The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jinzhuo Liu, whose focus is on affective polarisation in online discussions about Chinese traditional medicine. Is this reduced by shared national identity? The mechanism to explain such a tendency would be the Common In-group Identity Model.
Affective polarisation between opinion-based groups results in the formation or identification of in- and out-groups, treating each other in hostile ways. This is often also observed in online engagement between such groups. Such groups nonetheless foster cross-cutting discussions online; such exposure to opposing views may only increase polarisation between them.
Shared national identity could potentially mitigate such hostility, however, as it places both sides within the same larger in-group; this does not work if national identity itself is also a site of contest, however – expressed for instance in different attitudes towards national culture, towards national policies, or towards other nations. The Chinese medicine debate, for instance, might also trigger broader debates about what it means to be Chinese.
This study studied debates about some 94 news stories in China about Chinese medicine, between 2017 and 2020; in particular, it also examined the use of emoji and rated these for the positive or negative sentiment they conveyed (using the Chinese EmoBank dataset). It coded for cross-cutting discussion, exposure to national identity language, exposure to uncivil language; and thread lengths.
Affective polarisation increases with thread length: more replies resulted in greater emotional divides. Polarisation on Chinese traditional medicine was also amplified by disagreements over Chinese national identity. In such contexts, the rejection of Chinese medicine was equated with the rejection of Chinese national identity itself.
This challenges the universal application of the Common In-group Identity Model: in China, national identity is competitive, so there isn’t necessarily one common in-group in the first place.
