But that fear, while not unfounded, is often greatly exaggerated, he says Trevor SpellmanPhD student in management and organizations at the Kellogg School.
Spelman worked with Kellogg professors of Management and Organizations and his co-directors Litowitz Center for Enlightened Dissent Eli J. Finkel and Nour Kteily as well as Abdo Elnakouris of the University of Houston to study how Democrats and Republicans react when people in their own party diverge from their party’s standard view on key issues.
They found that individuals from both political parties consistently and substantially overestimated how much their own party would punish them for expressing opposing views.
This tendency to overestimate rejection could have serious implications, Spelman says. Research links this to self-censorship: those who expect harsher reactions are more likely to hide opposing views. When this pattern occurs in many people, it can distort the information environment itself – making political parties appear much more uniform than they really are and obscuring the diversity of opinion that exists within them.
“Healthy democratic discourse depends on people being willing to express dissenting views within their own coalitions. But when people systematically overestimate the social costs of such action, we end up with a distorted picture of what people really believe—and that undermines the quality of political dialogue within parties,” says Finkel, who also serves as the Schaapiro Research Institute at the Morton O.
The price of disagreement
“Two trends really stood out to me as we were designing this project,” says Spelman. “The first is that Americans are increasingly afraid of getting involved in political disputes.”
For example, polls show that the percentage of Americans who say they are afraid to speak their minds has exceeded 13 percent in 1954 to 46 percent in 2022.
The second trend is that people seem to increasingly perceive political parties as having uniform sets of beliefs – leading to the impression that liberals and conservatives tend to align with their party on every important issue. “But in fact, based on polling and private polling data, we know that people actually have a diversity of opinion below the surface,” Spellman says.
This discrepancy got Spellman thinking. He and his colleagues hypothesized that this potentially false appearance of consent may actually be what contributes to their remaining silent in the first place.
They tested this in a study where they randomly assigned about 250 Republicans and 250 Democrats to participate in one of two tasks: either to predict on a scale of one to seven how people in their political party would react to them expressing an opposing opinion, or to predict how they themselves would react to someone else who disagreed.
An opposing view for Democrats, for example, was that access to abortion should be restricted, which is generally considered a conservative view. While for Republicans, the opposing view was the more often liberal belief that access to abortion should be protected.
If people had an accurate idea of how severely dissent would be punished, the two scores—one, how they thought their fellow citizens would react to a dissenting opinion and two, how they would react to a partisan dissent—should roughly match when averaged across the group. But the scores didn’t.
Instead, a clear disconnect emerged.
People who expected the crisis expected moderately harsh social reaction. But those who actually did the judging reported much milder reactions. The mean difference—about a full point on the scale—represents a substantial overestimate of the social costs associated with dissent.
Anticipated versus actual responses
The researchers were surprised at how strongly the evidence showed a disconnect between expected and actual social reactions to disagreement. So they conducted a series of follow-up studies to confirm what they were seeing.
In one, researchers used the same seven-point scale survey to examine whether the effect occurred among people they actually met. Pairs of people from the same political party completed a small project. Then some of them learned that their new acquaintance had just softened their views on a party-defining belief. In another study, researchers looked at responses from people who had changed their minds in real life.
Over and over they saw the same pattern. People vastly overestimated how much backlash they would face for disagreeing with their party’s standard stance.
This overestimation appears to be associated with self-censoring behavior. In the studies, those who expected stronger reactions were more likely to report being silent about opposing views. If this dynamic plays out widely, it could contribute to the false impression that political parties are more even and divided than polling data suggests they actually are.
“When people hide opposing views, the views that remain visible are the ones that conform, which can contribute to a false perception of consensus,” says Spelman. “Expressing dissent offers an opportunity to create a more representative public sphere. We’re not having conversations that could bridge the divide.”
Demonstration of faith
The researchers then set out to determine why this overestimation occurs. They found a common tendency: the fear of appearing unfaithful.
Because humans are a social species, humans are naturally sensitive to the possibility of social rejection and questions of faith, Spellman says. And because beliefs on certain issues like immigration and gun control have become seemingly central to what it means to belong to one party or another, going against the grain can feel like treason.
“This aligns with previous research from political and social psychology, which shows that our beliefs on certain issues can act as identity markers. It’s a really powerful way to show that we belong and are loyal to our group,” says Spelman.
Therefore, dissent can risk anger, ridicule, or even exile from the group. Given people’s innate sensitivity to threats of social rejection, people naturally adopt a better-safe-than-sorry attitude, he adds.
This shows a possible solution.
In one study, people who had changed their minds on a political issue were asked to think about how they had shown loyalty to their party in the past. This simple exercise helped them feel more secure in their group’s stance—and as a result, they expected significantly less rejection for their opposing views, aligning their expectations more closely with reality.
Breaking the cycle
While the current research looked specifically at Democrats and Republicans, Spelman believes this dynamic could play out in any group where beliefs can signal loyalty, including other political parties, religious groups, or even sports fans.
The findings suggest several practical solutions.
First, the awareness that people systematically overestimate rejection is valuable in itself—it can help calibrate expectations. And practicing devotional reflection offers a specific tool: recalling past displays of group commitment can reduce anxiety about appearing unfaithful and lead to more accurate predictions of how others will react.
But perhaps more importantly, when people express disagreement—even in the face of some social cost—it makes real diversity of opinion within groups more visible. This visibility can help correct the false impression of uniformity that keeps others silent.
“People stay quiet to avoid reactions that are much milder than they imagine,” says Spelman. “When enough people realize this and start talking, it can change the information environment – making it easier for the next person and the next person.”
The costs of dissent are real, he points out, but not what people think. “Your fellow citizens may be more open to hearing different points of view than you expect,” he says. “The challenge is creating the conditions where people feel safe enough to find out.”
