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Rational social and political polarization

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A Correction to this article was published on 11 July 2018

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Abstract

Public discussions of political and social issues are often characterized by deep and persistent polarization. In social psychology, it’s standard to treat belief polarization as the product of epistemic irrationality. In contrast, we argue that the persistent disagreement that grounds political and social polarization can be produced by epistemically rational agents, when those agents have limited cognitive resources. Using an agent-based model of group deliberation, we show that groups of deliberating agents using coherence-based strategies for managing their limited resources tend to polarize into different subgroups. We argue that using that strategy is epistemically rational for limited agents. So even though group polarization looks like it must be the product of human irrationality, polarization can be the result of fully rational deliberation with natural human limitations.

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  • 11 July 2018

    In the original publication of the article, the Acknowledgement section was inadvertently not included. The Acknowledgement is given in this Correction.

Notes

  1. While Sunstein (1999, 2017) does think that groups can become more extreme in their beliefs via informational cascades and other mechanisms, none of those mechanisms is sufficient to break groups into polarized subgroups. Besides that, Sunstein (1999) offers no reason to think that polarization is epistemically rational, and his summary comments about polarization possibly producing “factual mistakes” suggests he believes it is not: “The problem [with group polarization] is … that people may be shifted, as a result of entirely rational processes, in the direction of factual … mistakes" (20).

  2. For ease of exposition, in some places, we’ll talk as though reasons support propositions or contents, rather than belief in those contents, but this is only a shorthand.

  3. We can think of these as mirroring something fixed in the world, like the time-indexed eternal facts.

  4. We assume that the weights of reasons do not vary across agents (either because they are perfectly shared or because the weight of a reason is a priori or a matter of logic, about which our agents are omniscient). Notice that this assumption only makes our case harder to show, since if agents could reasonably assign differing weights to the same reasons, it would be easier for them to reasonably disagree.

  5. Although we use these notions for quite different purposes, note the similarity of the ontology of our model to models in the hidden profile paradigm (Stasser 1988; Stasser and Birchmeier 2003; Lu et al. 2012 for a survey).

  6. Previous work has studied similar agents with limited memories. Following Hellman and Cover (1970), it’s popular to model memory limitations as limitations on states of finite automata. Wilson (2014) analyses these limited automata and shows that they can polarize when the agents have differing priors. Also see Halpern and Pass (2010). These models are quite different from ours and are subject to a number of limitations discussed in Sect. 6.

  7. The reader should think of these as the agents’ reasons that bear on the relevant proposition, not all of the reasons they have. We use 7 as the limit following Miller (1956), though recently Cowan (2001) has argued that the number should be 4. See the discussion of the robustness of this result below.

  8. Our results are robust for various other distributions of reasons that have a similar qualitative characteristic. We don’t discuss distributions that make put more reasons strongly on either side, since polarization would be less surprising in those cases.

  9. Of the 1000 runs done to test this, 32 of the runs didn’t converge in fewer than 100,000 steps, the limit we set in testing. These runs would have converged, given more time. So the real averages are even higher.

  10. These numbers assessed in different sets of 1000 runs. We stopped the run if convergence didn’t happen by 100,000 steps, since most converging runs did so very quickly (fewer than 350 steps for convergence on a view and fewer than 1500 steps for convergence on a set of reasons).

  11. We ran 1,000,000 runs to see if consensus is ever reached in this setup. Of those, less than 0.01% of them converged on a view and less than 0.005% converged on a set of reasons. When those cases did converge, it always happened in the first 9 steps of the model (many in the first or second step), which indicates a rare combination of initial conditions and early steps is required.

  12. In fact, it would be possible for groups to polarize even if their memory were limited to only 1 fewer than the total number of reasons, but we’d expect this to occur quite infrequently.

  13. We point the reader to Vitz (n.d.) for background on the connection between doxastic volunteerism and evaluation.

  14. If the reader hasn’t already given up on the rationality of simple-mindedness, she is encouraged to notice that simple-mindedness is subject to this same kind of worry.

  15. See, for example, Murphy (2016) for a discussion of how foundationalists often appeal to notions of coherence. Cohen (1984, pp. 283–284) also argues that “justification” and “rationality” are synonymous as used by epistemologists. As such, coherentists’ claims about justification ought to translate to rationality as well.

  16. That said, groups of agents following that more extreme rule still polarize.

  17. One might think that if a reason’s strength is a measure of how misleading it is, agents should forget the strongest opposing reasons (not the weakest, as coherence-mindedness requires). But, strength is a measure of how much the reason supports a view, and whether it is misleading is a question of whether it supports the truth. If one thinks that rationality requires that we drop the strongest opposing reason, that rule would still produce polarization, and so our primary conclusion still holds.

  18. We’re thankful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this case to our attention.

  19. In our actual tests, we assumed that an agent had a strong enough belief to be coherence-minded when the strength of their belief was at least a quarter of the weighted strengths of all of the reasons.

  20. In our tests, we implemented this by asking agents to treat reasons in favor of their view as 2 times as important as reasons against and then asked the agents to forget the weakest reason in that new ranking. So a reason of weight 1 in favor of their view would be saved over a reason of weight 1.5 against, but not against a reason of weight 2.5 against.

  21. We take ourselves to be adding to the literature that emphasizes the importance of investigating non-ideal agents in epistemology, political philosophy, game theory, economics, and related fields. Other prominent voices in that chorus include Simon (1957), Cherniak (1981) Kahneman and Tversky (1979), and Epstein (2006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Daniel J. Singer, Anika Ranginani & William J. Berger

  2. Riken Brain Science Institute, Wakoshi, Japan

    Aaron Bramson

  3. Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Aaron Bramson

  4. University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Aaron Bramson

  5. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Patrick Grim

  6. Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    Patrick Grim

  7. Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

    Bennett Holman

  8. Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA

    Jiin Jung

  9. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Karen Kovaka

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  1. Daniel J. Singer
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Correspondence to Daniel J. Singer.

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Singer, D.J., Bramson, A., Grim, P. et al. Rational social and political polarization. Philos Stud 176, 2243–2267 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1124-5

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