Daniel J. Singer, Aaron Bramson, Patrick Grim, Bennett Holman, Jiin Jung, Karen Kovaka, Anika Ranginani & William J. Berger
Philosophical Studies 176 (9):2243-2267 (2019)
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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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Keywords | polarization deliberatioon social epistemology |
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DOI | 10.1007/s11098-018-1124-5 |
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References found in this work BETA
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.George A. Miller - 1956 - Psychological Review 63 (2):81-97.
Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many.Hélène Landemore (ed.) - 2012 - Princeton University Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
Scientific Polarization.Cailin O’Connor & James Owen Weatherall - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):855-875.
The Role of Source Reliability in Belief Polarisation.Leah Henderson & Alexander Gebharter - 2021 - Synthese (3-4):1-24.
Information Elaboration and Epistemic Effects of Diversity.Daniel Steel, Sina Fazelpour, Bianca Crewe & Kinley Gillette - 2019 - Synthese 198 (2):1287-1307.
What Are the Chances You’Re Right About Everything? An Epistemic Challenge for Modern Partisanship.Hrishikesh Joshi - 2020 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 19 (1):36-61.
A Multidisciplinary Understanding of Polarization.Jiin Jung, Patrick Grim, Daniel J. Singer, Aaron Bramson, William J. Berger, Bennett Holman & Karen Kovaka - 2019 - American Psychologist 74:301-314.
View all 14 citations / Add more citations
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