C. Thi Nguyen, who is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, however, warns that radical polarization within a society fails to get its members to the heart of the issues they're facing.
And he thinks that echo chambers, which occur when insiders come to distrust everybody on the outside, are the real problem.
"Echo chambers isolate their members, not by cutting off their lines of communication to the world, but by changing whom they trust," Nguyen wrote. "And echo chambers aren’t just on the right. I’ve seen echo chambers on the left, but also on parenting forums, nutritional forums, and even around exercise methods."
According to legal scholar and behavioral economist Cass Sunstein, the main cause of polarization is that internet technologies have created a world where people don't often encounter the other side anymore.
"Many people get their news from social media feeds. Their feeds get filled up with people like them - who usually share their political views," Nguyen explained.
"What’s going on, in my view, isn’t just a bubble. It’s not that people’s social media feeds are arranged so they don’t run across any scientific arguments; it’s that they’ve come to systematically distrust the institutions of science," Nguyen said. "Echo chamber members have been prepared to face contrary evidence. Their echo-chambered worldview has been arranged to dismiss that evidence at its source."
"They’re not totally irrational, either. In the era of scientific specialization, people must trust doctors, statisticians, biologists, chemists, physicists, nuclear engineers, and aeronautical engineers, just to go about their day. And they can’t always check with perfect accuracy whether they have put their trust in the right place."
A new UCL study found that people who hold radical political views – at either end of the political spectrum – aren’t as good as moderates at knowing when they’re wrong.
“We were trying to clarify whether people who hold radical political beliefs are generally overconfident in their stated beliefs, or if it boils down to differences in metacognition, which is the ability we have to recognize when we might be wrong,” said the lead author if the study, Dr. Steve Fleming (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology).
For the study, 381 people (in addition to 417 people in a second experiment that replicated the findings) initially completed a survey gauging their political beliefs and attitudes towards alternative world views. People on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum tended to have more radical views, involving authoritarianism and dogmatic intolerance for opposing views.
The participants then completed a simple perceptual task requiring them to look at two sets of dots and judge which one had more dots. They were then asked to rate how confident they were in making their choice and were incentivized to judge their confidence accurately with a monetary reward.
The experiment was designed to test people on a task completely unrelated to politics, to hone in on cognitive processes without any political motivations.
