Are political echo chambers bad for society?

Great Debates
1

By ‘political echo chambers,’ I mean the tendency of conservatives and liberals to self-segregate socially, in such a way that conservatives only associate and converse with conservatives, and liberals only associate and converse with liberals.
This has several effects: It polarizes society more and more as conservatives get dragged further and further by their echo chambers to the right and liberals get dragged further and further by their echo chambers to the left. It also leads both sides to stereotype each other very negatively, since there isn’t that much interaction with people from the opposite political spectrum.
But most people’s response is or would be, “I already *know *what conservatives (or liberals) are like. It’s not that I haven’t interacted with them before. I *have *interacted with them before and they have no worthwhile ideas to offer. I don’t want to interact with them any more, I see no point in listening to their drivel.”

So, is political self-segregation a good or bad thing for society?

2

I propose mandatory military service as a solution - get people from all across society thrown in with random other members of society for a year or so.

3

Yeah, that’s why (for example) the upper crust were so sympathetic to the poors during the post-Civil-War Gilded Age…

Personally, I’ve never been steered wrong by this guideline: The only kind of “social engineering” that works is a con artist tricking people into giving him their passwords.

4

One compromise is to remain segregated from groups that have very strongly different opinions and values than you do… But study them and their views.

Take some time to read books by authors who espouse political standpoints different from your own. Listen to “their” radio shows. Browse “their” web sites.

Ideally, each of us should be able to present a reasonable argument in support of the viewpoints opposite of our own. A pro-life partisan should be able to make a good pro-choice argument, and vice versa.

We don’t have to socialize with them, but we really do owe it to ourselves, in all integrity, to comprehend what they believe.

5

I’d say it’s a bad thing. In my opinion, one of the worst things you can do is have unquestioned beliefs. You should always be thinking about what you believe, why you believe it, and whether you should believe it.

And exposing yourself to people who believe differently than you do and engaging them in rational debate is a good way to put your beliefs to the question.

6

I always wonder why people get together for a rally or event where they all basically try to upstage each other. For example, back in the day, who hated Bush more?

But your right such events dont solve any problems or get anything accomplished. Its just a big gripe session.

7

One very bad result shows when a “common” knowledge factoid that was repeated and believed in their echo chamber is suddenly repeated in the wild as it was a normal thing. (like “Teach the controversy” in scientific matters that affect our educational system, “I’m not a scientist” when dealing with climate change and “legitimate rape” regarding abortion) It does make look the ones that do know better look foolish by not telling all their peers about why those were not good ideas early.

I have pointed before that it is just happen-stance now that a lot of positions that have evidence on their side are currently supporting the left side of things. Eventually that will change. Neil deGasse Tysen can tell you and that he does expect that the Republicans will eventually do the right thing, “this is a self correcting thing”. But it is taking longer than we thought as Cecil would tell you.

8

Online this happens a lot and it is bad, imho.

Take this board as an example. There aren’t many conservatives/republicans. There used to be more. As far as I can tell most of them left because the constant refrain of ‘all conservatives/republicans are evil’ gets a bit old after a while.

I’ve seen two threads in the past day where a Doper said this straight out. It is standard and accepted as true here. And the mods rarely do anything about it. If you don’t believe me just think back to Der Trihs and how long it took for him to get banned.

So the 'Dope turned into an echo chamber. Differing views are dismissed with ‘you just believe that because you are evil’ and all the discussions turn into a circle jerk.

Sad, really.

The conservatives do it to. So us socially liberal, fiscally conservative folks are basically. screwed.

Slee

9

[nitpick]Der Trihs is not banned. He was suspended and never came back.[/nitpick]

I think it’s useful to know what my political opponents believe, and to understand why they believe it. I’m disappointed that anyone could think otherwise.

10

Ah, for the good old days when every city that was worth the ink on a map had two newspapers whose readerships did not overlap.

11

Well in many ways blogs and wesbites have filed in that nitch.

12

OTOH, it’s probably no small part of why the civil rights struggles of the latter half of the 20th century were successful. The military was integrated post-WWII, and we had a lot of men who served in integrated units in the peacetime draft, Korea and Vietnam.

The trick would be to identify promising officers from the ranks; as the system stands now, it’s skewed toward middle and above people who can get college degrees, and due to the correlation between socio-economic status and race, that generally means white people.

But as to the OP’s question, yes, I think political echo chambers are terrible for society. I take my Dad as an example; he’s always been conservative, but between watching Fox News, and reading all the breathless glurge people send him, he’s far more polarized than he was say… 15 years ago. Basically he may get a notion of how something should be, and then the sources of information that he considers authoritative (friends, family, television news) reinforce that notion, and in many cases exacerbate it, and when friends/family have many of the same “authoritative” sources, it all sort of compounds itself, to the point where people really do believe that Obama is a muslim, or that the UN is trying to take our guns or whatever other credulous nonsense is making the rounds.

And I’m sure the flip side happens on the democratic side; I see it happen around here all the time. Certain things are taken as God’s own truth and self-evident, and any dissent or disagreement is shouted down as heretical.

It’s not ignorance on either side; it’s merely a lack of reasonable challenge. And the TV shows don’t help- they tend to have debates between people who are 180 degrees off from each other in viewpoint, in order to generate some good Jerry Springer-ish hollering at each other, rather than getting two people who are about 30 degrees off-center either way, and having them have a good, respectful, productive debate.

Probably the worst single effect of the echo chamber/polarization is the notion that “you’re either with us or against us”, as if Armageddon is imminent. There’s no room for the middle anymore; if you’re stupid enough to get into a political discussion these days, and you’re centrist, you find yourself fighting both sides.

13

Its only bad if you’re wrong

14

I’d submit it’s bad even then.

  • Even starting from a hypothetical position of 100% accuracy, as situations change the scarcity of challenge and critical discussion inside the echo chamber to ensure positions adapt accurately.
  • Confirmation bias tends to make it hard to assess rightness/wrongness once you enter that echo chamber. It skews the perception of those inside them towards a misplaced confidence that they are right.
  • You can’t separate optimum policy/candidate positions from some axiomatic values and weighting of values. Two people can agree that both A and B are good things to pursue, and C is something to be avoided. When considering a policy change to increase A and B at the cost of some C, different weightings are enough to produce different “optimum” solutions.
  • Given different values and weightings exist, there’s frequently a need to negotiate solutions to actually implement things. Echo chambers tend to reinforce the sense of we’re fully right and they are fully wrong. They also tend to reinforce less accurate representations of the other parties interests. Both of those things make negotiating problematic. It simply gets harder to find solutions that are better for both sides than no agreement. We can bypass possible good solutions in favor of "perfect"solutions that never get implemented.
15

I’m not sure that made a great deal of difference. For the most part, non-black civil rights marchers and campaigners were Northern college students. There don’t seem to have been a lot of military veterans involved from North or South.

16

But in matters of government policy both sides must come together to find a solution that involves compromise. If I do what you’ve suggested and can find common ground and a fair compromise that will be rejected by a person who has not gone the extra mile to understand my perspective. What then? While I may understand their perspective no fair compromise can be reached if I do not believe they have extended the same courtesy to me. This exchange happens in the halls of Congress as well as Facebook, so I think far more is asked of society than ‘understanding’.

17

I do this all the time by listening to conservative talk radio. Sometimes the arguments are so off I get physical headaches at the wanton and unchecked stupidity and have to turn it off, but I find it useful to listen to these people. I want to catalog their arguments and ideas, find the ones I disagree with and identify the weaknesses in their arguments. And then crush them.

18

The bad thing is that self segregation is so EASY because there is so little crossover of ideas.

If someone advocates lower taxes, I feel like I can figure out their position on 10 other issues without even asking. If someone is pro-SSM, it’s the same thing. If that person doesn’t agree with me on one political topic, they’re probably not going to agree with me on any political topic.

19

The reason it is bad is that it inevitably leads to groupthink. It is part of a larger pattern of creating self-identity based on political positions.

Political positions become tribes. People become pressured to conform on every point with the norm, rather than picking and choosing good ideas. Switching from one political party or position to another becomes a traumatic shift of alliegance rather than simply a choice. It becomes preferable to support a scoundrel of one’s political persuasion than an honest person of the other. In the worst case, one actively hopes for disaster to strike one’s own country to discredit the other side who can be blamed for it.

20

I agree it works best – and may only work – if both sides practice it. But even if it’s only one-sided, only something I choose to do, it educates me and makes me better and wiser. If people only listen to echo-chamber viewpoints, they risk ignorance, believing a distorted caricature of the other side’s actual beliefs.

One problem here is that conservative talk radio is, itself, only a distorted caricature of anyone’s real viewpoint. It’s cartoonishly exaggerated, deliberately, and for effect. The same for most Bible radio: it’s grotesque and garish, and doesn’t fairly reflect what most ministers are really saying in most churches.

Now, listening to right-wing hate radio is still somewhat useful, just as studying the lies of creationists. It makes us familiar with the extremists’ “talking points.” But if we’re really going to do the work, we need to hear the viewpoints of people who are more representative, more average.