A 2020 Cato national survey found that self-censorship is on the rise in the United States. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.
Additionally, nearly a third (32%) of employed Americans say they are worried about missing out on career opportunities or losing their job if their political opinions became known. (These results are particularly notable since most personal campaign contributions to political candidates are public knowledge and can easily be found online.)
But when Armani Salado, the author of the fantasy book The Old Universe and co-founder of a multi-media company called Forbidden Origins, tweeted a question, asking everyone what radicalized them, many answered it and allowed the internet to have an honest discussion on a sensitive topic that’s becoming increasingly avoided.
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C. Thi Nguyen, who is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, however, warns that radical polarization within a society fails to get its members to the heart of the issues they’re facing.
And he thinks that echo chambers, which occur when insiders come to distrust everybody on the outside, are the real problem.
“Echo chambers isolate their members, not by cutting off their lines of communication to the world, but by changing whom they trust,” Nguyen wrote. “And echo chambers aren’t just on the right. I’ve seen echo chambers on the left, but also on parenting forums, nutritional forums, and even around exercise methods.”
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According to legal scholar and behavioral economist Cass Sunstein, the main cause of polarization is that internet technologies have created a world where people don’t often encounter the other side anymore.
“Many people get their news from social media feeds. Their feeds get filled up with people like them – who usually share their political views,” Nguyen explained.
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“What’s going on, in my view, isn’t just a bubble. It’s not that people’s social media feeds are arranged so they don’t run across any scientific arguments; it’s that they’ve come to systematically distrust the institutions of science,” Nguyen said. “Echo chamber members have been prepared to face contrary evidence. Their echo-chambered worldview has been arranged to dismiss that evidence at its source.”
“They’re not totally irrational, either. In the era of scientific specialization, people must trust doctors, statisticians, biologists, chemists, physicists, nuclear engineers, and aeronautical engineers, just to go about their day. And they can’t always check with perfect accuracy whether they have put their trust in the right place.”
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A new UCL study found that people who hold radical political views – at either end of the political spectrum – aren’t as good as moderates at knowing when they’re wrong.
“We were trying to clarify whether people who hold radical political beliefs are generally overconfident in their stated beliefs, or if it boils down to differences in metacognition, which is the ability we have to recognize when we might be wrong,” said the lead author if the study, Dr. Steve Fleming (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology).
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For the study, 381 people (in addition to 417 people in a second experiment that replicated the findings) initially completed a survey gauging their political beliefs and attitudes towards alternative world views. People on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum tended to have more radical views, involving authoritarianism and dogmatic intolerance for opposing views.
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The participants then completed a simple perceptual task requiring them to look at two sets of dots and judge which one had more dots. They were then asked to rate how confident they were in making their choice and were incentivized to judge their confidence accurately with a monetary reward.
The experiment was designed to test people on a task completely unrelated to politics, to hone in on cognitive processes without any political motivations.
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People with more radical beliefs performed similarly on the task to moderates, but they tended to give higher confidence ratings when they had made incorrect choices than moderates did. Radicals’ confidence in correct answers was similar to that of moderates.
A second stage of the study assessed how participants took in new evidence. After making a judgment on the dots task, participants were shown another set of dots as ‘bonus’ information about the correct answer, before making their confidence judgment. If they had made an incorrect choice, the next set of dots should have weakened their confidence in their choice – which it did for moderates, but not as much for people with radical political views.
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“An important point is that our findings held true among participants with radical views at either end of the political spectrum – radicalism appears to reflect a cognitive style that transcends political inclinations,” co-author of the study, Professor Ray Dolan (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry & Ageing Research), said.
While it’s admirable to stand up for your beliefs, it’s important to empathize with others too, at least if we want to fix our problems (of which we have many).
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