DEMOCRACYHow Do Reasonable People Disagree?
U.S. politics is heavily polarized. This is often regarded as a product of irrationality: People can be tribal, are influenced by their peers, and often get information from very different, sometimes inaccurate sources. Tribalism and misinformation are real enough. But what if people are often acting rationally as well, even in the process of arriving at very different views? A study explains how political differences can result from a process of “rational polarization.”
U.S. politics is heavily polarized. This is often regarded as a product of irrationality: People can be tribal, are influenced by their peers, and often get information from very different, sometimes inaccurate sources.
Tribalism and misinformation are real enough. But what if people are often acting rationally as well, even in the process of arriving at very different views? What if they are not being misled or too emotional, but are thinking logically?
“There can be quite reasonable ways people can be predictably polarized,” says MIT philosopher Kevin Dorst, author of a new paper on the subject, based partly on his own empirical research.
This may especially be the case when people deal with a lot of ambiguity when weighing political and civic issues. Those ambiguities generate political asymmetry. People consider evidence in predictably different ways, leading them to different conclusions. That doesn’t mean they are not thinking logically, though.
“What’s going is people are selectively scrutinizing information,” Dorst says. “That’s effectively why they move in opposite directions, because they scrutinize and selectively look for flaws in different places, and so they get overall different takes.”
The concept of rational polarization may help us develop a more coherent account about how views differ, by helping us avoid thinking that we alone are rational — or, conversely, that we have done no real thinking while arriving at our own opinions. Thus it can add nuance to our assessments of others.
The paper, “Rational Polarization,” appears in The Philosophical Review. Dorst, the sole author, is an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
Looking for Flaws
To Dorst, rational polarization stands as a useful alternative to other models about belief formation. In particular, rational polarization in his view improves upon one type of model of “Bayesian” thinking, in which people keep using new information to hone their views.
In Bayesian terms, because people use new information to update their views, they will rationally either change their ideas or not, as is warranted. it, But in reality, Dorst asserts, things are not so simple. Often when we assess new evidence, there is ambiguity present — and Dorst contends that it is rational to be unsure about that ambiguity. But this can generate polarization because people’s prior assumptions do influence the places where they find ambiguity.
