Political Partisanship and Perceived Partisan Threat Relate to Initial Trust Decisions

Affective polarization in the United States is an ongoing and pervasive problem eroding cooperation and productive debate related to partisan and nonpartisan topics. Such findings signal an inherent mistrust of opposing partisans that is likely related to the extent of threat people believe opposing partisans pose to them. Whereas past work has examined the mistrust and threat characteristic of affective polarization in complex social environments as well as in initial social perception, no work to date has examined their effects in the context of simple everyday decisions. The current work filled this gap in the literature by examining effects of political partisanship and perceived partisan threat on trust behavior indexed by an economic trust game widely used in decision making research. Across two studies using college-aged adults (Study 1) and adults across the lifespan (Study 2), participant and target partisanship interacted to affect trust. Across studies, more liberal participants exhibited lower trust toward Republicans than Democrats. However, more conservative participants’ trust either remained stable across party lines (Study 1) or erred toward lower trust toward Democrats than Republicans (Study 2). In Study 1, these patterns were paralleled when substituting perceived partisan threat toward Republicans and Democrats for political ideology, with threat potentially linking the relation between participants’ ideology and their trust behavior. Study 2 manipulated partisan threat to show larger participant-based partisan differences in trust when partisan trustees were more versus less threatening. These findings in part support threat-related affective polarization in initial trust decisions and that have implications for intergroup interactions along partisan lines in everyday life.