What do immigration, inheritance tax, and marijuana legalization have in common? There really isn’t that much. But if you know someone’s position on one of these issues, you can reasonably infer their views on other issues.
Politics often appears to function in one dimension. Political parties and politicians sit on a spectrum stretching from the far left to the far right. Knowing someone’s opinion on one wedge issue is often enough to place him or her on this ideological side, thereby making it possible to predict his or her position on other issues. It will be. And in countries like the United States, we are seeing more and more people becoming polarized into opposing political camps on opposite ends of this spectrum.
One-dimensional politics may seem as natural to us as an apple falling from a tree. It’s just how we think about politics. But like gravity, these mysterious forces that shape our politics require scientific explanation.
My colleagues and I wanted to understand how people end up so deeply divided. And research we published earlier this year proposes a model for how it might work. It suggests that the more we can no longer separate politics from personal relationships, the more polarized we will become.
This is not just an academic question. When politics is reduced to a single ideological dimension, we may be unable to find innovative solutions to our most pressing problems.
For example, if the best solution to the housing crisis is a combination of deregulation and public investment, it will be impossible to pass legislation if each half of the solution is rejected by one side of the political spectrum. Possibly. So understanding how politics becomes polarized is important on a very practical level.
The problem is that no matter how much we look into the past, politics is overwhelmingly organized along one main dimension of ideological conflict. Before left vs. right, it was Catholic vs. Protestant, Roundheads vs. Cavaliers, going all the way back to Optimates vs. Optimates. Popular of ancient Rome.
The issues may have changed, but the basic dichotomy remains stable. This makes it very difficult to investigate the origins of monistic politics. After all, you can’t experiment on an entire society, at least in real life.
simulation society
To overcome this limitation, we decided to choose an unusual approach. We created virtual societies, each populated by a large number of pseudo-people known as agents.
The different opinions of each agent are represented as coordinates in a space with several dimensions. Although I did not give any specific meaning to the coordinates or dimensions, they can be thought of as representing disconnected issues, such as defense spending, railroad nationalization, or abortion rights.
At the beginning of each simulation, agents’ positions were purely random and not organized along a single ideological dimension of left versus right. However, over time, agents interacted, influenced each other, and organized new collective states.
These simulated societies therefore provide a guinea pig for various theories used in political science, such as the assumption that humans are rational, and whether they can explain the emergence of one-sided politics and political polarization. I checked.
To do this, we translated these theories into computational protocols that control agent interactions and how they adapt their opinions. We then checked whether these protocols were sufficient to trigger the emergence of a single ideological dimension.
Initially, we modeled agents as rational decision makers in the mainstream political science tradition. When encountering other agents, they either met halfway or refused, but in any case this did not give rise to a single ideological dimension. Agents can be consensually centralized or remain dispersed.
But politics is not purely rational. Often characterized by intuition and anger. However, political science has not always been successful in incorporating emotions into decision-making models. So we turned to one of the founders of social psychology for inspiration.
In the 1950s, Austrian-born psychologist Fritz Heider coined the term cognitive balance theory, which states that people strive for consistency in their mental patterns. For example, if two of our friends hate each other, or if one of our friends is in love with someone we despise, we are perplexed. Similarly, we try to avoid agreeing with people we like just as we avoid agreeing with people we dislike.
We reflected this balance mechanism in our simulations. When two of our agents met each other, they first determined the extent to which they agreed or disagreed on various political issues. And they transformed agreement into sympathy and disagreement into disgust. Finally, I adjusted the position of the problem in a way that increases consistency.
When we met someone we mostly agreed with, we adjusted our opinions to smooth out any remaining disagreements. In the opposite case, they sought to further intensify their disagreements.
All of this happened little by little each time the agents met. But no matter what dimension of the problem that initiated the simulation, through countless interactions, the agents eventually self-organized into a single ideological dimension.
Where exactly an individual agent landed on this ideological continuum depended on one important factor: the strength of the link between disagreement on the issue and personal aversion .
If this connection is weak, that is, agents may dislike each other but agree, or may like each other but disagree, then agents will continue to remain close to the center. If it was strong, the simulated society split into two opposing camps and became polarized.
This suggests that polarization is related to people’s ability to connect with others on a personal level. If we lose sight of the fact that those who disagree with us are usually decent people with good intentions, we may find ourselves increasingly divided on political issues, with less room for compromise.
This is noteworthy at a time when much political discussion takes place online through impersonal or anonymous social media accounts. The real world is far more complex than a one-dimensional view of politics suggests. And people go far beyond the political views they share online.
After all, you can’t get rid of the force of cognitive balance any more than you can get rid of gravity. But you can find ways to increase personal connections between people with different political views.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
