Disciplinary priors strongly predict which direction of effect gets reported.

Evidence

What the results furthermore tell us, is that the direction of the effect varies according to discipline (see Table 4). 59% of the articles published in political science journals report that deliberation can reduce polarization, whereas this effect is only reported in 17% of the social psychology studies. Social psychologists (paralleling the findings from the remaining disciplines) report much more often (in 61% of the cases) that group discussion actually increases polarization. … The strong association between the discipline and the results requires further investigation, but two explanations are possible. On the one hand, there might arguably be a positive-results bias. Political science approaches the issue mainly from the angle of deliberative democracy, and the wide-spread assumption among political scientists is that deliberation is capable of overcoming even the deepest and most contentious forms of disagreement. It is therefore expected that deliberation reduces polarization. In contrast, most psychological studies approach the theme from the polarization angle, and are interested in the risky shift phenomenon, predicting that deliberating groups would go to extremes. As such, studies reporting findings in line with the discipline’s assumptions might get published more frequently, which might account for at least part of our findings. — Didier Caluwaerts et al., Deliberation and Polarization, 108

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the confirmation/publication-bias dynamics the reader probes in whether evidence of deliberation’s effects is trustworthy. — connects to: Deliberation reduces affective polarization but often increases idea-based polarization. — Didier Caluwaerts et al., Deliberation and Polarization: A…, 107; Journal article titles encode hypotheses and predicted findings

Related

• Deliberation reduces polarization mainly in political science studies (similarity 0.93)
• Deliberation reduces affective polarization but often increases idea-based polarization. (similarity 0.88)
• Deliberation depolarizes groups only when sufficient disagreement is present. (similarity 0.84)
• Deliberation polarization effects decay is unmeasured since few studies track long-term effects. (similarity 0.84)
• Deliberation reduces polarization only under specific deliberative frameworks (similarity 0.84)
• Depolarization requires deliberation framed by deliberative-democracy conditions. (similarity 0.84)
• Didier Caluwaerts et al. — Deliberation and Polarization A Multi-Disciplinary Review (similarity 0.83)
• Unipolar opinion convergence dominates deliberation studies more often than bipolar divergence (similarity 0.83)
• Deliberation depolarizes only when structured by deliberative-democracy design features, otherwise discussion polarizes. (similarity 0.82)
• Facilitated deliberation depolarizes participants while unfacilitated deliberation polarizes them. (similarity 0.82)
• Facilitation is a decisive condition for deliberation-induced depolarization. (similarity 0.81)
• Study sampling may proxy for the heterogeneity that drives deliberation outcomes. (similarity 0.81)
• Communicative encounters depolarize only when framed as deliberative democracy practices. (similarity 0.80)
• Mediated rather than face-to-face deliberation tends to polarize groups (similarity 0.80)
• Polarization research distinguishes idea-based from affective polarization (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Journal article titles encode hypotheses and predicted findings #expands (0.80)