What do immigration, inheritance tax and cannabis legalization have in common? Not much, actually. However, if we all know an individual’s stance on any of those issues, we are able to make a great guess about their view of others.
Politics often seems to operate in a one-dimensional way: parties and politicians are positioned on a spectrum from the far left to the far right. Knowing an individual’s opinion on a single core issue is commonly enough to assign them to this ideological dimension, which in turn makes it possible to predict their positions on other issues. And in countries just like the US, we’re seeing increasingly more individuals who polarized into opposing political camps at each ends of this spectrum.
One-dimensional politics could appear as natural to us as an apple falling from a tree – it's just the way in which we take into consideration politics. But identical to gravity, this mysterious force that shapes our politics in this manner demands a scientific explanation.
My colleagues and I wanted to grasp why individuals are so deeply divided and the Study we published A model of how this might work was proposed earlier this yr. It suggests that the less we’re capable of separate politics from personal relationships, the greater the polarization will grow to be.
This is greater than just a tutorial issue. Reducing politics to a single ideological dimension can prevent us from finding modern solutions to our most pressing problems.
For example, if one of the best solution to the housing crisis was a mix of deregulation and public investment, that solution couldn’t be implemented if each halves of the answer were rejected by one side of the political spectrum. So, on a really practical level, it will be important to grasp how politics can grow to be so polarized.
The problem is that irrespective of how far back in time we glance, we overwhelmingly find that politics has been organized along a significant dimension of ideological conflict: before the clash of left and right, it was Catholics and Protestants, Roundheads and Cavaliers, and all the way in which back to the Optimates and Populares in ancient Rome.
The issues can have modified, but the basic dichotomy has remained the identical. This makes it very difficult to look at the origins of one-dimensional politics. After all, we cannot experiment with entire societies – no less than not in real life.
Simulate societies
To overcome this limitation, we decided to take an unusual approach. We virtual societies createdeach of which is populated by numerous simulated people, so-called agents.
Each agent had a wide range of opinions, represented as coordinates in a multi-dimensional space. We didn’t assign any specific intending to the coordinates or dimensions, but one can consider them as representing unrelated issues akin to defense spending, nationalizing the railroad, or abortion rights.
At the start of every simulation, the positions of the agents were purely random and never organized along a single ideological dimension of left or right. But over time, the agents interacted and influenced one another, organizing themselves into recent collective states.
We subsequently used these simulated societies as a test bed for various theories utilized in political science, akin to the idea that folks are rational. We desired to test whether or not they could explain one-dimensional politics and the emergence of political polarization.
To do that, we translated these theories into computer protocols that guided the agents' interactions and the way in which they adjusted their opinions. We then checked whether these protocols were sufficient to trigger the emergence of a single ideological dimension.
First, we modeled our agents as rational decision makers within the tradition of mainstream political science. When they encountered other agents, they either accommodated them or rejected them. But either way, no unified ideological dimension emerged. The agents either converged on a consensus or remained scattered.
However, politics is just not a purely rational matter. It is commonly shaped by gut feelings and anger. But political science was not at all times successful in Integrating emotions into decision-making models. For inspiration, we turned to considered one of the founders of social psychology.
In the Fifties, the Austrian-born psychologist Fritz Heider coined the term Theory of cognitive balancewhich states that folks strive for consistency of their thought patterns. For example, we discover it disturbing when two of our friends hate one another, or a friend is in love with someone we despise. Likewise, we attempt to avoid disagreement with people we like in the identical way that we avoid agreeing with people we don't like.
We transferred this balancing mechanism to our simulation. When two of our agents met, they first determined how much they agreed or disagreed on various political issues. Then they translated agreement into sympathy and disagreement into dislike. Finally, they adjusted their positions on the problems in a way that increased consistency.
When they met someone with whom they largely agreed, they adjusted their opinions to defuse the remaining disagreement. Conversely, they tried to accentuate their disagreement.
All of this happened in tiny steps at each meeting of the agents. But through a mess of interactions, the agents eventually organized themselves into individual ideological dimensions—no matter what number of issue dimensions we had began the simulation with.
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Where exactly individual actors landed on this ideological continuum trusted one crucial factor: the strength of the connection between substantive disagreement and private antipathy.
If this connection is weak – that’s, the agents can dislike one another but still agree, or they will like one another but disagree – the agents stay near the center. If it is robust, the simulated society splits into two opposing camps – it polarizes.
This suggests that polarization is expounded to people's ability to attach with others on a private level. If we lose sight of the undeniable fact that those we disagree with are often decent individuals with good intentions, we may find ourselves drifting further apart on political issues, with less room for compromise.
This is notable at a time when a lot political debate takes place online, through impersonal or anonymous social media accounts. The real world is way more complex than a one-dimensional view of politics suggests. And individuals are way more than the political opinions they share online.
Ultimately, we are going to never have the option to completely eliminate the ability of cognitive balance—any greater than we are able to eliminate gravity. But we are able to find ways to strengthen the private connection between individuals with different political opinions.
image credit : theconversation.com