When political identity arrives before the argument
How belonging, familiarity and credibility shape what we can hear during an election
By Flávia Sgavioli
Imagine a message arriving in a family group chat. It makes a claim about a candidate and ends by asking people to share it. Before checking the source, someone asks who sent it. The answer shapes the conversation: one person trusts the sender; another already doubts the content because of the sender’s political preferences. The message has barely been examined, yet an existing relationship is already shaping how it is read.
This hypothetical scene opens a question about elections: what do we hear when we recognise an ally or an opponent in the person speaking? Information can arrive alongside our history with that person, the groups we associate them with and the place we want to occupy in relation to those groups. Examining this process requires attention to both the quality of the information and the relationship through which it circulates.
Belonging and polarisation
Mario Fuks and Pedro Henrique Marques help define the problem by distinguishing ideological from affective polarisation. Analysing Brazilian data from 2002 to 2019, they found predominantly affective polarisation, more intense in relation to candidates. The study also identified asymmetries between political camps. Its historical scope matters: the findings do not automatically describe the electorate in 2026. They offer concepts for investigating the current election without assuming that all groups behave alike. [1]
The distinction changes the question. Disagreement about public policy involves reasons that can be discussed. Assigning an entirely negative moral identity to a speaker can make people less willing to examine those reasons. I propose investigating the moment when disagreement comes to be received as a sign of who the other person is. If every statement merely confirms an existing classification, the encounter leaves little opportunity for reconsideration.
Familiarity does not replace verification
Familiarity adds another difficulty. In experiments published in 2015, Lisa Fazio and colleagues showed that repetition could increase truth ratings even when participants had knowledge that contradicted a statement. The work concerns the illusory truth effect: the ease of processing something familiar can contribute to the feeling that it is true. The study did not measure votes and cannot predict an individual voter’s choice. [2]
Recognising a sentence, trusting its sender and checking information are different operations. In everyday exchanges, we can move between them without noticing. After reading a claim many times, we may no longer remember where we first encountered it. When someone challenges it, we might experience the challenge as an attack on a certainty that has come to feel like our own. This possibility is an interpretation to investigate, rather than an electoral outcome demonstrated by the experiment.
An inquiry into subjectivity can ask what is at stake when we reconsider a conviction in front of other people. Depending on the relationship, admitting a mistake may feel like losing authority or distancing ourselves from an important group. This hypothesis directs attention to the cost someone attributes to reconsideration. It does not justify diagnosing voters or reducing political choices to individual conflicts. Material interests, values and social experience also require analysis.
What a conversation can achieve
Listening does not guarantee reconciliation. Erik Santoro and David Broockman conducted experiments in the United States with people from opposing parties. Conversations about experiences people could share reduced animosity in the short term; discussions centred on partisan disagreement did not have the same effect. The gains diminished over time and did little to change measures of commitment to democracy. The research shows that both the topic and the limits of a conversation matter. It provides no recipe that transfers automatically to Brazil. [3]
Within these limits, it is worth observing what we do with an unexpected answer. Do we ask about its source? Can we distinguish a claim requiring evidence from a fear the speaker is trying to express? A fear can deserve attention while the explanation offered for it still requires checking. Considering both dimensions allows us to examine the speaker’s experience and the argument’s validity using appropriate criteria for each.
In education, this distinction has consequences. A lesson about elections can examine the source, date and context of a claim while exploring how students justify their trust in it. Teachers need to make their assessment criteria explicit so that discussion does not become an exercise in guessing the teacher’s political position. Meaningful participation includes being able to ask a question and discover that a certainty needs reconsidering.
When the next message arrives, there is room for a pause before forwarding or ridiculing it: can I explain what was claimed, where the information came from and why I consider it reliable? If my answer depends only on who is on my side, the inquiry has not yet begun.
References
[1] Fuks, M.; Marques, P. H. (2022). Polarização e contexto: medindo e explicando a polarização política no Brasil. Opinião Pública, 28(3), 560–593.
[2] Fazio, L. K.; Brashier, N. M.; Payne, B. K.; Marsh, E. J. (2015). Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993–1002.
[3] Santoro, E.; Broockman, D. E. (2022). The promise and pitfalls of cross-partisan conversations for reducing affective polarization: Evidence from randomized experiments. Science Advances, 8(25), eabn5515.
This article is part of Flávia Sgavioli’s research on listening, language and subjectivity.
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