Abstract
When participants’ attitudes become extreme through group discussion around public policy, they may ignore different opinion and then make inappropriate policy judgment. This study focuses on protected values as extreme policy attitudes and explores the way to proceed group discussion while mitigating participants’ protected values. Two ways of group discussion were examined: (1) mechanism explanation task (task 1) in which participants discuss advantages and disadvantages of public policy and (2) reasons task (task 2) in which participants enumerate reasons for their position around the policy. It is hypothesized that the former task tends to mitigate participants’ protected values, while the latter task tends to foster their protected values. To test this hypothesis, we implemented an experiment that targeted university students (n = 94). The result supported the hypothesis, showing that the tendency to possess protected values decreased (increased) through task 1 (task 2). In contrast to task 1, only policy disadvantages tended to be discussed in task 2, which would cause participants to develop protected values against the policy. Furthermore, it was shown that initial protected values were more likely to propagate among participants in task 2 than in task 1. Finally, implications of the present results for mitigating political extremism around public policies were discussed.
