The Law of Group Polarization
By Cass R. Sunstein. How Change Happens, 2002
985 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon -- group polarization -- has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, "radicalization," cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism. Group polarization bears on the conduct of government institutions, including juries, legislatures, courts, and regulatory commissions. There are interesting relationships between group polarization and social cascades, both informational and reputational. Normative implications are discussed, with special attention to political and legal institutions.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b732d94afa60e81e961f4d73c9be5f46996465a
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Epistemic democracy with correlated voters (2017, background): “This can lead to the formation of “echo chambers”, within which deliberation actually reduces epistemic competency, by reinforcing voters’ ideological biases and cultivating manichean extremism (Sunstein, 2003, 2009).”
- Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information (2017, background): “This may further lead to polarization [57, 13, 56, 43]; one group may automatically discount ideas from another [39, 44].”
- The echo chamber effect on social media (2021, background): “According to group polarization theory (23), an echo chamber can act as a mechanism to reinforce an existing opinion within a group and, as a result, move the entire group toward more extreme positions.”
- Quantifying Biases in Online Information Exposure (2018, background): “So-called “echo chambers” (Sunstein, 2017) and “filter bubbles” (Pariser, 2011) have been claimed to be pathological consequences of social media algorithms and to lead to polarization (Conover et al., 2011; Sunstein, 2002).”
- A Transformer-based Framework for Neutralizing and Reversing the Political Polarity of News Articles (2021, background): “From a societal level, increased political fragmentation makes it harder for society to find common ground on controversial issues [84, 95].”
- Racism on the Internet: Conceptualization and Recommendations for Research (2018, background): “Online group polarization may cause people to act out of character or behave radically different toward others who do not share the same beliefs or opinions (Conover et al., 2011; Sunstein, 2002).”
- “Fake News” Is Not Simply False Information: A Concept Explication and Taxonomy of Online Content (2019, background): “This can narrow the universe of stories read by any one individual and lead to the creation of “echo chambers” (Sunstein, 2002) and “filter bubbles” (Pariser, 2011).”