Political Polarization — The Story of a House Divided
Keywords
Polarization, Perception Gap
Problem Statement
With the coming of another election cycle in our country, there are a lot of complex political issues that we are all trying to understand. In this project, we sought out to identify and explain the intricacies and complexities of one of these pressing and relevant political issues.
Our team got together and discussed where our own personal passions and confusions lied in today’s political environment and decided that we all wanted to know more about the problem of polarization in this country. How did we get to the polarized state that we are in now? Are we really as polarized as we feel we are? What are the factors that really impact the polarization of the country? We were unsure how to understand any of these questions, so in this article, you will see how we took a design thinking approach to unpack and explain these questions in a visual and interactive way.
Research Documentation
The first step of our dive into this problem was to take a step back from our own biases and experiences and try to view the problem from a different perspective. So, we looked into the existing research that has been done on this topic. We learned about the differences that people have in their opinions and morals (1), about the negative perspectives that many people have ingrained in them towards the “other party” (2), and about how often times we are wrong to hold these negative perspectives (3).
Through this research, we realized that this idea of a “perception gap” between the two parties continued to crop up in study after study. The perception gap is an idea where we have a mental model of people or situations that is drastically different than reality.
This idea intrigued us for the purposes of this project because while it is hard to explain and change the understanding of the core, ideological differences that divide us, what we can explain is why and how we develop opinions of those that we view as different even if those views are not completely accurate. We also realized that even for some of the most politically polarizing topics, there’s typically a substantial fraction of a party’s voters that disagree with the majority belief in their party. In short, people may be more moderate than we believe.
So, we decided to drill down even deeper into the problem of this perception gap and we wanted to hear from actual people about what they thought about the issue. So the next phase of the project was to conduct primary research by interviewing a spectrum of people in order to empathize with their perspectives. One of the biggest things that we heard from people was frustrations around the two-party system. Not only did they feel like their beliefs did not fully align with either of the parties, they felt as though they were grouped into a party that the other side demonized. One participant interestingly claimed,
“Just because I align more with the Republican party doesn’t mean that I support Trump or what he represents.”
Another quickly clarified that they’re,
“not a socialist”
after praising Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her grand entrance into United States politics.
These broad characterizations were interesting: instead of pointing at the other side and expressing frustrations, our interviewees tried to avoid being grouped into the “crazy part” of the side that they were on.
Models, Sketches, and Ideation
Now that we had a clear picture of the problem space we were in, we got right to work. Now we needed to answer the question of how we were going to do this in a way that would cause people to strongly understand and empathize with the problem. We began by brainstorming, sketching and ideating numerous ideas, both practical and not so practical, that we could pursue.
We narrowed down our list and eventually settled on a few fleshed out ideas that would illustrate the problem we wanted to address. After hearing peoples’ thoughts on our final set of ideas, we chose one we found the most compelling.
Usability Testing Edits(Changes after extension)
Through another round of usability testing, we found many small bugs that were more important for us to change, as well as got some ideas for some bigger changes(mentioned in Future Iterations section). We decided, in the interest of time, to focus on the small changes that we could make to the explainer that would give us the highest rewards. Some of these included moving the most compelling information of the perception gap to be displayed first, making it clear that there is more information to scroll to after the bucketing part of the game, and being able to skip the questions at the end of the process.
Our Final Deliverable
Our explorable explainer would ask users to judge a group of fictional characters. A user would start our explainer knowing only that they would be playing a game. That game would be trying to guess the political affiliation of a person knowing only one statement they made and some basic background information, just like what you might do if you ran into someone and heard them say something on a political topic. We promised to tell the user how many people they got right at the end, but there was a catch — each person could’ve easily been either a Democrat or a Republican, so we didn’t give a score. Instead, we showed everyone how many Democrat and Democratic-leaning voters supported each of the statements our fictional characters made, and how many Republican and Republican-leaning voters supported each of the statements. It turns out, oftentimes there was a majority from both parties that support an issue, and even on the most divisive issues, a number of people from both parties disagreed with their party’s majority stance.
We were pretty happy with what we had, but after presenting our preliminary idea, we realized we wanted to dive deeper into this topic. We needed to give more context for our game and make the whole explainer more compelling. So, we added a timer to make it more similar to an instinctive judgment you might make when just running into someone, and we expanded our set of topics to include more things that were the highest priorities in this upcoming election, even if there was sharp disagreement on these topics. Finally, our goal for our explainer is to show that demonizing the members of the other party is not productive, so we invited users to share a misconception that others might have about them based on their political affiliation or beliefs.
Try it Yourself
Try out this interactive exercise to see this issue from a different perspective.
How did the exercise make you feel? We hope that it shows how when we choose to put people into categorical boxes in our minds it fails to represent the complexities of the world we live in and the people that live in it. This categorical approach leads us to often separate ourselves from people that we could have encouraging, positive conversations or even relationships with.
Future Iterations
We want to be clear that this is by no means a complete work. Political polarization is a complicated and messy problem and it would take much more work and iterations to come up with a product that encapsulates those intricacies into an easily digestible and understandable idea. If we had more time to dive deeper into this specific problem, we have thought about multiple different directions that we could take it. There are two specific changes that we would want to make in response to the user testing that we have done for the explorable explainer. The first would be to deepen the experience that the user has when interacting with the explainer on an empathetic individual level. The second is to show the user what the implications of our current trends of polarization would mean for our future as a country.
The reason that we found that it would be beneficial to expand on the individual empathetic level is that we found that there are varying degrees that people have experienced polarization in their lives. Some people, have experienced a deep sense of polarization where they feel shut off from or even looked down upon by members of the other party. On the other hand, there are others that do not engage in any political stance as strongly and feel removed from the political climate entirely. However, just because someone does not feel the impacts of polarization does not make the problem any less of an issue. In fact, just because they do not feel the impacts of it does not mean that they are not part of polarization or even possibly contributing to it. This is why we found that it is important for people to empathize with the people who are most impacted by a polarized political climate so that they too will feel a strong urge to fight back against it.
The second dimension of the project that we would want to expand if we had more time is to show people the future implications of our current upward trending polarization. What would the country look like if it continues in this direction for 4 more years or even 10 more years? The purpose of expanding in this direction would be to show people the fears and possibilities of a polarized future on a large scale. Would people across political lines even be able to have a civil conversation about politics? Would politicians represent more and more extreme views? Would different parties even live in the same areas or even states as each other? Of course, in order to answer these questions or accurately represent this type of future, even in an anecdotal way, would take much more research and data collection. The goal of doing this, however, would not be to give people some sense of impending doom but to show people that a polarized future is not a future that would be good for anyone. We want to make people connect with this problem in a way that makes them want to actively avoid and oppose polarization, so that the next time they are presented with a situation where they could contribute to a more polarized climate or mitigate the effects of polarization, they would be more inclined to take some action that helps avoid the problem of polarization.
Citations
(1) https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2009-05192-002.pdf
(2) https://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016/
Appendix
More Ideation Pictures
Interviewee Mindmaps
