Polarization is here to stay!

In recent times, there is a surge in books and academic articles written about increasing polarization in the world. Ezra Klein’s book ‘Why we’re polarized’ captures increasing polarization in the US political landscape and how this has resulted in a deep divide in the country. Max Fisher’s book ‘The Chaos Machine’ describes the polarizing effect of social media. People tend to express stronger & more polarized opinions on social media than when they do so in person.

We should obviously be worried. Increasing polarization leads to more negativity, conflict & intolerance. It could lead to more protectionism if governments pay more heed to such populist polarized sentiments and will negate some of the gains of globalization journey that started few decades back.

We live in a world that is more affluent, literate and information-rich than ever before. Why are we becoming more polarized in our thinking and less tolerant of people who we don’t think as being similar to us?

The answer could very much lie in the concept of bounded rationality coined by Herbert Simon almost 50 years ago. First, an honest confession. Herbert Simon is someone I truly admire. He was a political scientist, economist, cognitive psychologist & computer scientist! He was a Nobel prize winner (Economics) & a Turing award winner (Computer Science). But, most importantly, he is credited to have started the field of behavioural economics when he came up with the concept of bounded rationality.

Before the advent of bounded rationality, rationality was thought of almost as an absolute concept. Economics was also governed by this absolute rationality- you will buy things only when you need them. When price goes up, demand will go down. Any behaviour that is not rational was irrational! You get the drift.

How did bounded rationality challenge this thinking? Herbert Simon proposed that people make decisions under constraints and under these constraints, they decide on what they think is the most rational decision. Under such constraints, people don’t make an absolute ‘best’ decision, but they make a decision that is ‘optimized’ for these constraints, though this decision appears to be perfectly rational to them in that situation.???

A lot depends on the constraints that result in this bounded rationality. In today’s world, social media & internet are the main contributors to these constraints. What we watch, search, like & dislike is harvested by social media or search algorithms and the next time, the same is played back to us again and again at higher frequency. Social media is not obliged to give us diversity of opinion; their task is to show us the content we have liked, again and again to increase stickiness. So, over time, we see more and more of the same content and this becomes ‘rational’ to us and anything that is different becomes ‘irrational’ to us.?The more we use social media, our opinions are played back to us to an extent that we become closed and intolerant of opposing opinions.

Unfortunately, social media is here to stay and so is the increasing polarization.?

Something to think about!