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1. Cross-Partisan Discussions on YouTube: Conservatives Talk to Liberals but Liberals Don't Talk to Conservatives

   Wu, Siqi; Resnick, Paul (May 2021, Proceedings of the Fifteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media)

   Budak, Ceren; Cha, Meeyoung; Quercia, Daniele; Xie, Lexing (Ed.)

   We present the first large-scale measurement study of cross-partisan discussions between liberals and conservatives on YouTube, based on a dataset of 274,241 political videos from 973 channels of US partisan media and 134M comments from 9.3M users over eight months in 2020. Contrary to a simple narrative of echo chambers, we find a surprising amount of cross-talk: most users with at least 10 comments posted at least once on both left-leaning and right-leaning YouTube channels. Cross-talk, however, was not symmetric. Based on the user leaning predicted by a hierarchical attention model, we find that conservatives were much more likely to comment on left-leaning videos than liberals on right-leaning videos. Secondly, YouTube's comment sorting algorithm made cross-partisan comments modestly less visible; for example, comments from conservatives made up 26.3% of all comments on left-leaning videos but just over 20% of the comments were in the top 20 positions. Lastly, using Perspective API's toxicity score as a measure of quality, we find that conservatives were not significantly more toxic than liberals when users directly commented on the content of videos. However, when users replied to comments from other users, we find that cross-partisan replies were more toxic than co-partisan replies on both left-leaning and right-leaning videos, with cross-partisan replies being especially toxic on the replier's home turf. 

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2. Do conservatives really have better mental well-being than liberals?

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0321573  

   Schaffner, Brian F; Hershewe, Thomas; Kava, Zoe; Strell, Jael (April 2025, PLOS One)

   Daoust, Jean-François (Ed.)

   American conservatives tend to rate their mental health more positively than their liberal counterparts. One explanation for this finding is that conservatives may be more likely to justify existing inequalities in society, leading to a palliative effect on their mental health that does not happen for liberals. Conservatives also score higher on personality and attitude measures, such as religiosity, marital status, and patriotism, which are associated with better mental health. We examine whether this ideological mental health gap holds for a different facet of well-being that is closely related to mental health. Further, we suggest that the ideological mental health gap may have more to do with a stigmatized reaction to the term “mental health” which has become increasingly politicized in the US context since its introduction to literature in the early 20th century. First, we examine whether the conservative-liberal divide in self-assessments of mental health remains once we control for a wide variety of demographics, socioeconomic factors, and recent life experiences. We find that accounting for these alternative explanations reduces the gap by about 40%, but that ideology remains a strong predictor of mental health self-reports. Second, we conducted an experiment where we randomly assigned whether people were asked to evaluate their mental health or their overall mood. While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives. One explanation is that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term. Another possibility is that ideological differences persist for some aspects of mental well-being, but not others. 

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3. An adversarial collaboration on the rigidity‐of‐the‐right, symmetry thesis, or rigidity‐of‐extremes: The answer depends on the question

   https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.70071  

   Bowes, Shauna M; Clark, Cory J; Conway, Lucian Gideon; Costello, Thomas; Osborne, Danny; Tetlock, Philip E; van_Prooijen, Jan‐Willem (September 2025, Political Psychology)

   Abstract In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.‐based studies (totalN = 6181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and belief rigidity (operationalized as less evidence‐based belief updating): rigidity‐of‐the‐right, symmetry, and rigidity‐of‐extremes. Across both studies, general and social conservatism were weakly associated with rigidity (|b| ~ .05), and conservatives were more rigid than liberals (Cohen'sd ~ .05). Rigidity generally had null associations with economic conservatism, as well as social and economic political attitudes. Moreover, general extremism (but neither social nor economic extremism) predicted rigidity in Study 1, and all three extremism measures predicted rigidity in Study 2 (average |bs| ~ .07). Extreme rightists were more rigid than extreme leftists in 60% of the significant quadratic relationships. Given these very small and semi‐consistent effects, broad claims about strong associations between ideology and belief updating are likely unwarranted. Rather, psychologists should turn their focus to examining the contexts where ideology strongly correlates with rigidity. 

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4. The politics of identity: The unexpected role of political orientation on racial categorizations of Kamala Harris

   Ma, D. S. (June 2021, Analyses of social issues and public policy)

   null (Ed.)

   The 2020 US Presidential election was historic in that it featured the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, on a major-party ticket. Although Harris identifies as Black, her racial identity was widely scrutinized throughout the election, due to her mixed-race ancestry. Moreover, media coverage of Harris's racial identity appeared to vary based on that news outlet's political leaning and sometimes had prejudicial undertones. The current research investigated racial categorization of Harris and the role that political orientation and anti-Black prejudice might play in shaping these categorizations. Studies 1 and 2 tested the possibility that conservatives and liberals might mentally represent Harris differently, which we hypothesized would lead the two groups to differ in how they categorized her race. Contrary to our prediction, conservatives, and liberals mentally represented Harris similarly. Also surprising were the explicit racial categorization data. Conservatives labeled Harris as White more than liberals, who tended to categorize Harris as multiracial. This pattern was explained by anti-Black prejudice. Study 3 examined a potential political motivation that might explain this finding. We found that conservatives, more than liberals, judge having a non-White candidate on a Democratic ballot as an asset, which may lead conservatives to deny non-White candidates these identities. 

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5. Understanding underlying moral values and language use of COVID-19 vaccine attitudes on twitter

   Judith Borghouts, Yicong Huang (January 2023, PNAS nexus)

   Public sentiment toward the COVID-19 vaccine as expressed on social media can interfere with communication by public health agencies on the importance of getting vaccinated. We investigated Twitter data to understand differences in sentiment, moral values, and language use between political ideologies on the COVID-19 vaccine. We estimated political ideology, conducted a sentiment analysis, and guided by the tenets of moral foundations theory (MFT), we analyzed 262,267 English language tweets from the United States containing COVID-19 vaccine-related keywords between May 2020 and October 2021. We applied the Moral Foundations Dictionary and used topic modeling and Word2Vec to understand moral values and the context of words central to the discussion of the vaccine debate. A quadratic trend showed that extreme ideologies of both Liberals and Conservatives expressed a higher negative sentiment than Moderates, with Conservatives expressing more negative sentiment than Liberals. Compared to Conservative tweets, we found the expression of Liberal tweets to be rooted in a wider set of moral values, associated with moral foundations of care (getting the vaccine for protection), fairness (having access to the vaccine), liberty (related to the vaccine mandate), and authority (trusting the vaccine mandate imposed by the government). Conservative tweets were found to be associated with harm (around safety of the vaccine) and oppression (around the government mandate). Furthermore, political ideology was associated with the expression of different meanings for the same words, e.g. “science” and “death.” Our results inform public health outreach communication strategies to best tailor vaccine information to different groups. 

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