Kevin Dorst's research on political polarization in the United States shows that rationality plays a key role in the formation of different political opinions. His concept of "rational polarization" believes that people will interpret ambiguous political information differently and draw different conclusions. This challenges the idea that political beliefs are based solely on emotion or misinformation.
American politics is deeply polarized. This is often thought to be the product of irrationality: people can be tribal, influenced by their peers, and often get information from very different and sometimes inaccurate sources.
Tribalism and misinformation are real. But what if people also tend to act rationally, even in the process of arriving at radically different views? What if instead of being misguided or overly emotional, they were thinking logically?
A study by philosopher Kevin Dorst explains how the process of "rational polarization" can lead to political divisions.
Rational polarization of political views
"People can polarize predictably in fairly reasonable ways," says MIT philosopher Kevin Dorst.
This may be especially true when people encounter a lot of ambiguity in weighing political and civic issues. These ambiguities create political asymmetries. People will consider the evidence in predictably different ways and thus reach different conclusions. But that doesn't mean their thinking isn't logical.
"What happens now is that people are selectively scrutinizing information. That's actually why they go in the opposite direction, because they're scrutinizing it in different places and selectively looking for flaws, so they get a different view overall," Dost said.
The concept of rational polarization can help us avoid thinking that we alone are rational or, conversely, that we are not really thinking when arriving at our opinions, thereby helping us to develop more coherent explanations for differences in opinions. Therefore, it can make our evaluation of others more nuanced.
The paper, titled "The Polarization of Reason," was published in Philosophical Review. Dost, the sole author of the paper, is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.
Challenging belief-forming patterns
In Dost's view, rational polarization is a useful alternative to other modes of belief formation. In particular, he believes that rational polarization improves a "Bayesian" thinking model, in which people constantly use new information to hone their opinions.
In Bayesian terms, because people use new information to update their opinions, they rationally change their opinions, or do not change as necessary. There is often ambiguity when we evaluate new evidence—Dost believes that it is rational to be uncertain about this ambiguity. But this can be polarizing because people's prior assumptions do influence how they detect ambiguity.
Suppose a group of people is given two studies on the death penalty: one study that found that the death penalty has no deterrent effect on people's behavior, and another that found that the death penalty is a deterrent. Even when reading the same evidence, people in the group are likely to arrive at different interpretations.
"Those who truly believe in a deterrent effect will look closely at studies that suggest there is no deterrent effect, be skeptical of it, debunk its arguments, and claim to recognize flaws in their reasoning. In contrast, people who do not believe in a deterrent effect do exactly the opposite. They find flaws in the studies that show a deterrent effect," Dost said.
Even these seemingly selective interpretations are rational, Dost said: "It makes sense to study surprising information more closely than non-surprising information." He added: "You can see that people who have this tendency to look selectively will drift away even when faced with the same evidence mixed in the same way."
Online experiment illustrates the role of ambiguity
To help prove this habit exists, Dost also conducted an online experiment on ambiguity on the Prolific online survey platform, with 250 people taking part. The purpose of the experiment was to understand the extent to which people's opinions become polarized when the information is ambiguous.
The experiment presented participants with a string of incomplete letters, like those in a crossword puzzle or "Wheel of Fortune." Some strings of letters are part of real words, some are not. Depending on the kind of additional information participants were given, these ambiguous, unsolvable letter strings had a clear polarizing effect on people's responses to the additional information they were given.
This process in the experiment is similar to what happens when people get uncertain information about a political issue from the news or research: "When you find a flaw, it gives you clear evidence that undermines the study. Otherwise, people tend to feel uncertain about the material they see." When you don't find a flaw, it [might] give you ambiguous evidence that overwhelms you. As a result, this could lead to predictable polarization. The more important point is that when people process similar information, we can develop a more nuanced and consistent view of how political disagreements exist. "There's this idea that in politics, the rational brain shuts down and people think intuitively," Dost said. If you take this view seriously, you should say, 'I formed my political beliefs in the same way.' Unless, you think you are the only one who is rational and no one else is. "Although he thinks this is an untenable worldview.
"Part of what I'm trying to do is come up with an explanation that's not subject to this instability. You don't have to point the finger at someone else. If you think there's something [plausible] in it too, then the process is a lot more interesting."
Compiled source: ScitechDaily