The last few years have seen an ever greater gap between political ideologies emerge, with a yawning chasm between conservatives and liberals making any collaboration increasingly difficult. Logically it makes sense to believe such a chasm emerges as a result of the differing political ideologies of the two groups, but a new study from Cornell University proposes that luck may play a bigger role than previously thought.
“Why have the major political parties shifted positions on issues like free trade, balanced budgets, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage and trust in science? And how is it that voters on both sides often have contradictory positions on abortion rights and capital punishment?,” the researchers ponder.
Opinion formation
The researchers aimed to explore the early stages of opinion formation, with an experiment designed to test how things may unfold in different ways.
They took a group of a few thousand Democratic and Republican volunteers and placed them into 10 ‘parallel worlds’ that were isolated from each other. Each world involved the completion of an online survey asking them to state their agreement or disagreement with a number of unfamiliar cultural and political issues. In two of the worlds, the results from the survey were private, but in the remaining eight, a real-time update of how the group was leaning was provided.
The data suggests that it only takes a handful of early movements to heavily influence the direction of ideological travel for a group, with the majority then piling in to support this newly formed position. What was most interesting however is that partisans were just as likely to support a position in one world as oppose it in another.
“In one world, it was Democrats who favored using AI to spot online criminals, and in another world it was Republicans,” the researchers explain. “In one world, Democrats favored classic books, and in another world, Republicans favored the classics. In one world, Democrats were more optimistic about the future and in another world, it was Republicans.”
Will this lead to wiser political discourse? That’s hard to tell, but the results do seem to suggest that the positions people so fiercely defend are not rooted in ideological differences as much as we might think.
“Our study suggests that these positions may just be identity markers, like bumper stickers, the result of opinion cascades that propelled people into a position with which they came to emotionally identify,” the authors conclude. “Learning that the two parties could just as easily have switched sides,” he said, “might encourage people to re-examine their positions and listen to the views of people with whom they sharply disagree.”
