Hi,

This week’s email is about how an important social tool for thinking can backfire.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• It’s commonly assumed that group discussions lead people to exchange views in a way that leads them to develop better-informed beliefs, which should—in theory—decrease polarization.

• In reality, however, group discussions often increase polarization rather than decrease it, by shifting groups and their individual members toward more extreme positions of their pre-existing beliefs.

• For example, when some group members are weakly in favor of some political reform and others are undecided, repeated discussions of that reform can first convince the undecided members, and later shift the group as a whole more and more strongly in favor of the reform.

• This can happen for various reasons, like pressure to conform to the group’s position and the limited range of persuasive arguments that people are exposed to within homogeneous groups.

• To avoid this issue, it’s important to allow group members to question existing views and share opposing ones, ideally while promoting reasonable heterogeneity of views within discussion groups.

This relates to concepts I’ve written about before, like the confirmation bias and the bandwagon effect.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar