Gustavo Novoa, Margaret Echelbarger, et al. write:
American political parties continue to grow more polarized, but the extent of ideological polarization among the public is much less than the extent of perceived polarization (what the ideological gap is believed to be). Perceived polarization is concerning because of its link to interparty hostility, but it remains unclear what drives this phenomenon.
We propose that a tendency for individuals to form broad generalizations about groups on the basis of inconsistent evidence may be partly responsible.
We study this tendency by measuring the interpretation, endorsement, and recall of category-referring statements, also known as generics (e.g., “Democrats favor affirmative action”). In study 1 (n = 417), perceived polarization was substantially greater than actual polarization. Further, participants endorsed generics as long as they were true more often of the target party (e.g., Democrats favor affirmative action) than of the opposing party (e.g., Republicans favor affirmative action), even when they believed such statements to be true for well below 50% of the relevant party. Study 2 (n = 928) found that upon receiving information from political elites, people tended to recall these statements as generic, regardless of whether the original statement was generic or not. Study 3 (n = 422) found that generic statements regarding new political information led to polarized judgments and did so more than nongeneric statements.
Altogether, the data indicate a tendency toward holding mental representations of political claims that exaggerate party differences. These findings suggest that the use of generic language, common in everyday speech, enables inferential errors that exacerbate perceived polarization.
Nice graphs. I guess PNAS publishes good stuff from time to time.
I haven’t read the study. I did look at the supplementary material which included the question wordings. I have a broad question: how do we know that the study is finding differences between actual and perceived polarization rather than finding artifacts that result from surveys? Survey instruments are prone (my opinion) to responses that generalize and exaggerate – what I think of as an artifact of surveys. I don’t have the patience to wade through the various measures they use in these studies, but perhaps someone can explain at a high level how they have avoided or controlled for the tendency of surveys to illicit such responses.
If I am understanding their results, perceived and generic perceptions (I don’t understand the difference) exceed the “true” perceptions. But I worry that such perceptions might result from the survey instrument itself. If I’m asked how group X feels about issue Y in a survey, I feel inclined to offer an exaggerated response. Nuanced responses may be deterred in such surveys (less so in qualitative research methods such as focus groups). Can anybody explain how and if they managed to avoid such instrument effects – or if they are only a figment of my imagination?
I haven’t followed the literature but there is work done on generic plurals that might support the reported effect (although I’m not sure I buy the larger argument). I’m not sure if the authors cite the example (but I know they know the work: I think Andrew’s sister has done work in the area?), but “Ticks carry Lyme disease” or “ducks lay eggs” are generic statements that people generally accept to be true, even if they know it doesn’t apply to all members of the class, and, in some cases, a distinct minority.
I’m not sure I see the connect to increased polarisation though. It could be that politics is one of those contexts where people have always accepted generic statements Wouldn’t you need to track change over time to see if it’s actually driving increased polarisation?
> We propose that a tendency for individuals to form broad generalizations about groups on the basis of inconsistent evidence may be partly responsible.
This is consistent with the “fundamental attribution error” across group identities – which imo, explains much of what se see these days.
I like this alot:
“We propose that….We study this tendency by….”
This sounds like a real research paper!! They’re not claiming to “show” that their ingenious little mouse trap has proved that humanity has mispercieved the color of the sky all along. They offer a method to analyze a problem and *propose* a *possible* mechanism to understand the problem. Amazing!! This alone is a big advance for social sciences.
But the mechanism doesn’t work. As usual, it has inaccurate assumptions. The failed assumption is that parties’ and candidates’ public statements express their actual positions. This is obviously false. Parties often have positions that are unpopular, which they strenuously avoid expressing in public. They also pay lip service to popular political ideas that they would work against behind the scenes.
Tragically, people can detect these untruths and appropriately percieve the *actual* degree of polarization, where the public statements used to calculate the purported positions of the parties show the degree of polarization that candidates want the public to percieve.
These well-known realities pretty much undermine the conclusions of this study.
Humanity has misperceived the color of the sky all along; it follows unambiguously from undergraduate electromagnetism and is measurably true.
chipmunk wrote:
“This sounds like a real research paper!! They’re not claiming to “show” that their ingenious little mouse trap has proved that humanity has mispercieved the color of the sky all along.”
I am not sure whether I like this kind of ill-mannered criticism that seems to reflect the (alt-right) social science bashing quest.
“But the mechanism doesn’t work. As usual, it has inaccurate assumptions. The failed assumption is that parties’ and candidates’ public statements express their actual positions. This is obviously false.”
Of course, you’d need to study (elite) polarization also from this angle by using, say, speeches, law proposals, and voting behavior. But you can’t do all that in a single all-encompassing paper.
“Tragically, people can detect these untruths and appropriately percieve the *actual* degree of polarization, where the public statements used to calculate the purported positions of the parties show the degree of polarization that candidates want the public to percieve.”
Care to put some evidence upon this claim of yours? Intuitively, I’d argue that the situation is exactly the opposite — if anything, people have hard time to detect political “untruths” of any kind, let alone to deduce about the “actual degree of polarization”. Here, note also that elite polarization and the polarization of their constituencies are related but still not the same thing. There are also much deeper issues involved, as captured well by the concept of affective polarization.
Rafael wrote:
“Ive always believed that primary elections in a 2 party system are the cause of this.”
A two-party system certainly is a factor, but the explanation no longer holds as polarization is widespread throughout Western countries. In other words, what we call “block politics” here increasingly applies; you get the Sartori’s classical U-shape also in multi-party systems.
“Taking the median voter theorem seriously […].”
I tend to agree: it is difficult to stop polarization because there are politicians and political forces that benefit from it. Funnily enough, it was not so long ago when the median voter theorem was still a hot thing in political science.
ROFL, you doubt this? How many times did the GOP house vote to repeal Obamacare? Yet by the time they could repeal it a bunch of companies were already making lots of money because of it so of course they balked. There might as well be constitutional amendment barring congress from harming anyone who has a profitable business or a large bank account. Who wouldn’t want to live in this country where we pay twice as much as anywhere else for healthcare that doesn’t even cover everyone and still manages to kill us younger than peer countries? Or the democrats running on $15 min wage only to be thwarted by the entirely useless and replaceable senate parliamentarian. Or Biden running on canceling student debt, but cynically waiting to do announce anything until right before midterms and then choosing to do it via the HEROS act which was obviously DOA at SCOTUS. And the finally doing it the right way (Higher ed act and rulemaking) which will no doubt finish just in time for Trump to repeal it via the congressional review act.
Polarization exists because it turns out the American Dream is Feudalism and the only way they stop the Guillotine’s is by convincing everyone to fight about stuff that is irrelevant to billionaires.
“This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first. Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.” – Mary Elizabeth Lease (circa 1890)
Nothing ever changes.
Ive always believed that primary elections in a 2 party system are the cause of this.
Taking the median voter theorem seriously in a primary system you’ll no longer obtain a candidate that is attractive to the median voter (no one likes Trump or Biden) but candidates that are attractive to the 1st quartile and 3rd quartile (probably a little more extreme as primary voters are likely more extreme than the average party voter).
And since these elected candidates are the most salient members of each party it’s who individuals end up identifying ‘the other’ as, especially given how the political divide has turned into an urban/rural divide with people self selecting geographically reducing the interactions with ‘the other’ and seeing that he or she is not so bad.
Gustavo Novoa, Margaret Echelbarger, et al. write:
The rest of the author list is so forgettable.
Author contributions: G.N., M.E., A.G., and S.A.G. designed research; G.N. and M.E. performed research; G.N. and A.G. analyzed data; and G.N., M.E., A.G., and S.A.G. wrote the paper.
I can only assume that GN created those graphs.
G.N. created the graphs, with some suggestions from A.G.
I was waiting for someone to catch on to the complete author list.