What Underlies Political Polarization? A Manifesto for Computational Political Psychology
Open accessAbstract
Polarization is one of the biggest societal challenges of our time, yet its drivers are poorly understood. Here we propose a novel approach - computational political psychology - which uses behavioral tasks in combination with formal computational models to identify candidate cognitive processes underpinning susceptibility to polarized beliefs about political and societal issues.
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Once groups are ideologically polarized, their members may engage in 'normal' or 'cold' cognitive processes, possibly including Bayesian updating, to maintain or exacerbate motivated differences in beliefs, opinions and values.
“Once groups are ideologically polarized (that is, extreme), their members may engage in ‘normal’ or ‘cold’ cognitive processes, possibly including Bayesian updating, to maintain or exacerbate motivated differences in beliefs, opinions and values61,102–105.”
From Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts (2022) · cites this paper as [104]
The Main text describes generic belief-formation processes and offers Bayesian belief updating as a model that might distinguish dogmatic from non-dogmatic worldviews. It also proposes that differences in these processes may predispose people to polarized views. It does not say that, once groups are polarized, their members use normal or ‘cold’ processes to maintain or exacerbate motivated differences. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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- Authors
- Rollwage, M., Zmigrod, L., de-Wit, L., Dolan, R. J., & Fleming, S. M.
- Affiliations
- Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging (GB)
- University of Cambridge (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Rollwage, Max
- Venue
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2019-10
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 820-822
- ISSN
- 1364-6613 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2967746245
- Cited by
- 52
- References
- 13
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 13.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- discovery.ucl.ac.uk
- Locations
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Wellcome Trust
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
- Keywords
- political polarization, cognitive processes, behavioral tasks, computational model
- MeSH terms
- Cognition, Computer Simulation, Humans, Politics, Cognitive Science
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