ways we can decrease polarization
Carnegie Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program senior fellow Rachel Kleinfeld discusses polarization in America and what, if anything, can be done to address it.
learning about other people's beliefs
To learn about where you fall on the American political spectrum, and where other Americans fall compared to you, take this quiz. One way that we can increase cooperation is by understanding that there is no one single majority viewpoint in the United States, despite our rigid two-party system. Even if your party loses, there's a chance someone in the other party shares some beliefs with you.
GuesSync! is a two-player game that attempts to reduce polarization by addressing misconceptions about opposing partisans. The game presents itself as a cooperative trivia game, where you and a partner work to get as close to guessing a statistic as possible. First, you both make guesses. Then, one player will see the true statistic, and using words based on a scale (eg. cold/hot, high/low), has to try and get their partner as close to the true value as possible.
This game was observed to have a moderate effect on Democrats, but a main effect was not observed for Republicans (Rajadesingan et al., 2023). This could suggest that Republicans and Democrats engage in different types of partisanship, where those created by Democrats can be corrected easier than those formed by Republicans.
One of the best ways that we can facilitate depolarization is by designing user interfaces to challenge a user's opinions and communicate that political views are not as binary as they may seem in the United States. One example is social recommendations, which are suggestions of political content based on one's social network. This is currently a feature of many platforms, but tailoring the social recommendations to political content could foster discussions about a diverse range of opinions.
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In designing the user interface, developers should also consider where their technology will be used. Finnish and U.S. participants demonstrated different preferences for encountering novel opinions. U.S. participants typically wanted to connect with new people outside of their social circle to diversify their views, so we could have a specific "section" of a social platform, different from the standard home page, that is dedicated to politics, and provides exposure to new opinions.
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Polarization has a strong ability to invoke emotion in people, so user interfaces should be designed to ease these emotions. For example, by providing users with context and alternate perspectives before responding to political content online, any feelings of anger or anxiety invoked by the original post can "cool down".
