A new study found that a simple intervention could moderate otherwise polarized political attitudes, such as those toward a proposed Islamic community center and mosque near the World Trade Center site in New York City.
CHAMPAIGN, lll. Partisans beware! Some of your most cherished political attitudes may be malleable! Researchers report that simply answering three "why" questions on an innocuous topic leads people to be more moderate in their views on an otherwise polarizing political issue. The research, described in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, explored attitudes toward what some people refer to as the ground zero mosque, an Islamic community center and mosque built two blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center in New York City. When the Islamic center first was proposed it sparked a heated debate pitting proponents of religious freedom against those who felt the center should be moved away from the site of the 9/11 attacks out of reverence for those killed by Muslim extremists. "We used the ground zero mosque as a particularly polarizing issue," said University of Illinois psychology Jesse Preston, who supervised the research with graduate students Daniel Yang and Ivan Hernandez. "People feel strongly about it generally one way or the other." Yang, now a postdoctoral researcher at Yale, designed the study with Preston and led the experiments. The researchers used techniques known to induce an abstract mindset in people, Preston said.
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