration policies and higher taxes on food with a large carbon footprint (called “left-leaning”) and those who opposed (“right-leaning”). Because this last group was too small for proper statistical analysis (comprising only 22 of the 188 participants), the results for this study concern only the politically left-leaning group (166 participants).

Participants read two fictive policies deliberately written to conflict with their political attitudes on immigration and the climate. After first privately evaluating and jotting down their immediate reaction to each policy, they would then either

a) discuss the policies with three to six like-minded individuals (enclave deliberation)

b) think and write in detail about the policies by themselves (solo deliberation)

c) receive no task (control group)

Afterwards, participants were asked to once again evaluate the policies and then to rate the acceptability of three scenarios: a civic group 1) holding a public demonstration, 2) holding a public demonstration that will disturb traffic for several hours, and 3) holding a public demonstration that is at high risk of a violent confrontation with a counter-demonstration. They were also asked to fill out a nine-item outcome measure of their general acceptance of violence called the Radicalism Intention Scale.

It was expected that those who participated in enclave deliberation would become more extreme and homogenous in their views and more accepting of political violence than those who deliberated by themselves.

What effect did enclave deliberation have?

Not only did the participants report more extreme and homogenous views on the policies after enclave deliberation than before, lending support to the classic group polarization effect, but they also showed greater acceptance of political violence. As compared to those who deliberated by themselves, those who participated in enclave deliberation became 13 percentage points more willing to accept the violent scenario (p > 0.05). This is illustrated in the following figure:

           

On average, those who participated in enclave deliberation also scored higher on the RIS measure of their general acceptance of violence. Specifically, they had RIS-scores eight percentage points higher than the control group and ten percentage points higher than those who deliberated by themselves (p > 0.1):

In other words, the results of experiment suggests that enclave deliberation does lead to greater acceptance of political violence.

The experiment is described in the conference paper “Accepting Violence? A Laboratory Experiment of the Violent Consequences of Deliberation in Politically Aggrieved Enclaves,” published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence in July 2022.