How Ambient Cues Facilitate Political Segregation

Abstract

People increasingly self-segregate into politically homogeneous communities. How they do this remains unclear. We propose that people use ambient cues correlated with political values to infer whether they would like to live in those communities. We test this hypothesis in five studies. In Studies 1 ( n = 3,543) and 2 ( n = 5,609), participants rated community cues; liberals and conservatives’ preferences differed. In Studies 3a ( n = 1,643) and 3b ( n = 1,840), participants read about communities with liberal or conservative cues. Even without explicit information about the communities’ politics, participants preferred communities with politically congenial cues. In Study 4 ( n = 282), participants preferred politically congenial communities and wanted to leave politically uncongenial communities. In Study 5 ( n = 370), people selectively navigated their communities in a politically congenial way. These studies suggest that peoples’ perceptions of communities can be shaped by subtle, not necessarily political, cues that may facilitate growing political segregation.