Lecture 1
Measuring polarization
- Population samples are not easy to come by
- If you do have data, very often the different groups that might be(coming more) extreme are not identified, or
difficult to identify
- Level of extremism, but no clear cut two different groups
- Think of the dutch landscape
- How can you quantify polarization in such datasets?
How do you know if a given population/system is polarized?
a) Look at the range/spread of the answers (they should get broader) → They can be informative but you have to be
very careful with the type of data you use.
- However, a system with a large range does not necessarily have more responders on the extremes! No
polarization, just a lot of variation.
- Bi-modal distribution → these types of questions are measured through a scale from example 1-10, there
will always be people who answer 1 or 10, the range can be less informative
b) Look at the variance/dispersion in which less variance (a 'tighter' bell curve for the entire population) → less
polarization
- Larger variance: more diversity in responding, but does that automatically indicate polarization?
c) Coverage → More empty space between different 'clusters' of responses (which could indicate a group) suggests
stronger polarization
Range, variance, coverage all are a bit crude/not always informative
- Very often, all potential responses in a likert scale/questionnaire are chosen at least by some respondents
- The range will be the same independent of actual polarization
- Coverage will not covary with actual polarization
It gets easier once you have an idea about the groups that play a role in your potentially polarized system
- Democrats vs republicans
- Left vs right
- College education vs practical education
- Countryside vs city
,How do you quantify the level of polarization between two (or more) groups?
a) Distinctiveness = How much overlap is there between your groups?
- More or less for more polarization? → More distinctiveness means more polarization
b) Divergence = How far away are centers of the groups from each other?
- More or less for more polarization? → More divergence means more polarization
c) Group consensus = How much diversity is there within each group?
- Which you can estimate as the variance within each group
- More or less for more polarization → More polarization means more group consensus
Types of polarization
1. Ideological polarization = The extent to which citizens become ideologically entrenched in their own values and
political beliefs (group consensus), thereby increasing the divide between citizens who hold different values and
beliefs (divergence)
- Ideological polarization can show extremism in voters (but not necessarily the case e.g. pro choice vs
life), e.g. parties at the extremes of the left/right spectrum gain more voters
Consequences of ideological polarization:
- Overconfidence in own position and knowledge
- In 2016 the Netherlands held a referendum to support or reject a European Union treaty designed to
establish stronger political and economic connections between the EU and Ukraine.
- Pro-establishment: vote in favor
- Anti-establishment: vote against
- Only parties at the extreme left and extreme right campaigned against the treaty
- A vote against the treaty was conceived as EU skeptic
2. Elite polarisation
- Elites: politicians and political 'influencers'
- In elite polarization, elites grow more ideologically distant from each other and more internally
homogeneous
- Can emerge as extremism in politicians
- For example, rejection of compromise and collaborative governance
3. Affective polarization
- Belief in moral superiority of own ideology
- Intolerance of other ideological groups and individuals
- Negative attitudes towards other ideological groups and individuals
- A homogeneous political environment combined with a strong need to belong can yield simplistic,
negative attitudes about the political out-group
Motive attribution asymmetry bias = Political adversaries tend to ascribe outgroup aggression to hate,
while ascribing ingroup behavior to love. It most likely arises from interactions between context (e.g.
limited and negatively-valenced exposure to the political outgroup), and cognition (e.g. the epistemic
motivation to see one's ingroup as loving and one's outgroup as hateful).
Negative attitudes towards other ideological groups and individuals
4. Social polarization (strong spatial component)
- Income & wealth
- Health
- Education
- Housing
,Why do people become polarized?
- Individual traits
- Contextual factors
- Cognitive architecture
Individual traits
a. Epistemic motivation = A person's drive or desire to acquire knowledge and understanding, particularly in
uncertain or ambiguous situations.
- Predictable and simple world view
- Need for closure
- I dislike unpredictable situations
- I dislike the routine aspects of my work (studies)
- I feel irritated when one person disagrees with what everyone else in a group believes
- I hate to change my plans at the last minute
- High need for closure is related to endorsement of political extremes in left
b. Cognitive flexibility = The ability to flexibly switch perspectives, focus of attention, or response mappings
- Suggestion that lower cognitive flexibility is related to political extremism
- 750 participants
- Wisconsin card sorting, remote associates, alternatives uses
Context
- Social connections → provide new information, feedback on (un)acceptable behavior, model behavior etc
- Online → Filter bubble
- Offline → Community
- Echo chambers
Cognitive architecture
= The mental processes and structures that govern how people think, reason, and make decisions. It plays a crucial role
in how individuals process information and can lead to polarized thinking.
a) Motivated reasoning = How people assess/incorporate new information about societal issues seems to depend
on their pre-existing beliefs. The goal is NOT to achieve a full representation of the truth, BUT to:
- Maintain a positive self-concept
- Avoid stress
- Perceive a coherent and simple world
- Fit in with one's social environment
Study:
Participants: students that were proponents or opponents of the death penalty. The participants were provided
with two 'empirical studies' with very different implications.
- One study show the death penalty is an efficient way to lower crime-rates → pro-deterrence
- One study shows that the death penalty does not lower crime-rates → Anti-deterrence
- The take away from the graph is that people read exactly the same information, but pre-existing beliefs
radically change the effect of that information.
Consequences
- Different beliefs about the world based on the same evidence
- Rigidity of attitudes and beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence
b) Attention
Top-down attention = Choosing what to focus on in the outside world
- Would you want to hear from a typical *voter about why they voted for *? On a likert scale running from
100 (yes) to -100 (no). Likert scale was anchored in pleasant (sunny walk) and unpleasant (tooth
extraction) experiences.
- Political affiliation influences how long you look at political information → Initial evidence using
eye-tracking reveals that motivated reasoning can affect political information search, causing committed
partisans to preferentially look at political posters depicting candidates and views from their own side.
c) Language perception
- Language understanding heavily depends on contextual expectations, which drive how ambiguous words
and sentences and interpreted. Contextual language expectations can be conceptualized as the
co-activations of semantic nodes in a network of linguistic knowledge, where connection strengths can
vary between individuals, for example as a function of political affiliation.
- Experiment comparing voters of Italians voting for populist vs mainstream political parties
, - Larger N400 for belief-congruent items
- Reflecting linguistic surprise
- Populist items evoke a larger N400 than non-populist items in mainstream voters and
vice versa for populist voters
- Freedom of movement within the EU is desirable
- One can classify 'agree/disagree' from the EEG
evoked by individual topic words (abortion,
immigration)
d) Emotional processing
- There might be a polarization of emotional
experience, since individual differences in life
history and psychological need can yield quite
different emotional responses to the same
political events.
- Algorithm that predicts voting based on facial
expressions to US political debate
- 50% of data used for training, 17% for
model selection, 33% for testing
- 73% accurate in predicting voting
behavior
The polarized mind in context: Interdisciplinary approaches to the psychology of political polarization
Increased level of polarization, which includes increasing alignment of within party opinions on distinct issues, a widening
ideological gap between opposing parties associated with stronger party brands, and the homogenization of voting
districts along lines of race, education, socio-economic status and other demographic factors.
Our psychological grasp of political processes that shape polarization are difficult to reproduce in statis antiseptic
laboratory settings. Also, key psychological processes such as emotional responses to political information can be difficult
to detect with classic measurements like verbal report. Given these constraints, it is unclear in which psychological
processing step (attention, perception, language understanding, emotion, decision-making) polarization takes hold.
a. The first account examines how individual trait differences, such as need for closure and cognitive inflexibility, are
associated with holding polarized attitudes.
b. The second account seeks to understand how contextual factors such as media filter bubbles and biased social
networks shape polarized political behavior.
Advanced neuroscientific methods can help overcome long-standing issues of measurement and ecological validity in this
endeavor.
Individual cognitive traits contribute to political polarization
Leading cognitive-based theories in political psychology argue that a person's idiosyncratic psychological needs and traits
contribute to the adoption of particular political views. A now classic theory reasons that a conservative worldview can
satisfy the 'epistemic need' for predictable, organized social environment and clear-cut principles about how the world
works. Strong epistemic motivation and lack of cognitive flexibility are found in both extreme ends of the political system.
These epistemic needs may be compounded by social desires such as the need to belong, which strengthens the
motivation to hold beliefs that maintain a good position within a desired social group.
How do the psychological needs stemming from our cognitive traits exacerbate polarization?
1. If a view is held in order to satisfy a need, that view becomes a valued possession and contradictory views
become threatening.
2. Psychological needs can strengthen existing beliefs through motivated reasoning
3. Once a person has developed a biased worldview, any new information is interpreted in a partisan way even
without motivated reasoning.
Contextual factors shape political polarization
Context = The structure of the social environment, which includes factors known to influence behavior, such as social
pressure, others' expectations, social norms and habits.
Filter bubble effect = The algorithms provided by social media platforms are designed to pick posts that the user will like,
which means social media users are becoming increasingly exposed to views they already agree with.
Measuring polarization
- Population samples are not easy to come by
- If you do have data, very often the different groups that might be(coming more) extreme are not identified, or
difficult to identify
- Level of extremism, but no clear cut two different groups
- Think of the dutch landscape
- How can you quantify polarization in such datasets?
How do you know if a given population/system is polarized?
a) Look at the range/spread of the answers (they should get broader) → They can be informative but you have to be
very careful with the type of data you use.
- However, a system with a large range does not necessarily have more responders on the extremes! No
polarization, just a lot of variation.
- Bi-modal distribution → these types of questions are measured through a scale from example 1-10, there
will always be people who answer 1 or 10, the range can be less informative
b) Look at the variance/dispersion in which less variance (a 'tighter' bell curve for the entire population) → less
polarization
- Larger variance: more diversity in responding, but does that automatically indicate polarization?
c) Coverage → More empty space between different 'clusters' of responses (which could indicate a group) suggests
stronger polarization
Range, variance, coverage all are a bit crude/not always informative
- Very often, all potential responses in a likert scale/questionnaire are chosen at least by some respondents
- The range will be the same independent of actual polarization
- Coverage will not covary with actual polarization
It gets easier once you have an idea about the groups that play a role in your potentially polarized system
- Democrats vs republicans
- Left vs right
- College education vs practical education
- Countryside vs city
,How do you quantify the level of polarization between two (or more) groups?
a) Distinctiveness = How much overlap is there between your groups?
- More or less for more polarization? → More distinctiveness means more polarization
b) Divergence = How far away are centers of the groups from each other?
- More or less for more polarization? → More divergence means more polarization
c) Group consensus = How much diversity is there within each group?
- Which you can estimate as the variance within each group
- More or less for more polarization → More polarization means more group consensus
Types of polarization
1. Ideological polarization = The extent to which citizens become ideologically entrenched in their own values and
political beliefs (group consensus), thereby increasing the divide between citizens who hold different values and
beliefs (divergence)
- Ideological polarization can show extremism in voters (but not necessarily the case e.g. pro choice vs
life), e.g. parties at the extremes of the left/right spectrum gain more voters
Consequences of ideological polarization:
- Overconfidence in own position and knowledge
- In 2016 the Netherlands held a referendum to support or reject a European Union treaty designed to
establish stronger political and economic connections between the EU and Ukraine.
- Pro-establishment: vote in favor
- Anti-establishment: vote against
- Only parties at the extreme left and extreme right campaigned against the treaty
- A vote against the treaty was conceived as EU skeptic
2. Elite polarisation
- Elites: politicians and political 'influencers'
- In elite polarization, elites grow more ideologically distant from each other and more internally
homogeneous
- Can emerge as extremism in politicians
- For example, rejection of compromise and collaborative governance
3. Affective polarization
- Belief in moral superiority of own ideology
- Intolerance of other ideological groups and individuals
- Negative attitudes towards other ideological groups and individuals
- A homogeneous political environment combined with a strong need to belong can yield simplistic,
negative attitudes about the political out-group
Motive attribution asymmetry bias = Political adversaries tend to ascribe outgroup aggression to hate,
while ascribing ingroup behavior to love. It most likely arises from interactions between context (e.g.
limited and negatively-valenced exposure to the political outgroup), and cognition (e.g. the epistemic
motivation to see one's ingroup as loving and one's outgroup as hateful).
Negative attitudes towards other ideological groups and individuals
4. Social polarization (strong spatial component)
- Income & wealth
- Health
- Education
- Housing
,Why do people become polarized?
- Individual traits
- Contextual factors
- Cognitive architecture
Individual traits
a. Epistemic motivation = A person's drive or desire to acquire knowledge and understanding, particularly in
uncertain or ambiguous situations.
- Predictable and simple world view
- Need for closure
- I dislike unpredictable situations
- I dislike the routine aspects of my work (studies)
- I feel irritated when one person disagrees with what everyone else in a group believes
- I hate to change my plans at the last minute
- High need for closure is related to endorsement of political extremes in left
b. Cognitive flexibility = The ability to flexibly switch perspectives, focus of attention, or response mappings
- Suggestion that lower cognitive flexibility is related to political extremism
- 750 participants
- Wisconsin card sorting, remote associates, alternatives uses
Context
- Social connections → provide new information, feedback on (un)acceptable behavior, model behavior etc
- Online → Filter bubble
- Offline → Community
- Echo chambers
Cognitive architecture
= The mental processes and structures that govern how people think, reason, and make decisions. It plays a crucial role
in how individuals process information and can lead to polarized thinking.
a) Motivated reasoning = How people assess/incorporate new information about societal issues seems to depend
on their pre-existing beliefs. The goal is NOT to achieve a full representation of the truth, BUT to:
- Maintain a positive self-concept
- Avoid stress
- Perceive a coherent and simple world
- Fit in with one's social environment
Study:
Participants: students that were proponents or opponents of the death penalty. The participants were provided
with two 'empirical studies' with very different implications.
- One study show the death penalty is an efficient way to lower crime-rates → pro-deterrence
- One study shows that the death penalty does not lower crime-rates → Anti-deterrence
- The take away from the graph is that people read exactly the same information, but pre-existing beliefs
radically change the effect of that information.
Consequences
- Different beliefs about the world based on the same evidence
- Rigidity of attitudes and beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence
b) Attention
Top-down attention = Choosing what to focus on in the outside world
- Would you want to hear from a typical *voter about why they voted for *? On a likert scale running from
100 (yes) to -100 (no). Likert scale was anchored in pleasant (sunny walk) and unpleasant (tooth
extraction) experiences.
- Political affiliation influences how long you look at political information → Initial evidence using
eye-tracking reveals that motivated reasoning can affect political information search, causing committed
partisans to preferentially look at political posters depicting candidates and views from their own side.
c) Language perception
- Language understanding heavily depends on contextual expectations, which drive how ambiguous words
and sentences and interpreted. Contextual language expectations can be conceptualized as the
co-activations of semantic nodes in a network of linguistic knowledge, where connection strengths can
vary between individuals, for example as a function of political affiliation.
- Experiment comparing voters of Italians voting for populist vs mainstream political parties
, - Larger N400 for belief-congruent items
- Reflecting linguistic surprise
- Populist items evoke a larger N400 than non-populist items in mainstream voters and
vice versa for populist voters
- Freedom of movement within the EU is desirable
- One can classify 'agree/disagree' from the EEG
evoked by individual topic words (abortion,
immigration)
d) Emotional processing
- There might be a polarization of emotional
experience, since individual differences in life
history and psychological need can yield quite
different emotional responses to the same
political events.
- Algorithm that predicts voting based on facial
expressions to US political debate
- 50% of data used for training, 17% for
model selection, 33% for testing
- 73% accurate in predicting voting
behavior
The polarized mind in context: Interdisciplinary approaches to the psychology of political polarization
Increased level of polarization, which includes increasing alignment of within party opinions on distinct issues, a widening
ideological gap between opposing parties associated with stronger party brands, and the homogenization of voting
districts along lines of race, education, socio-economic status and other demographic factors.
Our psychological grasp of political processes that shape polarization are difficult to reproduce in statis antiseptic
laboratory settings. Also, key psychological processes such as emotional responses to political information can be difficult
to detect with classic measurements like verbal report. Given these constraints, it is unclear in which psychological
processing step (attention, perception, language understanding, emotion, decision-making) polarization takes hold.
a. The first account examines how individual trait differences, such as need for closure and cognitive inflexibility, are
associated with holding polarized attitudes.
b. The second account seeks to understand how contextual factors such as media filter bubbles and biased social
networks shape polarized political behavior.
Advanced neuroscientific methods can help overcome long-standing issues of measurement and ecological validity in this
endeavor.
Individual cognitive traits contribute to political polarization
Leading cognitive-based theories in political psychology argue that a person's idiosyncratic psychological needs and traits
contribute to the adoption of particular political views. A now classic theory reasons that a conservative worldview can
satisfy the 'epistemic need' for predictable, organized social environment and clear-cut principles about how the world
works. Strong epistemic motivation and lack of cognitive flexibility are found in both extreme ends of the political system.
These epistemic needs may be compounded by social desires such as the need to belong, which strengthens the
motivation to hold beliefs that maintain a good position within a desired social group.
How do the psychological needs stemming from our cognitive traits exacerbate polarization?
1. If a view is held in order to satisfy a need, that view becomes a valued possession and contradictory views
become threatening.
2. Psychological needs can strengthen existing beliefs through motivated reasoning
3. Once a person has developed a biased worldview, any new information is interpreted in a partisan way even
without motivated reasoning.
Contextual factors shape political polarization
Context = The structure of the social environment, which includes factors known to influence behavior, such as social
pressure, others' expectations, social norms and habits.
Filter bubble effect = The algorithms provided by social media platforms are designed to pick posts that the user will like,
which means social media users are becoming increasingly exposed to views they already agree with.
