On a solely Democratic three-judge panel, all three appointees showed very liberal voting patterns in cases involving discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation, environmental protection, and the rights of workers—far more liberal patterns than they showed when at least one Republican appointee was on the panel.
The pattern was identical for Republican appointees, who showed highly conservative voting patterns on all-Republican panels. You can think of three-judge panels as teams: judicial voting is affected by the attitudinal composition of the team. If you want to know how an appellate judge will vote in an ideologically contested case, you might want to find out whether she was appointed by a Republican president or a Democratic president.
Juries display group polarization as well. In particular, their punitive-damage awards tend to be far higher than the preferred award of the median member, before deliberation. The result of jury deliberation is to produce an increase in extremism, in the form of higher awards. There is a lesson here about punishment judgments in general. If group members begin with an inclination to be punitive, there is a good chance that the group will end up more punitive still.
To cast light on this lesson, the two of us created along with our friend and colleague David Schkade, of the University of California, San Diego an original experiment in group deliberation—one that, we believe, accurately reflects much deliberation in the real world.
In this experiment, we recruited citizens from two US cities and assembled them into small groups usually six people , all from the same city. The groups were asked to deliberate on three of the most contested issues of the time: climate change, affirmative action, and same-sex civil unions. The two cities were Boulder, known by its voting patterns to be predominantly liberal a.
We did a reality check on the participants before the experiment started, ensuring that the Boulder residents were in fact left of center and that the Colorado Springs residents were in fact right of center.
The citizens were first asked to record their views individually and anonymously—and then to deliberate together in an effort to reach a group decision.
After deliberation, the individual participants were asked to record their postdeliberation views individually and anonymously. People from Boulder became a lot more liberal on all three issues.
By contrast, people from Colorado Springs became a lot more conservative. The effect of group deliberation was to shift individual opinions toward extremism. This shift happened in two ways. Second, the anonymous views of individual members became more extreme, after deliberation, than were their anonymous views before the participants started to talk. Group deliberation often makes not only groups but also individuals more extreme, so much so that they will state more extreme views privately and anonymously.
Deliberation increased consensus within groups. Sure, people in the Boulder groups were generally liberal; but in predeliberation interviews, they did not always agree with one another on the particular issues that we selected. Discussion brought liberals into line with each other, and the same thing happened with conservatives.
As a result of a brief period of discussion, group members showed a lot more agreement and less variation in their anonymous postdeliberation expressions of their private views. Deliberation sharply increased the disparities between the views of the largely liberal citizens of Boulder and the largely conservative citizens of Colorado Springs. Beforedeliberation, there was considerable overlap between many individuals in the two cities.
After deliberation, the overlap was a lot smaller. Liberals and conservatives became more sharply divided. The implications are clear. As a general rule, deliberating groups tended to adopt a more extreme position in line with their inclinations before they started to talk, and a major effect of deliberation was to squelch internal diversity—and thus to push different groups apart. The first and most important explanation involves the now-familiar idea of informational influence—but with a few twists, in an unusually interesting form.
Group members pay attention to the arguments made by other group members. In any group with members who carry a shared initial predisposition, the arguments will inevitably be skewed in the direction of that predisposition. Suppose, for example, that most group members begin by thinking that a new venture is likely to succeed.
If so, there will be a lot of arguments to that effect. As a statistical matter, the arguments favoring the initial position will be more numerous than those pointing in the other direction. Individuals will have thought of or heard of some, but not all, of the arguments that emerge from group deliberation. As a result of the arguments that are made by group members, deliberation will naturally lead people toward a more extreme point in line with what group members initially believed.
The second explanation, also familiar, involves social influences. People want to be perceived favorably by other group members. Once they hear what others believe, some group members will adjust their positions at least slightly in the direction of the dominant position to preserve their preferred self- presentation. They shift accordingly. Here is yet another reason that wise leaders often speak tentatively or not at all, inviting group members to speak their mind.
The third explanation of group polarization is more subtle. The solution to the problem of vaccine hesitancy is not to eliminate echo chambers. Rather, it is to be intentional about the social networks in those echo chambers. Damon Centola, Ph. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital.
Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? The social comparison theory concerns individuals comparing views with others, while the informational influence theory focuses on an individual trying to persuade another. Also known as the normative influence, this theory of group polarization states that people often change their opinions when in a group in order to fit in or to be accepted, and to be looked upon more favorably.
As outsiders, new members of the group may promote a more extreme view of a topic than the rest of the group previously had. That can push the entire group toward the more extreme viewpoint or the stance that best correlates with the views of the group leader. The importance of group polarization in social psychology is significant in contemporary times, because it helps explain group behavior in a variety of real-life situations.
Some examples of these include discussions and decisions made about public policy, terrorism, college life, and all types of violence. One example of informational influence within group polarization is jury verdicts.
0コメント