Does Enclave Deliberation Polarize Opinions?

By Kimmo Grönlund, Kaisa Herne, Maija Setälä. 2015

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When like-minded people discuss with each other, i.e. engage in ‘enclave deliberation’, their opinions tend to become more extreme. This is called group polarization. A population-based experiment with a pre-test post-test design was conducted to analyze whether the norms and procedures of deliberation interfere with the mechanisms of group polarization. Based on a survey, people with either permissive or restrictive attitudes toward immigration were first identified and then invited to the experiment. The participants were randomly assigned to like-minded and mixed small-n groups. Each like-minded group consisted of only permissive or restrictive participants, whereas each mixed group consisted of four permissive and four restrictive participants. The like-minded treatment represents enclave deliberation, and the mixed treatment a ‘standard’ deliberative mini-public design. The main finding of our experiment is that people with anti-immigrant attitudes become more tolerant even when they deliberate in like-minded groups. Moreover, similar learning curves are observed in both treatments. Based on the results, we conclude that deliberative norms can alleviate the negative consequences of discussion in like-minded groups.

Subfields: Communication, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97b5637a5ceebcd47bbb1debc65e8d645fc78470

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

  1. W. Brady

In Sociology and Political Science

  1. J. V. Bavel
  2. Molly J. Crockett
  3. W. Brady

Citations in the corpus