Workshop Report: Coming to terms with Polarisation…Literally
Written by Ceejay Hayes
On Friday, 24 February, the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab hosted 12 academics – professors, post docs, and PhD students – to answer one question: What is polarization? Over a half-day workshop, participants tackled what quickly became an ever-evolving challenge: applying a singular definition to a multi-faceted circumstance.
In attendance were Drs Sander van Der Linden (Psychology), Jon Roozenbeek (Psychology), Rory Finnin (Slavonic/Ukrainian Studies), Amy Orben (Psychology/Neuroscience), Lucia Reisch (Behavioural Economics & Policy), Andreas Vlachos (Natural Language), and Roberto Stefan Foa (Politics & Public Policy). They were joined by PhD Students and Postdocs Yara Kyrychenko, David Young, Malte Dewies, and Giulio Corsi.
Perspectives on Polarization
The workshop started by breaking into groups along academic disciplines – psychology, natural language, and political science – to see how scholars in each field define polarization. Early on, an idea was shared by Dr Sander van der Linden that the political science definitions of the term – affective and ideological polarization – are the most prolific in academia. Indeed, these terms were identified by several participants in a survey sent out prior to the workshop that asked, in part, how they personally defined polarization. However, any consensus quickly unfolded as groups elaborated on their understanding of the subject matter.
One definition – shared by the psychology group – remained relevant throughout the discussion:
People move away from each other, organically or by force.
An unprompted – or organic – separation of groups around shared ideals is also known as homophily and is a widely known sociological concept. While noted, much more time was spent on polarization as a response to stimuli.
Dr Rory Finnin offered a definition of polarization from a Humanities perspective:
Rapid flight of bifurcation caused by cultural anxiety and fear characterized by rapidity and extremes.
In Dr Finnin’s understanding of polarization lay a critical question: Is polarization reactionary by nature?
The natural language group added some dimension, literally, to the collective understanding of polarization. In their view, identities are spatially far apart – physically, psychosocially, and ideologically.
Polarization in the Real World
We paused the discussion to hear from three participants about their research on polarization.
First, we heard from PhD candidate Yara Kyryrchenko about her research on Social Media & Polarization during the 2022 Russo-Ukraine War. Her findings highlight that ingroup affinity (as opposed to outgroup hostility) produced higher levels of social media engagement – the so-called “rally around the flag” effect. Such patterns were observed both in Ukraine and Russia, highlighting the role of stimuli in social polarization.
Next, we heard from Dr Andreas Vlachos, who offered insight into potential avenues for intervention against polarization. His study looked at the efficacy of “AgruBots'' in engaging users with opposing viewpoints. Findings suggested that ArguBots helped users to understand that people had good reasons for their ideological stance, and that the platform itself was engaging, clear, consistent, not confusing, and not frustrating.
Finally, we heard from David Young, another PhD candidate, who brought to attention the role of bias in polarization.
Equipped with new insights into real-world observations of polarization, the attention returned to developing an interdisciplinary understanding of the term.
What is, or rather, what makes polarization?
As the workshop progressed, it became clear that polarization could not be wholly defined by a single process or condition. In fact, the question arose of whether polarization itself is a process or a state. (Thankfully, we all agree that polarization is a verb).
In the real world, polarization appears to be both a means and an end – a process that establishes identities that creates distance between people along ideological, psychosocial, and, at times, physical axes. Herein, however, lies a peculiar contradiction.
Polarization exists in a multipolar, multidimensional world, but is graphed on a two-dimensional axis: for or against; left versus right; us versus them. Take immigration policy as an example. One’s attitudes towards immigration policy is likely to be affected by race, ethnicity, immigration status, partisan affiliation, and class – each of which could be categorized as a dimension. However, public discourse over the subject will often orient perspectives on a pro/anti-immigration axis. If we consider each identity an axis upon which attitudes on policy are made, polarization necessarily flattens those dimensions onto a single two-dimensional ideological axis onto which a person must graft themselves without fully considering the nuance of their stance. Polarization, in this scenario, alters both the condition and the state in which a person engages with policy.
Politics and Polarization
When asked about their definition of polarization, the political science group responded with a question: Can we separate polarization and politics?
Taking a step back, it may be helpful to acknowledge that polarization necessarily implies a difference of perspective on a given subject matter. Take, for example, two friends’ stance on cheese: one loves it, the other hates it. Does the fact, alone, that these two friends have opposing stances on cheese mean that they exist in polarized relation to each other?
Can two people (or, more importantly, two communities) coexist with their differences without existing in a state of polarization?
One participant, Dr Lucia Reisch, offered a framework to unpack this question. Reisch suggests that there are three elements that animate polarization: politics, policy, and polity.
Politics animates polarization; lawmakers and media commentators debate on policy along a left/right ideological axis, competing for representational majorities in government and among the public. The public, more specifically a voting-age person, aligns themselves with a political party (or polity) and thus takes on an identity that informs their attitudes toward politicians, legislation, and the opposition. And policy codifies legislation, often ideologically biased, into law. In this configuration, there are extremely high stakes that come with polarization. Difference becomes gamified.
Bigger than a single question
By the end of the workshop, it was evident that polarization is too complex to distill into a single sentence. Indeed, Dr Amy Orben called to question whether both the feasibility and the helpfulness of attempting to apply a singular definition to polarization. While that was the task at the outset, the workshop revealed that polarization is, perhaps, a constellation of processes and conditions that exaggerate pre-existing difference (in ideology, in phenotypes, in societal relation) that breeds intergroup hostility and gamifies difference in the political arena.