Attitude Change in Face-To-Face and Online Political Deliberation: Conformity, Information, or Perspective Taking?

ABSTRACT: Theorists of deliberative democracy maintain that deliberation can alter political views by providing new information and by exposing participants to alternative perspectives. Prior research has shown that deliberation often results in substantial attitude change. Published studies, however, do not effectively separate the effects of reading policy briefs from the effects of discussion, nor do they explore conformity or perspective taking effects. This paper examines data from a representative sample of 568 Pittsburgh residents, who came to a one day deliberation experiment. All participants received and had time to study detailed information about the project topic. They were divided into online discussion, face-to-face discussion, and no-discussion control groups. OLS with group-robust p-values indicate that reading materials and not discussion resulted in much of the change in policy attitudes, though face-to-face discussion had some effects. Discussion did have powerful effects in shifting individual attitudes toward their post-discussion group mean. This diverges from conformity research, which predicts polarization to pre-discussion group means. Analyses also find evidence for effects of perspective taking and knowledge, but not conformity