A common world view is one of the most important things holding a society together. 2020 was a year in which Americans could feel themselves being pulled apart by incompatible perspectives more than ever before. Opinions on COVID19 became a yawning gulf. We had a presidential election where many on both sides perceived the outcome as existentially important. Media outlets drifted apart, focused in on target audiences, and continued to diminish in importance relative to social media and independent producers. Americans’ beliefs and values are diverging. We’re less confident that we can cooperate with one another, and less open to alternative points of view. Can a country in which people refuse to listen to one another’s perspectives continue to function as a democracy? Could we even stop this trend if we tried?
A whole bevy of psychological mechanisms exist to try to help us live harmoniously in groups. We love discovering that we have things in common with people and we experience distressing cognitive dissonance when they disagree with us. When our beliefs or values are out of alignment with those of others, we strive for realignment through mechanisms that psychologist Fritz Heider described in his “Balance Theory”. We might try to persuade. We might avoid talking about points of contention, or conform just to get along, or eject intractable deviants from the group: anything to achieve consonance.
Because we love agreeing with people so much, we experience strong feelings of ideology and value homophily. That is, we’re attracted to forming relationships with people who think and feel like us. It’s not surprising that on social media, where we can control our social environment with the push of a button, we use that power to construct an atmosphere that minimizes dissonance and that maximizes the warm fuzzy feeling of well satisfied homophily. We artificially reproduce something resembling the cozy womb of a tightly knit primitive tribe.
But having the ability to edit people who think differently from us out of our online reality seems to be transforming our real world expectations. We no longer believe there’s any value in hearing things we don’t already agree with. And our God-like power to control our online world is causing the skills we would otherwise use to achieve balance in real world groups to atrophy. When we magically filter out the people we’re not harmonizing with, the mechanisms of conformity start to backfire, pulling us apart rather than drawing us together.
There was a prominent wave of deviant ejections in our media this year. James Bennet, an editor who the New York Times had given a mandate to increase ideological diversity in their opinion page, was ousted after publishing an Op-Ed that called for sending the national guard to establish order in US cities after weeks of conflict between police and demonstrators following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. “Running this puts Black @nytimes staffers in danger,” Times employees tweeted. Young woke employees broadly characterized publishing an opinion they disagreed with as a “mistake” or “process failure”. Bari Weiss left the Times the following month saying that the paper was failing to resist tribalism and had allowed Twitter to “become its ultimate editor.” The same week Andrew Sullivan left Vox lamenting that mainstream media could no longer “host a diversity of opinion” and put the “‘moral clarity’ of some self-appointed saints before the goal of objectivity in reporting.” More recently, cofounder Matthew Yglesias left Vox because he felt constrained in his ability to honestly address the issues of the day given the dominant editorial sensibilities, citing, in part, criticism he received for signing an open letter against cancel-culture.
Self sorting like this breaks our pluralistic society down along ideological lines. It makes us feel less like one cooperating group and more like competing tribes. And what makes things much worse is that when people form homophilic bands, their points of view become ever more alike, and ever more different from everyone else.
In 2007 some legal scholars, including Cass Sunstein, gathered groups of people together to talk about political issues. Each group was asked to discuss their views on global warming, affirmative action, and same sex unions and to try to arrive at a consensus view on each topic. The researchers had the participants report their opinions about the issues on questionnaires, once before the discussions began, and then again after.
You might expect that, after the group deliberation, the members’ thoughts on an issue would get closer to the group average. For instance, the person who felt most strongly that the US should join a climate treaty might typically be a little less confident about the issue after talking to a group who all felt less strongly than they did. While whoever was the least enthusiastic about a climate treaty would be persuaded by the group to be a little more in favor of the idea. By this hypothesis, if the average response of the group was a 7, on a 10 point scale, before the discussion, it would still be 7 after, but the spread of the responses would be reduced. Some 5s would become 6s. Some 9s would become 8s. Opinions would regress to the mean.
That isn’t what the researcher’s found. Instead, the groups became more strongly for or against the proposition, whatever it was, depending on whether the group, on average was for or against it at the outset. So if the average opinion in the group opposed same sex unions before the conversation started, people would emerge even more strongly opposed after talking the issue through. If they had been in favor, then they’d come away even more strongly in favor. The views of the groups tended naturally to become more extreme. People became more polarized.
The consequence of this for a society that divides itself into partisan camps that talk only amongst themselves is that their views on every issue will gradually drift further and further apart. Or maybe, not so gradually. In the study above, people’s views moved significantly in a 15 minute discussion. People’s thinking on what to do about COVID19 became extremely polarized in just a week or two.
Young people, who have grown up in an electronic bubble where they could control everything that they saw and heard, feel that it isn’t necessary to coexist with ideas they find disagreeable. We’ve failed in our duty as a society to socialize them to one of the core features of citizenship. Sadly, as we see at the New York Times, the world is now adapting to them rather than the other way around.
When we shut our eyes and stop our ears, the thing we’re trying to avoid seeing doesn't cease to exist. According to Sunstein’s research, it actually gets stronger. It’s likely to metastasize into something even more different from our own beliefs.
The world is not your social media feed. The things that you thumbs-down might disappear from view for a little while, but only to come back, bigger and badder than before. If you’re unlucky, the next time you encounter them, you might be hearing them from the lips of a US president.
The new censors relish the idea of deplatforming people, depriving ideas they find repugnant of access to the most popular venues. But deplatforming is actually a symmetrical process. If you shut out the views of whole segments of the population, those people are going to stop coming to your platform. Nothing stops you from kicking them off the stage, but as the bands on your tour become more and more homogenous, the people in the crowd will also become less and less diverse. Controlling the platform gives you the power to reshape your bubble, but it doesn’t give you the power to reshape the world itself. By deplatforming them, you’ve deplatformed yourself. You no longer have access to the audience you once did. You’ve lost the power to convert the unconverted, you can only preach to the choir. It cannot be otherwise in an open society. Nobody is required to drink your Kool-Aid. They’re free to just walk away. They can buy tickets to some other show.
The dissolution of the information environment into bubbles has kicked into overdrive in the last few years, but it started decades ago. Conservative talk radio and later Fox News took off because there was a large audience just waiting to be captured by anyone willing to speak to them in terms that they related to. The left leaning mainstream media played an important role in creating the Trump voter by excluding their viewpoints from consideration. That process is accelerating, and in ways that are perhaps unstoppable: the modern media environment naturally complements increasing platform specialization and market segmentation. But we don’t have to exacerbate the breakdown in communication by deliberately shoving people out of our sphere of mutual comprehension.
If we act like one nation, like the group of flesh and blood humans stuck together on this material planet that we actually are, then the psychology of group cohesion will start to work for us rather than against us. If we’re willing to endure cognitive dissonance, we can go back to exchanging ideas with our fellow citizens in such a way that social balancing mechanisms will draw us closer together, rather than pushing us further apart. We should want that. We need that. Especially in the kind of elite circles that read publications like the New York Times. They’re supposed to be the grown ups. How can they lead this country if they don’t even know what’s going on? The answer is, they won’t.