Journal ArticleDOI
The Law of Group Polarization
TLDR
Group polarization has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions as discussed by the authors, such as juries, legislatures, courts, and regulatory commissions, and it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism and tribalism.Abstract:
In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon -group polarization -has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, “radicalization,” cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism. Group polarization bears on the conduct of government institutions, including juries, legislatures, courts, and regulatory commissions. There are interesting relationships between group polarization and social cascades, both informational and reputational. Normative implications are discussed, with special attention to political and legal institutions. “The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties in [the legislative] department of the government . . . often promote deliberation and circumspection; and serve to check the excesses of the majority.”read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory
Hugo Mercier,Dan Sperber +1 more
TL;DR: The hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative: It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade and is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Political Polarization on Twitter
Michael Conover,Jacob Ratkiewicz,Matthew Francisco,Bruno Gonçalves,Filippo Menczer,Alessandro Flammini +5 more
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that the network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated partisan structure, with extremely limited connectivity between left- and right-leaning users, and surprisingly this is not the case for the user-to-user mention network, which is dominated by a single politically heterogeneous cluster of users.
Journal ArticleDOI
Deliberative democratic theory
TL;DR: A survey and evaluation of the state of deliberative democratic theory as it is being applied in a number of research areas and as it intersects with related normative debates can be found in this article.
Book
Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy
TL;DR: In this article, hearing the other side examines this theme in the context of the contemporary United States and suggests that it is doubtful that an extremely activist political culture can also be a heavily deliberative one.
Journal ArticleDOI
Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science
TL;DR: Although empirical studies of deliberative democracy have proliferated in the past decade, too few have addressed the questions that are most significant in the normative theories as mentioned in this paper, and many theorists have tended too easily to dismiss the empirical findings.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Should the Tax Law Require Current Accrual of Interest on Derivative Financial Instruments
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the original issue discount rules should not be expanded beyond their current scope and that the current accrual requirement is inconsistent with the realization requirement.
Journal ArticleDOI
Orwell versus Huxley: Economics, Technology, Privacy, and Satire
TL;DR: The authors argued that the novels are best understood as literary works of art, rather than as social science or commentary, and that when so viewed Orwell's novel in particular reflects a dissatisfaction with everyday life and a nostalgia for Romantic values.