Synthetic Contact with AI Reduces Cross-Partisan Animosity
Americans' warmth toward members of the opposing political party has fallen sharply over the past three decades -- yet meaningful cross-partisan contact remains scarce, in part because people actively avoid it. Across five preregistered studies (total N = 3,960 U.S. partisans), we test whether brief conversations with AI chatbots representing the political outgroup can substitute for the contact people shun. Synthetic contact first lowers the barrier to entry: partisans would endure almost twice as long contemplating their own mortality to avoid a human outgroup partner as an AI one. These conversations then correct the misperceptions that fuel division. At baseline, Democrats placed Republicans more than a standard deviation past their actual position on environmental consumption attitudes -- enough to flip the average Republican from supportive to opposed -- and a single ten-minute conversation with an outgroup chatbot corrected those beliefs and warmed affect in a within-person study of both parties. A three-arm experiment ruled out pure engagement and sociality as drivers. Synthetic contact also moved behavior, in a sample of both parties and on a more affectively charged issue: participants who spoke with an outgroup bot about immigration were six percentage points more likely than controls to choose to have a real conversation with a partisan from the other side. A final study tested whether these gains last: the warmth effect replicated immediately in a new sample; most of it faded within a week, with a small residual concentrated among the most extreme partisans. Analyzing conversation content showed that information, more than friendliness, distinguishes outgroup bots from control chatbots. Together, these findings establish synthetic contact as a scalable, behaviorally consequential, and -- unlike face-to-face contact -- widely acceptable form of cross-partisan engagement.