The potential role of empathy in reducing political polarization: The case of Brexit

In June 2016, British voters elected to leave the European Union by a margin of 52% to 48%. Emerging work has begun to characterize ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ voters in the context of increasing unrest and polarization between the two sets of voters. We investigated whether increasing empathy might reduce polarization, and whether such effects were consistent across voter groups. A final sample of 262 British voters completed measures of cognitive and affective empathy, ingroup identification, and outgroup polarization. Political polarization was predicted by higher levels of cognitive empathy, and was greater in ‘Remain’ voters. However, the relationship between ingroup identification and polarization was not moderated by empathy or vote choice. As such, polarization in the Brexit debate appears to be tribal in nature and symmetrical across ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ voters. Nonetheless, we do provide evidence that increasing cognitive empathy for one’s political outgroups may reduce polarization in highly politicized contexts.