Attitude convergence
To further explore the consequences of the mislabeling intervention for the overall trajectory of conversations, we examine a conversation-level metric of convergence in thermometer rankings across all candidates. We compare the average gap between the subject’s rating of each candidate and their partner’s rating of the same candidate, before and after the conversation. This metric has the advantage of looking at changes in more than just one subject’s top-rated candidate, and it allows for reciprocal influence across the full range of candidates. Same-gender conversations are excluded from this analysis because the initial level of agreement on candidates between conversation partners is different than for cross-gender conversations due to gendered differences in candidate preferences (see the The left panel of Fig. Mislabeling effects on attitude convergence. The left panel shows the magnitude of disagreements in feelings towards candidates pre- and post-conversation by treatment condition and the right panel explicitly shows treatment effects on the within-conversation changes in feelings towards candidates. This visualization depicts the absolute difference in thermometer rating for the same candidate across conversation partners within either the pre- or post-conversation survey. Conversations where the man is mislabeled exhibit increases in disagreement that are significantly larger (shown in the right panel, two-tailed 