When it comes to US politics, why do the majority of people like to stay in their echo chambers? (serious)
When it comes to US politics, why do the majority of people like to stay in their echo chambers? (serious)
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not american.
but echo chambers are cool in a way that goes beyond politics. it provides perceptible feelings of unity, belongingness, and validity to those that seek them. apes together strong kind of deal.
and since politics is about social issues, I don't see why not.
Going to build on this to highlight something:
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Given the hyper-stigmatized, hyper-partisan approach to... well, a lot of things these days, not just US politics, engaging with those you politically disagree with is likely to not just produce calm disagreements but sharp, even vicious statements that your entire worldview/lifestyle/culture/ethnicity/whatever is literally the stuff of pure evil, and you are an absolutely terrible person for adhering to it. No nuance, no consideration, no empathy.
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On a different tack, consider that strong rejection/disagreement is shown to activate the same centers in your brain which are associated with sharp physical pain. To your brain, being slapped in the face conversationally and slapped in the face physically produce extremely similar results.
With these two points in mind, consider: Why would people choose to expose themselves to environments which promote something their brain interprets as actual, physical harm?
Unfortunately, the current palette of social media options don't really offer spaces for nuanced, thoughtful discussion which doesn't begin with people screaming their hostility to what they disagree with. It's a big of a chicken-and-egg question whether that's a cause or an effect, but the net result is creation of an environment which our pain-avoiding brains guide our choices away from people we disagree with.
Why would people choose to expose themselves to environments which promote something their brain interprets as actual, physical harm?
People commonly have a framework where they think of the slap as having kind of, occurred beforehand, right, and then they see themselves as slapping back whenever they respond, which is another part of why political discourse is so polarized and bad faith basically at all times.
That's a fair point too; if you go in anticipating a conversational slap, you're in a defensive posture from the start.
This reinforces my feeling that setting out to specifically create that no-slapping environment from the start is critical, but it also adds in another twist and problem: There's increasing evidence that political "language" between various groups is diverging. In other words, ~20 years ago people used the same words to mean the same things, even when they disagreed. Now people on different sides of an issue use identical words to mean totally different things - including some that can be perceived as a verbal slap.
I've been tooting that horn for a while, but it's a pretty hard point to translate into real political discourse with people. I try to weasel out of it, but at some point, people get really fed up and want you to "state your actual opinions", or otherwise will just bully you relentlessly. Basically, I'm just saying that with any change of opinion, there's going to be, probably, some necessary amount of discomfort. I guess my extrapolation from that would probably be that it's a better policy as a whole if people just stop taking the slap so personally or so passionately. Better policy if your face goes numb, easier to work with, rather than handcuffing everyone, ja feel?
I dunno but there's also definitely an amount by which that political polarization is strictly due to social media algorithms keeping people in bubbles where they're constantly drip fed their own personalized optimal ratio of ragebait to wholesome garbage. It's kind of inevitable that anyone starts to lose it, if they've been confined to their schizo microculture for long enough.
Yeah, I feel you. On both points.
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