Adam Smith Business School

Dr Egon Tripodi (Hertie School)

Talking Across the Aisle
Wednesday, 1 October 2025, 15:00–16:30
Room 383, Adam Smith Business School

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a large-scale experiment in which U.S. Democrats and Republicans engage in naturalistic face-to-face video conversations focused on political facts. We investigate both self-selection into politically homogeneous conversations and the effects of co- and cross-partisan interactions on information aggregation and affective polarization. We find that participants exhibit a preference for co-partisan conversations that is driven by pessimistic expectations about both the relative informational and hedonic value of cross-partisan interactions. Broadly in line with their beliefs, participants learn slightly less from cross-partisan than from co-partisan conversations. This gap in learning arises not from how knowledge is distributed across party lines, but from a significantly greater difficulty of extracting knowledge from counter-partisans. Participants' pessimism about the hedonic value of conversations is less warranted, as co- and cross-partisan conversations are, on average, deemed equally enjoyable ex post. Moreover, cross-partisan interactions lead to a reduction in affective polarization that persists more than three months after the end of our experiment. Taken together, our findings suggest that policies that encourage cross-partisan interactions with the aim of reducing affective polarization and promoting information aggregation may be more successful at the former goal than at the latter.

Biography

Egon Tripodi is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Hertie School. Egon is an applied microeconomist, broadly interested in Behavioral, Public and Political Economy questions. His research uses lab, field and natural experiments to understand how incentives and the social environment shape behavior and beliefs. Before joining the Hertie School, Egon was a JILAEE Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Chicago and at the Universidad del CEMA in Buenos Aires. He earned a PhD in Economics from the European University Institute in 2020.

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First published: 17 September 2025