Arthur Brooks at The Atlantic:
Achieving ideological diversity in the workplace is especially tricky because, in aggregate, people’s resistance to accepting political differences is growing. According to the polling firm YouGov, back in 2016, only 10 percent of both Republicans and Democrats said they had no friends with whom they significantly differed politically; by 2020, this figure had risen to 12 percent for Republicans and 24 percent for Democrats. This trend was corroborated by the research firm Generation Lab and the publication Axios, which found in 2021 that 71 percent of college students who are Democrats said they wouldn’t go on a date with a Republican, while 31 percent of Republican college students said they wouldn’t date a Democrat. Similarly, 41 percent of Democratic college students would not support a Republican-run business, 37 percent would not be friends with a Republican, and 30 percent would not work for one. (The Republican numbers regarding Democrats were 7, 5, and 7 percent.) You probably have your own ideas about how to account for this. Unfortunately, though, I am not aware of any differential studies of the amygdala response of progressives and conservatives.
…
I shared the evidence on political intolerance, but political views might seem a special case, outside the concept of diversity we’re trying to address here. I don’t believe it is. By all means, encourage civility and tolerance at work—no one needs a pot-stirrer who bullies others with their opinions and creates bad blood—but true political diversity can offer a trove of valuable market information and keep organizations from making errors. Think of the companies that have stumbled into a major political controversy because they assumed that what everyone in their bubble thinks is the same as what everyone in the rest of this huge country thinks. Political diversity protects against that.