# Scientists identify a psychological phenomenon that could be reinforcing political echo chambers

- [PopSci Source](https://www.psypost.org/2021/01/scientists-identify-a-psychological-phenomenon-that-could-be-reinforcing-political-echo-chambers-59142)
- Underlying journal paper: [Ekstrom PD, Lai CK. The Selective Communication of Political Information. _Social Psychological and Personality Science_. August 2020. doi:[10.1177/1948550620942365](https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620942365)]
- Credibility: Seems to be solid [Journal self-report](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&venue=nIxswjDoFIwJ.2020&vq=med_socialpsychology) [Google Scholar rank](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&venue=nIxswjDoFIwJ.2020&vq=med_socialpsychology)

## Summary

Interesting reading about how how ideological echo chambers get formed. The main conclusion is this:

> People are less willing to share information that contradicts their pre-existing political beliefs and attitudes, even if they believe the information to be true

## Speculative dissection

> When ideology, partisanship, or a strong political opinion is at stake, it is difficult to persuade people to believe unappealing political facts.
> ...
> [People] were also consistently more willing to pass on findings that supported their political ideology.

This is either expected or at least not surprising.

> Even if and when you succeed in persuading someone that something is true, they may be relatively unwilling to pass that information along if it undermines their ideological, partisan, or other political commitments,

This is interesting, but understandable in hindsight. Well, nobody is willing to "lose their face" in their ideological ingroup by suddenly changing sides. We often seem to value social cohesion more than (objective) truth.

Then they present how does bias influence those information-sharing patterns. First, let's take a deeper look at what was that bias about.

> [People] could perceive reality very clearly and _still_ present distorted or inaccurate versions of reality to the people around them.

Right. So it's like overblowing, or misrepresenting some idea to others.

And then comes something quite intriguiging (perhaps too US-centric?) in the article. The information-sharing patterns differ depending on whether a person is more liberal, or more conservative leaning (whatever that means in today's messy world).

> “Liberals were most biased in communication with ideological opponents, revealing greater willingness to discuss ideology-inconsistent information with fellow liberals than with conservatives. Conservatives, in contrast, were most biased in communication with ideological allies—and showed no significant evidence of bias in what they were willing to communicate to liberals"

So I interpret it as follows (in probabilistic terms):
1. when a liberal meets a conservative, the liberal would show as radically standing their ground and overshooting/misrepresenting their differences with the conservative. From this, I would guess, the liberal would probably attempt persuasion (my ideas are better!), maybe shaming (your ideas are bad!). At the same time, the conservative would happily discuss their differences with the liberal without misrepresenting either opinion, but would probably remain unconvinced.
2. when a liberal meets a liberal, they would happily and freely discuss the opposing ideas, maybe (probably?) even without bias and misrepresenting them and would be able to consider them rationally.
3. when a conservative meets a conservative, they would misrepresent ideas of their political opponents (even if they don't agree with the overblown position). At the same time they would probably also show radical fandom for their own overblown ideas.

Now from this analysis we have (as I understand the paper summary) that liberals are more rational when they speak to their own group and combative when interacting with the outgroup, while conservatives are combative (about the outgroup) when speaking to their fellows, but present as quite reasonable when they speak to their opponents (I actually recognise this around myself, but that is just anecdotal evidence).

In other words:
1. a liberal meets a conservative: "how horrible _you_ are!"
2. conservative counters back to the liberal: "that sounds interesting. maybe you should consider..."
3. the liberal going home to their liberal partner: "maybe these conservatives are not that horrible people in the end..." - partner (possibly) agrees, but _both are happy that they are not conservative_;
4. the conservative coming home to their conservative spouse: "how horrible people _they_ are!" - spouse violently agrees and _both are happy that they are conservative_.