Buder, J., Zimmermann, A., Buttliere, B., Rabl, L., & Huff, M. (2022, January 14). Online interaction turns the congeniality bias into an uncongeniality bias. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/r87bm

Once we give ourselves over absolutely to a cultural immortality belief system, that is when our complete identification can emerge a self-righteousness so powerful that any other mortality-denying system that claims to be the truth and therefore threatens ours, must be eliminated.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable and can drive us into ingroup/outgroup formation. It can, in other words, lead to greater social polarization.

Adaptation requires us to step into the unknown. Big changes in our lives therefore require us to go from the familiar and comfortable space, to the unfamiliar and uncomfortable - movement away from our comfort zone, as is happening as the polycrisis we face gains traction.

Introducing the concept of collective illusion within highly polarized context tends to reduce its conceptual understanding. The political impact of collective illusions is that it is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that drives further entrenchment, misunderstanding of one's own ingroup as well as the outgroup.

Benjamin Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America to help sell his newspapers and to crush a rival.

An early statement of the problem of distribution which has been widely solved by many social media algorithmic feeds. Sadly pushing ideas to people interested in them (or not) doesn't seem to have improved humanity. Perhaps too much of the problem space with respect to the idea of "influence" has been devoted to marketing and commerce or to fringe misinformation spaces? How might we create more value to the "middle" of the populace while minimizing misinformation and polarization?

This is the critical observation - everything is interconnected. It is a nexus of problems that requires that we deal with all dimensions of the problem simultaneously.

Putin is the nexus of so much that is wrong with the world. He is like an octopus that has its arms in multiple crisis of the planet.

The political polarization of the US, the ascendancy of the puppet government of Trump and the blatant cognitive dissonance of the extreme right who are impervious to facts is reminiscent of the propaganda imposed upon the Russian people themselves for one reason - it was part of Putin's master plan: https://youtu.be/FxgBuhMBXSA The US population has been split by Putin's information warfare system, the same one he uses on the Russian population.

The fake news programmed by Russian propaganda about the Ukraine war has worked effectively to mislead the Russian populus: https://youtu.be/kELta9MLOzg The same pattern of psychological manipulation has also had the same impact in the belief system of the typical hardcore Trumpist.

Polarization

Grüning, D. J., Panizza, F., & Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2022). The importance of informative interventions in a wicked environment. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/azsbn

Garland, J., Ghazi-Zahedi, K., Young, J.-G., Hébert-Dufresne, L., & Galesic, M. (2022). Impact and dynamics of hate and counter speech online. EPJ Data Science, 11(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00314-6

ReconfigBehSci. (2022, January 9). Just a thought on this and the general vaccine mandate debate. As a behavioural scientist currently stuck in Germany where this is a live debate, it strikes me that the thoughts below address only part of the population: Those not currently vaccinated. But what about ... 1/2 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1480213148032450565

Timothy Caulfield. (2021, December 30). #RobertMalone suspended by #twitter today. Reaction: 1) Great news. He has been spreading harmful #misinformation. (He has NOT contributed to meaningful/constructive scientific debate. His views demonstrably wrong & polarizing.) 2) What took so long? #ScienceUpFirst [Tweet]. @CaulfieldTim. https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1476346919890796545

Zewe, A., & Technology, M. I. of. (2021, December 19). MIT Scientists Find Clues to Why Fake News Snowballs on Social Media. SciTechDaily. https://scitechdaily.com/mit-scientists-find-clues-to-why-fake-news-snowballs-on-social-media/

Wood, D., & Brumfiel, G. (2021, December 5). Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate

Tanase, L.-M., Kerr, J. R., Freeman, A. L. J., & Schneider, C. R. (2021). The effects of President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis on hoax beliefs and risk perceptions of the virus in the U.S. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/frxt8

The Left’s Covid failure. (2021, November 23). UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2021/11/the-lefts-covid-failure/

Is cancel culture a right/left political issue? Some have indicated that it is though Anne Applebaum shows that the victims don't show such bias.

This is worth exploring in more depth to untangle the justice needed from the political debate cesspool and political polarization which seems to be occurring in America.

We often talk about the same things, share the same values, have the same common human denominators, but couched in different language. It is critical to get to the root of what we have in common in order to establish meaningful dialogue.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1439615491174141965.html

Apparently Chuck Todd has been captured by Republican Party PR?

Bai, H. (2021). Fake News Known as Fake Still Changes Beliefs and Leads to Partisan Polarization [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/v9gax

This is an incredibly important fact. It's gone even further with additional advances in advertising and social media not to mention the slow drip mental programming provided by algorithmic feeds which tend to polarize their readers.

People simply aren't actively reading their content, comparing, contrasting, or even fact checking it.

I suspect that this book could use an additional overhaul to cover many of these aspects.

Garimella, K., Smith, T., Weiss, R., & West, R. (2021). Political Polarization in Online News Consumption. ArXiv:2104.06481 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06481

Jones, M. I., Sirianni, A. D., & Fu, F. (2021). Polarization, Abstention, and the Median Voter Theorem. ArXiv:2103.12847 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12847

Lovari, A., Martino, V., & Righetti, N. (2021). Blurred Shots: Investigating the Information Crisis Around Vaccination in Italy. American Behavioral Scientist, 65(2), 351–370. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764220910245

Wenner, A. (2020, May 26). Our Democracy Depends on a Safe Election in November. Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/our-democracy-depends-safe-election-november

Helmus, Todd C., James V. Marrone, Marek N. Posard, and Danielle Schlang. ‘Russian Propaganda Hits Its Mark: Experimentally Testing the Impact of Russian Propaganda and Counter-Interventions’, 15 October 2020. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA704-3.html.

Krupenkin, Masha, Kai Zhu, Dylan Walker, and David M. Rothschild. ‘If a Tree Falls in the Forest: COVID-19, Media Choices, and Presidential Agenda Setting’. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 22 September 2020. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3697069.

A Wall Street Journal experiment to see a liberal version and a conservative version of Facebook side by side.

This is interesting because Montgomery essentially sacrificed a part of his community and his heritage in the name of peace and compromise without being certain of the results. This makes me consider the present day political climate, particular, the way that neither side is willing to make concessions (especially the people power).

Wang, X., Sirianni, A. D., Tang, S., Zheng, Z., & Fu, F. (2020). Public Discourse and Social Network Echo Chambers Driven by Socio-Cognitive Biases. Physical Review X, 10(4), 041042. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.041042

Wenner, A. (2020, October 28). Society Needs to Adapt to a World of Widespread Disinformation. https://Fsi.Stanford.Edu/. https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/society-needs-adapt-world-widespread-disinformation

Druckman, J. N., Klar, S., Krupnikov, Y., Levendusky, M., & Ryan, J. B. (2021). Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America. Nature Human Behaviour, 5(1), 28–38. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01012-5

Stewart, A. J., McCarty, N., & Bryson, J. J. (2020). Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline. Science Advances, 6(50), eabd4201. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd4201

These words certainly didn't take into account the focusing factor that social media algorithms based on surveillance capitalism and attention seeking clicks and engagement would inflict in the coming decade.

u/nick_chater (2020) Behavioural Policy challenge: when does compulsion help? Reddit. Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/BehSciAsk/comments/hzci8g/behavioural_policy_challenge_when_does_compulsion/

KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) @KFF (2020) RT @KFF @DrewAltman discusses two fundamental policy decisions made by the Trump administration that set the U.S. on the controversial an…

Alec {@AlecStapp} (2020) Twitter.. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1309169079597621250

An interesting example with some inflamatory rhetoric, but coupled with his resignation which is all he has left...

Maia, H. P., Ferreira, S. C., & Martins, M. L. (2020). Adaptive network approach for emergence of societal bubbles. ArXiv:2010.08635 [Nlin, Physics:Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.08635

Centola, D. (n.d.). Why Social Media Makes Us More Polarized and How to Fix It. Scientific American. Retrieved October 25, 2020, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-makes-us-more-polarized-and-how-to-fix-it/

Yong, S. by E. (n.d.). America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral. The Atlantic. Retrieved October 12, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/pandemic-intuition-nightmare-spiral-winter/616204/

Houghton, J. P. (2020). Interdependent Diffusion: The social contagion of interacting beliefs. ArXiv:2010.02188 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02188

Hotz, J. (n.d.). Can an Algorithm Help Solve Political Paralysis? Scientific American. Retrieved September 21, 2020, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-an-algorithm-help-solve-political-paralysis/

Rodriguez, C. G., Gadarian, S. K., Goodman, S. W., & Pepinsky, T. (2020). Morbid Polarization: Exposure to COVID-19 and Partisan Disagreement about Pandemic Response [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/wvyr7

James O’Brien on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved August 30, 2020, from https://twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/1299248453416083456

Hurst, D., & Murphy, K. (2020, June 22). Trump’s misleading information enables China to sow discord among allies, research finds. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/23/trumps-misleading-information-enables-china-to-sow-discord-among-allies-research-finds

Pickup, M., Stecula, D., & van der Linden, C. (2020). Novel coronavirus, old partisanship: COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors in the United States and Canada [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/5gy3d

Green, J., Edgerton, J., Naftel, D., Shoub, K., & Cranmer, S. J. (2020). Elusive consensus: Polarization in elite communication on the COVID-19 pandemic. Science Advances, eabc2717. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abc2717

Benton, R. A., Cobb, J. A., & Werner, T. (2020). Firm Partisan Political Positioning and Perceptions of COVID-19-Related Risk [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/tazux

Druckman, James, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Matthew Levendusky, and John B. Ryan. ‘The Political Impact of Affective Polarization: How Partisan Animus Shapes COVID-19 Attitudes’. Preprint. PsyArXiv, 19 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ztgpn.

Allcott, H., Boxell, L., Conway, J. C., Gentzkow, M., Thaler, M., & Yang, D. Y. (2020). Polarization and Public Health: Partisan Differences in Social Distancing during the Coronavirus Pandemic (Working Paper No. 26946; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w26946

Simchon, A., Brady, W. J., & Bavel, J. J. V. (2020). Troll and Divide: The Language of Online Polarization. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xjd64

Lees, J. M., & Cikara, M. (2020, July 29). Understanding and Combating False Polarization. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ncwez

Fuhrer, J., & Cova, F. (2020). “Quick and dirty”: Intuitive cognitive style predicts trust in Didier Raoult and his hydroxychloroquine-based treatment against COVID-19. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ju62p

US, A. B., The Conversation. (n.d.). Coronavirus Responses Highlight How Humans Have Evolved to Dismiss Facts That Don’t Fit Their Worldview. Scientific American. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coronavirus-responses-highlight-how-humans-have-evolved-to-dismiss-facts-that-dont-fit-their-worldview/

Ekstrom, P. D., & Lai, C. K. (2020, June 18). The Selective Communication of Political Information. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/pnr9u

Ziems, C., He, B., Soni, S., & Kumar, S. (2020). Racism is a Virus: Anti-Asian Hate and Counterhate in Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis. ArXiv:2005.12423 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12423

Young, V. A. (2020, May 20). Nearly Half Of The Twitter Accounts Discussing ‘Reopening America’ May Be Bots. Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. https://www.scs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-discussing-%E2%80%98reopening-america%E2%80%99-may-be-bots

Grubbs, J. B., Warmke, B., Tosi, J., & James, A. S. (2020). Moral Grandstanding and Political Polarization: A Multi-Study Consideration. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/k3ynj

Tomohiro, I. (2020, May 8). Consensus among group members’ shared leadership ratings polarizes group performance. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/psjeu

And important: the role media plays in political polarization. On this topic, I've found works from the Pew useful, like "U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided":

"As the U.S. enters a heated 2020 presidential election year, a new Pew Research Center report finds that Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments."

Also useful are works from Data & Society like "Media, Technology, Politics: six new pieces on the networked public sphere"

"Although many people are anxious to understand how much influence old and new media had over the US presidential election, the reality is that we will never know comprehensively. We can, though, seek to understand how different cultural and technical factors are shaping the contemporary information landscape."

I chose this article, because it is timely, relevant, easy-to-follow (because it is intuitive), and innovative (using data sources, Twitter, and an innovative method, textual analysis). I hope you enjoy the reading. Please follow my annotations (comments + questions) and respond to the questions I pose. Try to answer them in your own words.

The deregulation of the 90s, consolidating ownership, had consequences. unintended and unanticipated or not.

Polarization Can Be Good

Gruber had linked to Michael Tsai’s roundup of the backlash, calling it “must-read stuff”. In this case, though, Gruber is “throwing his hat in the ring”. And the ring now feels like the site of a burgeoning flamewar. Issue is, here, that the “war” is happening about people who actually enjoy Apple’s products. This isn’t the “religious wars” between Macs and PCs or between Fandroids and Apple fanbois. It’s a whole argument between people who have been purchasing Apple computers and wanted updated ones. A well-known lesson from social psychology is that group polarization deepens divides by encouraging extreme positions. Chuq Von Rospach’s piece contains several comments which could be qualified as “extreme”. And it puts the blame on those who disagree. There are similar pieces on the other side of the equation, surely. Tsai’s roundup should make it possible to identify them. But Gruber has yet to link to them (apart from arguing about specific points like Tim Cook’s quote on the irrelevance of “PCs” and trying to set the record straight on Apple and Intel sharing responsibility for the 16GB limits on new top-of-the-line MacBook Pro desktop replacements).

As an example of the effect of group polarization: my own perspective is that disappointment is real. Wasn’t impressed by what transpired from last week’s announcement. Feeling a bit more excited about the Microsoft Surface Studio than about the Touch Bar, but will likely not buy either any time soon. Because polarization forces me to take sides, my vote would go for the “there’s a serious problem, here”. Not saying Apple is doomed or that each of the problems discussed is a tragedy. But, to me, what is being thrown around sounds quite reasonable, not “trivial and petty”. Can’t be on Von Rospach’s side if that’s where the line is drawn. “You’re either with us or against us.” If you force me to choose, well, bye bye!