The wisdom of partisan crowds
| Autor: | Joshua Becker, Damon Centola, Ethan Porter |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
Multidisciplinary
05 social sciences Polarization (politics) Collective intelligence Social Sciences 050105 experimental psychology Social information processing Deliberative democracy Politics Crowds 0502 economics and business Premise 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Positive economics Psychology 050203 business & management Information exchange |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116:10717-10722 |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| Popis: | Theories in favor of deliberative democracy are based on the premise that social information processing can improve group beliefs. While research on the “wisdom of crowds” has found that information exchange can increase belief accuracy on noncontroversial factual matters, theories of political polarization imply that groups will become more extreme—and less accurate—when beliefs are motivated by partisan political bias. A primary concern is that partisan biases are associated not only with more extreme beliefs, but also with a diminished response to social information. While bipartisan networks containing both Democrats and Republicans are expected to promote accurate belief formation, politically homogeneous networks are expected to amplify partisan bias and reduce belief accuracy. To test whether the wisdom of crowds is robust to partisan bias, we conducted two web-based experiments in which individuals answered factual questions known to elicit partisan bias before and after observing the estimates of peers in a politically homogeneous social network. In contrast to polarization theories, we found that social information exchange in homogeneous networks not only increased accuracy but also reduced polarization. Our results help generalize collective intelligence research to political domains. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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