LAUSR

The January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, which left five dead and hundreds injured, was a stark demonstration that political violence remains a clear and present threat to democratic institutions. Perhaps because of the rarity of such events in the United States’ near past, recent scholarship on political and intergroup conflict has focused largely on topics of polarization and attitude extremism rather than political violence. It is in this social and scientific context that Mernyk et al. (1) provide timely and compelling evidence that inaccurate metaperceptions serve as a psychological driver of support for and willingness to engage in political violence, and that correcting such inaccurate metaperceptions can durably attenuate partisans’ positive attitudes toward political violence. Mernyk et al. (1) begin by documenting inaccurate partisan metaperceptions related to political violence. Both Democrats and Republicans substantially overestimate the extent to which outpartisans support and are willing to engage in political violence. Next, they introduce a corrective intervention which informs partisans of outpartisans’ true and low levels of support for and willingness to engage in political violence. This intervention reduces partisans’ own support for and willingness to engage in political violence, and they find that this effect lasts for at least a month. The success of their intervention provides two critical takeaways. First, attitudes about political violence can be changed and increasing levels of polarization have not cemented partisans’ tolerance for political violence. Second, these interventions provide experimental evidence that attitudes about political violence are caused in part by judgments of how much others support and are willing to engage in political violence. Put simply, if partisans (inaccurately) think other partisans are tolerant of political violence, they will themselves become more tolerant of political violence. This dynamic parallels similar findings across social domains, where (mis)perceptions of social norms and others’ attitudes can lead people to shift their own opinions closer to the (mis)perceived values (2–4).