Social perspective-taking as a catalyst to building common ground between opposing parties

Democracies thrive on constructive conversations between stakeholders with divergent opinions, yet building common ground between these stakeholders to facilitate such conversations appears more difficult than ever. How can opposing parties establish common ground when preexisting shared experiences, traits, or values are not easily uncovered? Drawing on an online sample of U.S. adults ( N  = 558), this preregistered randomized controlled experiment tested social perspective-taking (SPT) as a promising strategy to create common ground between people who hold opposing opinions on a polarizing policy. Specifically, in two treatment conditions, a fictional expert took the perspective of participants by either affirming their (a) reasonable logic or (b) good intentions. The two interventions created a sense of common ground and improved multiple relationship-related outcomes, including perceived perspective-taking, perceived similarity, perceived fairness, and anticipated positive relationship with the opposing expert. Estimated effect sizes further suggest that affirming the other party’s logic was about twice as effective as affirming their intentions. In the present historical moment when society faces acute polarization threats, our study provides a recipe for effectively communicating SPT attempts that can catalyze common ground where none existed previously.