Julia Cohen on June 1, 2018
Thanksgiving dinners were significantly shorter for families with split political ideologies in 2016.
Dinners where relatives came from homes voting for the respectively opposite party of the hosts were 30 to 50 minutes shorter than those where all family members came from households voting the same way, according to a study in Science Magazine.
This effect was exaggerated for guests who lived in areas heavily targeted by political advertising, with their Thanksgiving dinners up to a third shorter than the average family’s. (RELATED: Facebook Plans To ‘Dial Up’ Suppression Of Certain News Outlets)
The shorter dinners led to 34 million hours less of Thanksgiving dinner in total.
The study looked at Thanksgiving 2016 and was able to determine the length of dinners as well as home voting districts using GPS signals from cell phones.
The study’s authors plan on repeating the project in 2018 to see if the partisan divide continues into the midterms and beyond.
