In this post, I’d like to tell you about one of the most fascinating papers I’ve read in the last few years. Led by the psychologist Victoria Parker, it’s about the causes and consequences of political polarization. Here’s my one-sentence summary of the paper:
One of the major causes of political polarization is the fact that people dislike their political opponents for views most don’t actually hold - a tendency fueled in large part by politically biased media on both sides.
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The Growing Problem of Political Polarization
Political polarization is a real and growing problem. People don’t just disagree with the opposing political team; they often actively despise them. As one 2020 paper put it, “Out-party hate has emerged as a stronger force than in-party love.” Many people are horrified by the idea of living near to or working with someone with different political views than them - and doubly horrified by the idea that a daughter or son might marry such a person. And whereas discrimination on the basis of race and religion is receding, discrimination on the basis of political affiliation is getting increasingly common.
Long story short, it’s a mess.
But what lies behind the polarization? And why is it quite so intense? Those are the questions that motivated a recent preprint by Victoria Parker, Matthew Feinberg, Alexa Tullett, and Anne Wilson, titled “The Ties that Blind: Misperceptions of the Opponent Fringe and the Miscalibration of Political Contempt.”
The central thesis of the paper is that at the root of the problem is a simple misunderstanding: People on both sides of the political aisle vastly overestimate the prevalence of extreme views on the other side.
Conservatives, for instance, think that most lefties are lazy snowflakes who want to eliminate free speech and defund the police. Lefties, in contrast, think that most conservatives are racist rednecks who want to eliminate immigration and defund the schools. And while both sides roll their eyes at the caricatures of their own side, they find it hard to recognize their own eye-rolling caricatures of the other.
The phenomenon is known as false polarization: polarization based not on genuine differences in the modal views of each side but on misperceived differences. According to Parker and colleagues, false polarization is amplified by partisan media, and has various harmful knock-on effects - effects potentially damaging to the democratic process.