Verbal communication can act as social glue, facilitating group coherence, or as a social repellent antagonizing people against each other. In this symposium, we bring together social psychologists, psycholinguists, and media scientists to ask how communication strategies have evolved in the age of polarization. While much of the literature on political polarization is based on the U.S. landscape, our workshop brings attention to polarization in Europe. The work of Asya Achimova addresses this question by looking at how speakers in these two cultural spaces choose indirect ways to signal their opinions on societally relevant topics. Her results suggest that German speakers prefer more direct ways of communicating opinions when topics are particularly controversial. We then turn to conversational strategies of Dutch speakers and their use of hedging expressions, such as ‘I think’. Liesje Van der Linden investigates how these hedges affect the perception of polarization in discourse. These psycholinguistic studies set the stage for studies of polarizing content in social media. Jürgen Buder will share insights into understanding social media communication strategies in German and US discourse. Gerrit Anders will then take this debate to the actual comments section of the German media outlet “Der Spiegel” and evaluate what types of comments users most often engage with, showing that users are more likely to engage with opposing view and express antagonistic opinions. Looking at the conflicting findings of Jürgen Buder in experimental settings and the findings of Gerrit Anders in field settings will allow us to discuss the role of antagonism in increasing polarization. Finally, we plan to engage with the possible interventions that aim at reducing polarization. Ximeng Fang will share his recent work on a large-scare experimental intervention in which individuals in Germany were matched to form either pairs with congruent or incongruent political views. He will discuss how confronting opposing people affected their antagonism, and whether bringing together similarly-minded individuals increased the risk of creating echo-chambers. In sum, we will look into the role of cultural expectations, personality characteristics of individuals, and the controversy of topics to investigate how they shape communication strategies.