Enhancing curiosity with a wise intervention to improve political conversations and relationships

Political, ideological, and religious ideas divide us all. Can we bridge that gap to promote more productive discussions? We think so. We present a multi-study research program in hopes of introducing greater curiosity and less defensiveness in political conversations. Here we show, first, that political curiosity is associated with indicators of positive political conversations, such as having goals to learn and a lesser desire to be socially distant from people with different views. Second, we identified an antecedent of political curiosity: perceiving others in one's political party as open-minded and intellectually humble. Regardless of political orientation (liberal or conservative), people showed a bias toward assuming their group was less open-minded and humble than reality. Third, we developed a social norm referencing intervention to minimize this bias. Our wise intervention (in a pre-registered initial study and pre-registered replication) led to a valuable finding: upon realizing that political ingroup members are more open-minded and humbler than assumed, people demonstrated an increase in political curiosity and greater motivation to converse with the goal of learning. The current work offers insights into factors contributing to a lack of curiosity in American political discourse and presents a brief, quick, targeted intervention for improving conversations.