The presidential election in 2020 was unique due to the restrictions placed on officials and voters due to the Covid pandemic.  The various restrictions meant that virtual watch parties were common communal activities as people tuned into the presidential and vice-presidential debates.

Research from the University of Missouri explores whether such group chat rooms during virtual debate watch parties increased or decreased the level of political bias among attendees.

“Imagine watching a political debate by yourself, and you already know who you’re going to vote for, but all of a sudden the other political candidate makes a good point,” the researchers say. “You might think to yourself, ‘that was smart, or ‘I hadn’t thought about it that way.’ But if you are watching the same debate with a group of like-minded people, we found that you’re more likely to notice the negative things or to construe something being said as negative, when likely that wouldn’t have happened if someone wasn’t there to conveniently supply that information.”

Political influence

Around 500 volunteers were recruited to watch one of the two presidential campaign or vice-presidential campaign debates in real-time using video conferencing and a digital chat room.  The volunteers were divided into three groups, with one group containing supporters of the same party, a second group containing a mixture of Republicans and Democrats, and a final group with no chat functionality enabled.

“We devised an innovative design for this study, and it was surprising to me that we could recruit a lot of students to participate,” the researchers say. “We also allowed participants to turn off their video cameras and change their names so they could remain anonymous when sharing their responses with us and one another.”

The experiments were deliberately manipulated in order to produce social conditions that would allow them to study the amount and way in which bias was processed by the participants in each watch party.

“When we talk about bias processing and debates, it means that Democrats believe their candidate did an awesome job and the Republican candidate was terrible—and vice versa,” the authors continue. “We found that it wasn’t the agreements that made people more positive toward a particular candidate, rather it seems like these chats helped create a ‘piling-on’ effect of negative comments directed against the opposition party’s candidate.”

For many, watching political debates has become almost akin to watching your favorite sporting team with fellow fans, where you’re both united behind your own team but also united in your opposition to the other team.  The authors believe their work can be illustrative as we begin to understand the modern political narrative and especially the concern that by surrounding ourselves with like-minded peers we are closing ourselves off to alternatives and deepening the sense of polarization in society.

“When we think of the types of information environments that we surround ourselves in—we all have a choice of whether or not to hang out with people we disagree with—what kind of perspectives are we volunteering to expose ourselves to?” the researchers conclude. “For instance, if I’m watching a football game and I purposely don’t watch the game with fans of the opposing team that I root for, then I am recreating the sort of ideologically homogeneous environment of attending a political debate watch party with like-minded people.”