Christopher Liu, University of Toronto – Ideology and Proximity

Does personal interaction with people who hold conflicting ideology influence your thinking?

Chris Liu, a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto, conducted a fascinating study on the topic.

Christopher Liu is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at Rotman. His research explores spatial networks: how geography shapes the ability of individuals and firms to enter into some (but not other) relationships and networks. Empirical settings for his work have ranged from scientists working within a biotechnology firm to the US Senate Chamber. Chris also has a long-standing interest on scientists, innovation and productivity, and continues to actively conduct research in this area.

Ideology and Proximity

In January of this year, US Senators returned to a dramatically different landscape on Capitol Hill, as Republicans took over as the majority party. Probably, one of the first things the returning Democrats and Republicans did was to sit down together and hope to arrive at common understandings.

That could be a big mistake.

In a new study, my coauthor Sameer Srivastava and I argued that more social contact could lead to either common ground or increased polarization, depending upon the individuals’ political identities. Senators from the same party who had opportunities to interact with one another, voted more similarly. However, we showed that this did not necessarily occur. Democrats and Republicans that had more contact—as measured by seating proximity on the Senate Chamber floor and committee co-membership—voted together less, not more, often. In other words, increasing contact actually drove a wedge between opposition party members rather than establishing commonalities.

Moreover, this effect, the “dark side of contact” is most evident when contact occurs in contentious settings.

We chose to study the Senate as “a window into how people’s behaviors are shaped by others in the organization”. The Senate was ideal for a study on the consequences of contact because of its rich record-keeping. We were able to track pairs of senators over time, observe multiple, distinct measures of contact, and analyze the overlap in each pair of individual’s subsequent voting patterns.

Although this study took place in an elite political setting, its findings may also have implications for other organizations that are trying to better understand the consequences of their internal design decisions. Within organizations, geography location is a key managerial lever, but it’s a lever that can have unexpected consequences.