Informal political discussions with peers can increase trust in democracy and improve understanding of self and others. However, these benefits do not often materialize because people tend to shy away from political discussions and because friendship networks rarely expose highly divergent political views. In a large-scale experiment, we overcome these limitations by matching participants to peers selected for sharing common interests and demographics and exposing them to a personal message about a divisive political topic: wealth redistribution. As a result, support for redistributive policies increased and polarization decreased. Furthermore, feeling close to a peer greatly increased the assimilation of a political message. Our results suggest that incidental similarities may cold-start cross-cutting political arguments and increase consensus on divisive topics.
R code and data about focal survey, opinion shift, matching scores, and preregistered focal survey variables have been deposited in the Open Science Framework (<https://osf.io/7ghnj/files/?view_only=4f59af9f5bfb4e29aff2262dfa8aa66d>) ([76][1]).