Ph.d.-Profil: Anna-Luise Schönheit

Kari and Marie do not know each other. In conversation, they touch on climate change. Marie expresses skepticism toward human-caused climate change and climate mitigation policies; Kari supports both. Does this disagreement remain a difference of opinion, or does it prompt Kari to place Marie within a broader cultural or political camp—and, in turn, shape how she feels about Marie or whether she would want to interact with her?

Across many Western societies, including Norway, the concern that disagreement spills over into everyday interactions and undermines people’s willingness to engage is widely voiced. This worry is especially pronounced around issues such as climate change, immigration, and gender equality, where attitudes are often perceived as signals of broader cultural orientations or worldviews. Under such conditions, differences of opinion may function as markers of social distinction, with the potential to generate social distance, dislike, and discrimination.

This PhD project takes such everyday encounters as its starting point. Using survey experiments, it examines how disagreement over climate change, immigration, and gender equality shapes how people evaluate and approach one another. Rather than viewing attitudes as isolated issue positions, the project focuses on whether the perceived coherence of others’ attitudes—whether inferred from a single stance or observed across multiple issues—fosters social distance, animosity, and discrimination, and when these reactions intensify, particularly along left–right political divides. To explain why such reactions are stronger for some individuals than others, the project draws on need for cognitive closure—a dispositional tendency toward order, predictability, and discomfort with ambiguity.

By tracing how disagreement over salient cultural issues acquires affective and behavioral consequences, the project speaks to a central intuition underlying contemporary concerns about polarization: that disagreement itself is not the problem, but the way it comes to shape everyday social relations.