There are certain resolutions that are easily made and easily broken: lose weight; drink less; be mindful. They all seem a cinch compared with the challenge of our age: think less tribally. Try meeting people who disagree with you. Try to understand both sides of the argument. Most of us instinctively feel that this is desirable. Each of us has something to learn from others. And even if we do not, even if the other side of the argument is utterly wrong, how are we to persuade them if we are not on speaking terms? And yet bursting our own bubbles is infuriatingly hard.
Here’s one obvious approach: use social media to follow people with opposing opinions. If you see what they are saying, you can ponder their arguments and try to see the world from their point of view — at the very least, you can work out how to convert them.
To investigate this idea, a group of social scientists (Christopher Bail, Lisa Argyle and others) recently recruited several hundred people with Republican or Democrat leanings, and gave them a small financial incentive to follow a Twitter bot for a month that would expose them to the opposing point of view. Republicans followed a liberal bot that would retweet 24 messages from elected Democrats, left-leaning media outlets and non-profit groups; Democrats followed a conservative bot.