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The Other Side Is More Rational Than You Think
Polarization is not being caused by irrational factors. If it were, you wouldn’t be able to trust your own beliefs.
Polarization is rising in the United States. We all know it. We can sense it. Beyond our own impressions, it’s what the data clearly tells us. Year by year, members of each party agree more amongst themselves, and less with the other side. As a result, they increasingly demonize the other side. From 1994 to 2016, the percentage of Republicans with “very unfavorable” attitudes toward the Democratic Party rose from 21 percent to 58 percent, with a whopping 91 percent having an overall “unfavorable” attitude. The numbers for Democrats are similar.
Why is this happening? It has become commonplace to point to irrational causes as the drivers of polarization: people are subject to reasoning errors like confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, identity-protective cognition, biased assimilation of evidence, and so on.
What we are told is that these biases have led people to misuse the internet: they tend to look only at news sources that agree with their beliefs, to share and promote only articles that confirm them, to talk with and trust only those who agree with them, and so on. And that, we are told, is why we are polarized.
