RUNNING HEAD: RECEPTIVE MINDSET AND ATTITUDE STRENGTH Eating with the Enemy: Receptive Mindsets in Conflictual Dialogue

Two studies investigate receptiveness to opposing views in conflictual dialogue. Study 1 uses a factor-analytic approach to demonstrate that being in a receptive mindset is distinct from attitude strength and the Big Five trait of Openness (Costa & McCrae, 1985; 1992). Study 2 tests the impact of a broadly utilized conflict resolution ritual, namely sharing food with an opponent, on both receptiveness and attitude strength. Participants engaged in a socio-political debate while eating food that they either prepared for themselves (Control condition) or food that they had previously exchanged with an ideological opponent (Exchange condition). Greater disagreement was associated with lower receptiveness and stronger attitudes. Exchanging food had two effects: it attenuated the negative effect of disagreement on receptiveness, but also led participants to report stronger attitudes on the issue in question. Together, these studies provide evince for a situationally-malleable receptive mindset and distinguish it from related constructs. (148 words) Democratic governance, sound judgment, and congenial relationships all require that individuals engage with ideas they disagree with or even find ideologically distasteful. However, people are often unwilling to do so. The present research introduces and investigates the receptive mindset, and distinguishes it from other related constructs. We define this mindset as a non-judgmental cognitive stance characterized by openness to opposing views and willingness to engage in future contact with holders of those views. We posit that being in such a mindset is an important and under-investigated outcome of conflictual dialogue. To the extent that people feel receptive toward their opponent’s views they may be more willing to engage in future contact and attend to arguments in an open-minded manner. Negotiations scholars have explored a variety of outcomes resulting from contact between opponents, including, but not limited to, likelihood and value of agreements (Galinsky, Maddux, Gilin and White, 2008), agreement satisfaction (Ward, Disston, Brenner and Ross, 2008), evaluations of counterparts and arguments (Cohen, Aaronson and Steele, 2000; Cohen, et al. 2007), and relational outcomes (Curhan, Elfenbein and Xu, 2006). We propose that a mindset which allows partisans to listen to each other in an open-minded manner and be willing to engage in future interaction represents a further important outcome worthy of investigation. Because being in a receptive mindset may, at first blush, appear to be simply a byproduct of weak or uncertain attitudes, in the current work we investigate the relationship between these two constructs. Attitude strength and its moderators have been extensively investigated, in part because shifts in attitude strength are taken as indicative of persuasion (Petty and Krosnick, 1995; Tormala and Petty, 2002; Visser, Bizer & Krosnick, 2006). Indeed, research in the attitudes literature has demonstrated that strong attitudes are more likely to give rise to the congeniality bias (see Hart et al., 2009 for a review), whereby individuals seek attitude confirming and avoid attitude-disconfirming information. In the present research, we conceptualize the receptive mindset as encompassing openminded attention to counter-attitudinal views as well as the willingness to engage with such views and their proponents in the future. Thus, in Study 1 we employ a factor analytic approach to demonstrate the internal coherence of this construct in the context of strongly held sociopolitical attitudes. We also show that being in such a receptive mindset is only weakly correlated with attitude strength and orthogonal to the Big Five trait of Openness to Experience (Costa & McCrae, 1985; 1992). In Study 2 we test a common conflict resolution technique, namely sharing food with an ideological opponent on both the receptive mindset and attitude strength, in order to show that these constructs can be manipulated independently. Inducing a Receptive Mindset What might persuade individuals to consider “the other side”? Prior research suggests that people vilify and stereotype those they disagree with, inferring that opponents may be stupid, evil, biased, and even sub-human (Bandura, 2004; Pronin, Gilovich and Ross, 2004; Ross and Ward, 1995). We propose that one way to foster receptiveness is through creating situations that highlight the shared, human traits of disagreeing partisans by engaging them in common daily activities with holders of opposing views. In the present research we test this hypothesis by engaging participants in food sharing with a debate counterpart. Examples of food sharing as a means to dispute resolution have been documented by generations of anthropologists and sociologists (see Kaplan and Gurven, 2001). From meat distribution customs among Aché hunters in Paraguay (Kaplan, Hill, Hawkes, and Hurtado, 1984) to the “bread and salt” ceremony of Slavic cultures (Smith and Christian, 1984), food exchange represents a basic form of relationship building (Mauss, 1923). However, the underlying assumption that food sharing aids conflict resolution has not been empirically tested. We selected food sharing for our demonstration because we do not expect this manipulation to have parallel effects on receptiveness and attitude strength, allowing us to disambiguate these constructs. Sharing food—due to its association with shared human values of family, safety, and community—is likely to increase opponents’ willingness to hear each other’s views. However, prior research on biased assimilation (Lord, Lepper & Ross, 1979) suggests that close attention to counter-attitudinal messages may leave partisans more, not less, convinced of their prior views. Thus, this common social ritual provides an ideal setting for testing whether the receptiveness mindset can be situationally manipulated independently from attitude strength.