Monthly Archives: August 2023

Polarization: Or, How We Came to Distort Reality So Thoroughly

Polarization: or How We Came to Distort Reality so Thoroughly

I like to talk politics. And I’m really not so concerned about “winning an argument” or crushing someone’s position just to satisfy myself. No, I’m more interested in how they think. Sometimes, dare I say much of the time, listening to some argue politics is just appalling. Their command of data and facts, along with reasoning processes that accompany such facts are just debilitating.

So how is it that your cranky old uncle at Thanksgiving can ruin the day with his cockamamie opinions; how is it that the nice kid you socialize with can actually believe that Hillary Clinton has secrets in her home basement; or, can you really prove to me that the government is trying to vaccinate people so I can control them.

How people configure a set of ideas that are bound together by some mechanism or functional interdependence is the real question. Examining someone’s beliefs or ideological system always unearths a specified attitude or belief that goes with a collection of others. We assume that a person, for example, who holds a conservative position in one capacity will hold additional beliefs and attitudes in the same conservative capacity.

For example, if a person strongly believes in lower taxes they are probably conservative and believe in fewer government programs supported by those taxes. Such a conservative probably believes in strong protections for the American values system and is thereby supportive of the military and military interventions. Our hypothetical political character opposes federal aid to education, a state-controlled economy, and union organization.

The person who supports this reasonably coherent political position has been labeled an “ideologue.” But the question that is difficult pertains to how these ideas are packaged together and considered to represent an orderly and defensible ideological system. Such a system, as briefly described above, is a fairly consistent conservative position that is recognizable and defensible. But what happens when that collection of ideas gets contaminated by nonlogical, or empirically indefensible, or deeply personal and subjective ideas that are seeking to find a different order, one organized more by personal emotions or feelings rather than issue-based analysis.

One of the problems of contemporary debate over controversial issues is the attachment of emotions to the various planks in the system described above. So, one person might hold and represent the conservative position above but “hate” the other person and feel that they are personally morally degenerate or intellectually dishonest. They then turn any engagement about the issues into a personal and emotional clash that has little to do with the issue and much to do with the polarization that results.

The result is increased attention to other groups that individuals identify with. These are ethnic, religious, or political groups and they are typically associated with intense emotions and strong feelings of defensiveness. The participants in the conflict move away from issue-based matters and are more drawn to emotional bonds which are characterized by deep psychological reactions to threat and the various meaning distortions that accompany group identity.

This results in a downward spiraling of emotions that feeds the divisions between groups. We can see the consequences of this in the current state of American politics – polarization.

Posted in Communication and Conflict Resolution

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Peace and Conflict Information Silos

Communication with other information management systems, to be blunt as well as simplistic and obvious, is an important part of any endeavor to analyze our effective institutions and figure out what they are doing and how effective they might be. An information silo is an information management system that is unable to freely communicate with other communication systems because of certain types of structural barriers that result in incommensurability. And while incommensurability can be established in many ways including ethnic, educational, political, and stylistic differences, they construct silos nonetheless and these silos are responsible for the polarization that characterizes the two sides of an issue.

The business world is full of information silos and groups that differ thoroughly, but they continue to struggle with how to make contact (that is, communicate) with those in other groups. Questions about the quality of information, the nature of disinformation, partisan silos, and polarization are important questions to ask because we have always struggled with information silos and issues pertaining to the quality of information in general. So, these questions about information positions are persistent in their determination to influence perceptions and unearthing the infrastructure of, say, political campaign messages and other ideas essential to a democracy.

There is such a thing as the “silo mentality” which describes people in some sort of organization preferring to work by themselves and not collaborate with others. They live in a bounded world of information and cannot see the value of cooperation. It is true enough that people working in silos often do so as a matter of power. If an individual has access to information others don’t than that gives them a certain amount of power.

The silo mentality appears in the corporate world and is commonly understood as a source of tension and a barrier to progress. Highly familiar organizations are associated with the silo mentality. But this silo syndrome can characterize people in all sorts of networks of contact. The individual who holds a political position and will not budge from it is also living in an information silo. They are surrounded by a set of beliefs, either accurate or not, that they are comfortable with and those beliefs guide their behavior.

That person you argue with and they just don’t listen or consider seriously any position other than the one they already hold is living in a narrow information world Surely, there is a difference between the corporate automaton and someone who desperately hangs onto a political opinion. The individual in an organization is part of the system that doesn’t change – at least not very easily – and lacks vision for people to rally around. The individual who lives in an information silo usually chooses to avoid information that will be upsetting or counter productive to his or her goal of maintaining a political position.