[Vision2020] Breaking Up the Echo

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
September 17, 2012
Breaking Up the Echo By CASS R. SUNSTEIN

Cambridge, Mass.

IT is well known that when like-minded people get together, they tend to
end up thinking a more extreme
version<http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal/essay/deliberative-trouble?-why-groups-go-to-extremes/>of
what they thought before they started to talk. The same kind of
echo-chamber effect can happen as people get news from various media.
Liberals viewing MSNBC or reading left-of-center blogs may well end up
embracing liberal talking points even more firmly; conservative fans of Fox
News may well react in similar fashion on the right.

The result can be a situation in which beliefs do not merely harden but
migrate toward the extreme ends of the political spectrum. As current
events in the Middle East demonstrate, discussions among like-minded people
can ultimately produce violence.

The remedy for easing such polarization, here and abroad, may seem
straightforward: provide balanced information to people of all sides.
Surely, we might speculate, such information will correct falsehoods and
promote mutual understanding. This, of course, has been a hope of countless
dedicated journalists and public officials.

Unfortunately, evidence suggests that balanced presentations — in which
competing arguments or positions are laid out side by side — may not help.
At least when people begin with firmly held convictions, such an approach
is likely to increase polarization rather than reduce it.

Indeed, that’s what a number of academic studies done over the last three
decades have found. Such studies typically proceed in three stages. First,
the experimenters assemble a group of people who have clear views on some
controversial issue (such as capital
punishment<http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1981-05421-001>or sexual
orientation). Second, the study subjects are provided with
plausible arguments on both sides of the issue. And finally, the
researchers test how attitudes have shifted as a result of exposure to
balanced presentations.

You might expect that people’s views would soften and that divisions
between groups would get smaller. That is not what usually happens. On the
contrary, people’s original beliefs tend to harden and the original
divisions typically get bigger. Balanced presentations can fuel unbalanced
views.

What explains this? The answer is called “biased assimilation,” which means
that people assimilate new information in a selective fashion. When people
get information that supports what they initially thought, they give it
considerable weight. When they get information that undermines their
initial beliefs, they tend to dismiss it.

In this light, it is understandable that when people begin with opposing
initial beliefs on, say, the death penalty, balanced information can
heighten their initial disagreement. Those who tend to favor capital
punishment credit the information that supports their original view and
dismiss the opposing information. The same happens on the other side. As a
result, divisions widen.

This natural human tendency explains why it’s so hard to dislodge false
rumors and factual errors. Corrections can even be self-defeating, leading
people to stronger commitment to their erroneous beliefs.

A few years ago, for example, both liberals and conservatives were provided
with correct and apparently credible information showing that the George W.
Bush administration was wrong to think that
Iraq<http://intraspec.ca/Nyhan-Reifler2010.pdf>had an active
unconventional weapons program. After receiving the correct
information, conservatives became even more likely to believe that Iraq had
such weapons and was seeking to develop more.

The news here is not encouraging. In the face of entrenched social
divisions, there’s a risk that presentations that carefully explore both
sides will be counterproductive. And when a group, responding to false
information, becomes more strident, efforts to correct the record may make
things worse.

Can anything be done? There is no simple term for the answer, so let’s make
one up: surprising validators.

People tend to dismiss information that would falsify their convictions.
But they may reconsider if the information comes from a source they cannot
dismiss. People are most likely to find a source credible if they closely
identify with it or begin in essential agreement with it. In such cases,
their reaction is not, “how predictable and uninformative that someone like
that would think something so evil and foolish,” but instead, “if someone
like that disagrees with me, maybe I had better rethink.”

Our initial convictions are more apt to be shaken if it’s not easy to
dismiss the source as biased, confused, self-interested or simply mistaken.
This is one reason that seemingly irrelevant characteristics, like
appearance, or taste in food and drink, can have a big impact on
credibility. Such characteristics can suggest that the validators are in
fact surprising — that they are “like” the people to whom they are
speaking.

It follows that turncoats, real or apparent, can be immensely persuasive.
If civil rights leaders oppose affirmative action, or if well-known climate
change skeptics say that they were wrong, people are more likely to change
their views.

Here, then, is a lesson for all those who provide information. What matters
most may be not what is said, but who, exactly, is saying it.

Cass R. Sunstein<http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/index.html?id=552>,
a law professor at Harvard and the author of “Going to Extremes: How Like
Minds Unite and Divide,” was until last month the administrator of the
White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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