Political polarization and trust

(Press-News.org) A collection of 15 articles from the Polarization and Trust Special Feature explores the complex nature of the emotional divide between political opponents, using approaches from a variety of disciplines, including political science, psychology, sociology, and economics. The articles emerged from a 2023 workshop on “Directions of Polarization, Social Norms, and Trust in Societies,” held at MIT and organized by  Kati Kish Bar-On,  Eugen Dimant,  Yphtach Lelkes and  David Rand. Researchers from a number of teams identified ways in which partisans mistrust and inaccurately perceive their political opponents, and other teams  examined why such inaccurate views arise and what to do about such views. One study reports that social media users are attracted to posters who share their political orientation but hold more extreme views. This tendency is stronger among conservatives than liberals and is associated with high levels of outgroup animosity. In another study, researchers in Colombia tested different interventions to reduce the spread of misinformation during the 2022 presidential election. Confronting people with their own tendency toward bias, using a personality test, was ineffective, but showing people a video featuring real people rethinking stereotypical views of one another made participants more skeptical of false news. In another study, researchers completed a meta-analysis of public responses to corporate activism, wherein companies take a stand on divisive sociopolitical issues and assessed the conditions under which taking a stand helps the firm engage customers. The collection also includes work pointing toward possible solutions to the problem of polarization. A Perspective imagines how digital media platforms could be redesigned to combat rather than aggravate misinformation and polarization. Such deliberative digital media platforms might include a “pause and reflect” step before a user can post or repost something, games and tools to help users learn about the real opinions of opposing partisans, incentives to create posts that a large proportion of users agree with, and taxes on accounts with large followings. Such platforms could even use generative AI to help moderate and identify points of consensus across ideological divides. Articles in the collection also focused on how we measure and conceptualize polarization, with one set of researchers finding that polarization is more widely and evenly distributed across the US than many people might imagine and another finding that focusing on measuring between-group differences might lead researchers to overlook sizable differences of opinion within partisan groups. Together, the collection sheds light on the origins of political polarization, its maintenance, and its consequences for individuals and societies. The editors of the collection, Eugen Dimant and Erik Kimbrough, hope the collection can be a resource for those working to address hyper-polarization.

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