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This research investigates the potential of AI chatbots to facilitate cross-partisan engagement among U.S. partisans, addressing the decline in interpersonal warmth between opposing political groups. Through five preregistered studies involving nearly 4,000 participants, findings reveal that brief conversations with AI can effectively reduce misperceptions and increase willingness to engage with outgroup members, even leading to a notable behavioral shift towards real-life interactions. Notably, while the warmth generated by these interactions diminishes over time, a lasting effect persists among more extreme partisans, highlighting the unique role of information exchange in fostering understanding.
Engaging with AI chatbots can significantly lower partisan barriers and promote real-world dialogue, even when face-to-face contact is avoided.
Americans'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. These 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.
