We live in an era in which groups of people—on the Left, on the Right, in university departments, in religious institutions—often end up in a pitch of rage, seeing fellow members of the human species not as wrong but as enemies. Such groups may even embark on something like George Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate. When that happens, or when people go to extremes, there are many explanations. But group polarization unifies seemingly diverse phenomena. Extremism and mobbing are not so mysterious. On the contrary, they are predicable products of social interactions.
The essay goes into some of the social psychology involved. As my thinking evolves, I am putting more emphasis on what the three-axes model says about political psychology and less emphasis on what it says about ideology per se.
As my thinking evolves, I am putting more emphasis on what the three-axes model says about political psychology.
Or is that modern people have a lot easier time and ways of sharing opinions and finding the news or commentators they really want to follow. When the means of sharing information, society is disrupted. Do we get Reformation without the printing press? (For an example of seeing raging religious differences.)
1) In all reality political violence is down around the world the last 25 years (post Cold War) Honestly, I often think Trump won the Presidency in 2016 because the US population was bored with modern political realities and wanted some disruptions.
2) I know young people believe this, but say racism was a lot worse when I was younger in the 1970s and 1980s. There was lots talk about an African-American family moving into our middle/working class neighborhood in 1979. And young people would be amazed on how students at a racially mixed school in the late 1980s. I know young people in our area don’t understand the Rodney King trial and riots.
3) It is probably best to think that really only 3 – 5% of Progressives are raging SJWs and 25% are hard/left socialist. Very similar on the right but the extreme tend to be the loudest voices.
Sunstein’s discussion of hidden profiles seems underdeveloped. First, a lot of people who are unsure of things may be consciously aware that most issues have “wicked” characteristics and are much more nuanced and complex than college professors and journalists and other ideological crusaders of their ilk would permit the public to believe.
The right position for most people to be is in fact uncertain. Who has the time to think through issues deeply? And once one has done so, more often than not, the correct answer remains uncertainty.
And this is what we observe on a daily basis among people whose bread and butter is not tied to buffoonish attempts at authoritative bravado. Most people harbor low grade contempt for zealots and this is amply demonstrated in polling by the public’s low level of respect for journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, teachers, and other would-be philosopher kings. Most people have open minds and are willing to hear both sides of an argument. They also can recognize one sided arguments.
Keeping quiet is very often the right thing to do simply to avoid entanglement with zealots. There is no gain to be had.
Keeping quiet also keeps information out of the hands of those who would use that information against you. If political pollsters actually had the information necessary to predict election outcomes, they might be able to convert that information into self-fulfilling prophecies.
The silver lining to the multinational social media companies’ attempts to meddle in elections by converting their platforms into far left echo chambers for extremists is that your average person will be incentivized to do their self-directed learning elsewhere. An analogy may be the recent Walmart studies that find that a new Walmart in town may shut down the local department store but also results in increased numbers of specialty shops. By analogy Twitter and Facebook are the Walmarts but blogs are the specialty shops for thinking that matters.
True we should be quiet around the various tribes, but some of us, including me, cannot resist the easy troll.
There is a book called _One nation undecided_ that examines “Five Hard Issues,” one of them being immigration to the USA and another being racial inequality in the USA. I wonder how quickly you would get in trouble in many situations simply by taking talking points verbatim from the book.
Here is the citation.
One Nation Undecided
Clear Thinking about Five Hard Issues That Divide Us
Peter H. Schuck
hardback 2017. Paperback coming out this year.
It’s not an easy read, either! He writes well and the book is engaging–it’s just that by the time he finishes describing why things are so complicated, you’ve been concentrating for a while.
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10936.html
Arnold, I see the Sunstein article/book as a complement to your Three Languages framework. Your frameworks makes clear which position an individual will tend to take while Sunstein is emphasizing that this tendency becomes more entrenched and more polarized when a group of like-minded individuals deliberate about their position.
“groups tend to dwell on shared information and to neglect information that is held by few members”
While this may be true in group deliberation, the opposite seems to be true when people interact through financial markets. In financial markets, traders are rewarded for acting on information that most participants lack. In contrast, information that most participants already know is already incorporated in prices and has very little value. Maybe, that’s why markets seem so much better than mere discussion at aggregating information.
Sunstein provides explanations for group polarization, but he doesn’t emphasize that in his scenarios the group members individually benefit from the polarizing behavior while the costs, if any, of failing to incorporate all information are dispersed across the whole group or even projected onto people outside the group. In contrast, when financial market participants fail to consider all information, the costs often fall on participants individually through trading losses. Participants also gain individually from considering information that others haven’t.
So, group polarization may not be so “inevitable” after all. Rather, it could arise from non-ideal incentive structure rather than from an inherent aspect of human nature. When a social structure, like a financial market, incentivizes participants individually to consider all information, then the result seems to be convergence rather than polarization.