How does "generally speaking" lead to political polarization?

Does making generalizations about your political opponents contribute to political polarization? Recent research by U-M Professor of Psychology Susan A. Gelman and her collaborators at Columbia and Stony Brook University suggests that the answer is “yes.”

In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, Gelman and co-authors examined the interpretation, endorsement, and recall of “generic” (or generalizing) statements about partisans across three survey studies. In the first study, they found that perceived polarization is substantially larger in magnitude than actual polarization. Their research suggests that this is in part because even when people believe that Democrats and Republicans differ very little in their beliefs about an issue, they still agree with generalizing claims that put the parties into opposing categories.

In the second study, Gelman and collaborators found that people tend to recall statements from political elites as generic—even when those statements aren’t generic and do actually exhibit nuance. In the final study, they found that generalizing statements presenting new political information led to more polarized judgments than nongeneric statements. Particularly, when new information is presented as a generic statement about one party, people tend to assume it doesn’t apply to the other party.

Taken together, these studies suggest that using generic statements—which is common in everyday communication—contributes to errors in judgment that amplify perceived polarization. In addition, speaking with more nuanced statements may not be enough to combat this, since people tend to remember that information as generic anyway.

You can read a more detailed summary of this research, see Bloomberg’s coverage of the work, or dive into the article itself. Alternatively, listen to one of Prof. Gelman’s co-authors discuss this work on a recent podcast. To find out more about Prof. Gelman’s work, you can check out the website of her Conceptual Development Lab.