Overall Conclusion: No.

How we know: 3 Studies

STUDY 1: Are Americans willing to listen to the other side?
Conclusion: Yes.

How do we know?
Step 1: Record thousands of passionate Americans explaining their feelings about gun control, abortion and immigration.
Step 2: Offer participants the chance to listen to up to 3 of these audio clips from people with whom they strongly disagree.
Step 3: Record how many they listen to.

Result: 69% listened to all 3 available clips.

STUDY 2: Are Americans persuadable?
Conclusion: 10% are.

How do we know?
Step 1: Before letting participants listen to audio clips, ask them to rate their views on gun control, abortion and immigration on a scale of 1 to 10.
Step 2: Let them listen to audio clips.
Step 3: Ask them to re-rate their views.

Result: 10% move 2-3 points on the scale.

STUDY 3: Does emphasizing common ground reduce division?
Conclusion: Sometimes

How do we know?
Step 1: Ask participants to rate their views
Step 2: Also ask them to rate their support for either a) a list of rules of etiquette or b) a list of UN human rights.
Step 3: Before letting them play the audio clips, randomly tell half the participants that the opposing voices they're going to hear agree with them about etiquette/rights.
Step 4: Let them play audio clips.
Step 5: Ask them to re-rate their views.

Results: Groups told they had common beliefs moved their ratings away from the extremes after hearing the clips. This was only true though for abortion and immigration. It had no effect for gun control.

READ THE FULL PAPER
Reducing Polarization on Abortion, Guns and Immigration: An Experimental Study. (Belot & Briscese, 2022)

Overall Conclusion: Yes(ish).

How we know: 2 Studies

STUDY 1: Do people listen to/like the other side more?
Conclusion: Kinda.

How do we know?
Step 1: Find strongly politically biased Americans.
Step 2: Have them read an article celebrating a) open-mindedness or b) close-mindedness.
Step 3: Let them choose news articles from a list that either a) supports b) challenges or c) is neutral towards their political beliefs.
Step 4: Record which articles they read and for how long.
Step 5: Measure how much they like the other side compared to their own.

Result 1: Celebrating open-mindedness DID NOT effect how many challenging articles people read, but it DID increase the number of neutral articles (compared to promoting close-mindedness). It also increased how long people read them.

Result 2: Celebrating open-mindedness DID NOT help Americans treat the other side more like people from theirs.

STUDY 2: Does it help if Democrats/Republicans celebrate it?
Conclusion: Yes.

How do we know?
Step 1: Find strongly republican/democratic-leaning people.
Step 2: Have them read an article from their party celebrating how a) open-minded or b) close-minded they are.
Step 3: Let them choose news articles from a list that either a) supports b) challenges or c) is neutral towards their political beliefs.
Step 4: Record which articles they read and for how long.
Step 5: Measure how much they like the other side compared to their party.

Result 1: Americans who saw their party celebrate open-mindedness read more challenging articles than those who saw close-mindedness celebrated.

Result 2: Americans who saw their party celebrate open-mindedness viewed the other side more like their party members.

PAPER TITLE
Social Norms and Selectivity: Effects of Norms of Open-Mindedness on Content Selection and Affective Polarization. Magdalena Wojcieszak, Stephan Winter & Xudong Yu, 2020

Overall Conclusion: Yes.

How we know:
Step 1: Search every social science study database using 54 search terms relating to “intergroup interactions”.
Step 2: Collect every study that comes up between 1940 (when research began) and 2000 (when this study was done).
Step 3: Collect every study the above studies cite.
Step 4: Write letters to all the researchers from those studies asking them for any studies they didn’t publish.
Step 5: Email networks of social science researchers across Australia, Europe and North America asking for more unpublished studies.
Step 6: Remove studies that look at anything other than how F2F interactions affect prejudice.
Step 7: Remove studies where people can belong to both groups at the same time.
Step 8: Rate the remaining 515 studies based on how well they control variables.
Step 9: Use statistics to figure out what the studies find on average.

Result: 94% of the studies found that face-time with people we’re prejudiced against reduces our prejudice.

Result: This finding gets stronger for the best controlled experiments.