Conformity

by Cass R Sunstein

  Chapter 3

  Group Polarization

  Thus far I have been exploring how informational and reputational influences produce conformity and cascades. I have also identified factors that can increase or reduce the likelihood of both of these. When people are not bound by affective ties, the magnitude of social influences diminishes. When people define themselves in opposition to the relevant others—if “we” are opposed to a “they”—conformity effects might be greatly reduced. Because of “reactive devaluation,” there might be no conformity at all. Greater confidence about the facts can reduce conformity, and when people know that certain people are more informed, cascades can be shattered.

  With these points in view, let us now turn to the phenomenon of group polarization, a phenomenon that contains large lessons about the behavior of interest groups, private companies, religious organizations, political parties, juries, legislatures, judicial panels, and even nations.

  The Basic Phenomenon

  What happens within deliberating bodies? Do groups compromise? Do they move toward the middle of the tendencies of their individual members? The answer is now clear, and it is perhaps not what intuition would suggest: members of a deliberating group typically end up in a more extreme position in line with their tendencies before deliberation began.1 This is the phenomenon known as group polarization. Group polarization is the usual pattern with deliberating groups, having been found in hundreds of studies involving more than a dozen countries, including the United States, France, and Germany.2 Each of the three studies with which I began—involving deliberating citizens, deliberating juries, and deliberating judges—involved group polarization.

  It follows that a group of people who think immigration is a serious problem will, after discussion, think that immigration is a horribly serious problem; that those who dislike the Affordable Care Act will think, after discussion, that the Affordable Care Act is truly awful; that those who approve of an ongoing war effort will, as a result of discussion, become still more enthusiastic about that effort; that people who dislike a nation’s leaders will dislike those leaders quite intensely after talking with one another; and that people who disapprove of the United States, and are suspicious of its intentions, will increase their disapproval and suspicion if they exchange points of view.

  Indeed, there is specific evidence of the latter phenomenon among citizens of France.3 When like-minded people talk with one another, they usually end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. It should be readily apparent that enclaves of people, inclined to rebellion or even violence, might move sharply in that direction as a consequence of internal deliberations. Political extremism is often a product of group polarization.4

  There is a close relationship between group polarization and cascade effects. Both of these are a product of informational and reputational influences. A key difference is that group polarization refers to the effects of deliberation,5 and cascades need not involve discussion at all. In addition, group polarization does not necessarily involve a cascade-like process. Polarization can result simply from simultaneous independent decisions, by all or most individuals, to move toward a more extreme point in line with the tendencies of group members.

  In the United States, group polarization helped both Barack Obama and Donald Trump to ascend to the presidency. Speaking mostly with one another, Obama supporters and Trump supporters become intensely committed to their candidate. On Facebook and Twitter, we can see group polarization in action every hour, every minute, or every day. As enclaves of like-minded people proliferate online, group polarization becomes inevitable. Sports fans fall prey to group polarization; so do companies deciding whether to launch some new product.

  To see the operation of group polarization in a legal context, let us explore in more detail the study of punitive intentions and punitive damage awards, referred to in the introduction.6 The details are somewhat technical. I recite them here because they tell us something about the dynamics of outrage, which is often a source of both private and public action. The study involved about three thousand jury-eligible citizens. Its major purpose was to determine how individuals would be influenced by seeing and discussing the punitive intentions of others. Hence subjects were asked to record, in advance of deliberation, a “punishment judgment” on a scale of 0 to 8, where o indicated that the defendant should not be punished at all and 8 indicated that the defendant should be punished extremely severely. After the individual judgments were recorded, jurors were sorted into six-person groups and asked to deliberate to a unanimous “punishment verdict.” It would be reasonable to predict that the verdicts of juries would be the median of punishment judgments of jurors, but the prediction would be badly wrong.

  Instead, the effect of deliberation was to create both a severity shift for high-punishment jurors and a leniency shift for low-punishment jurors.7 When the median judgment of individual jurors was four or more on the eight-point scale, the jury’s verdict was above that median judgment. Consider, for example, a case involving a man who nearly drowned on a defectively constructed yacht. Jurors tended to be outraged by the idea of a defectively built yacht, and groups were significantly more outraged than their median members.

  But when the median judgment of individual jurors was below four, the jury’s verdict was typically below that median judgment. Consider a case involving a shopper who was injured in a fall when an escalator suddenly stopped. Individual jurors were not greatly bothered by the incident, seeing it as a genuine accident rather than a case of serious wrongdoing, and juries were more lenient than individual jurors. Here, then, is a clear example of group polarization in action. Groups whose members were antecedently inclined to impose large punishments become inclined toward larger punishments. The opposite effect was found with groups whose members were inclined toward small punishments.

  Outrage

  When we consider the ingredients of punishment judgments, this finding has a large implication for people’s behavior both inside and outside the courtroom. Punishment judgments are rooted in outrage,8 and a group’s outrage, on a bounded numerical scale, is an excellent predictor of the same group’s punishment judgments on the same scale.9 Apparently people who begin with a high level of outrage become still more outraged as a result of group discussion. Moreover, the degree of the shift depends on the antecedent level of outrage; the higher the original level, the greater the shift as a result of internal deliberations.10 There is a point here about the wellsprings of not only severe punishment by jurors, mobs, and governments but also rebellion and violence. If like-minded people, predisposed to be outraged, are put together with one another, significant changes are to be expected. The American Revolution was made possible in this way, and the same is true for the revolts against apartheid and Communism.

  It should be easy to see that group polarization is at work in feuds, ethnic and international strife, and war. One of the characteristic features of feuds is that members of feuding groups tend to talk only to one another, fueling and amplifying their outrage and solidifying their impression of the relevant events. Group polarization occurs every day within Israel and among the Palestinian Authority. Many social movements, both good and bad, become possible through the heightened effects of outrage; consider the movement for rights for deaf people, which was greatly enhanced by the fact that the deaf have a degree of geographical isolation.11 Social enclaves are breeding grounds for group polarization, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

  Hidden Profiles and Self-Silencing in Groups

  The tendency toward extreme movement is the most noteworthy finding in the literature on group polarization. But there is another point, of special importance for my argument here: in a deliberating group, those with a minority position often silence themselves or otherwise have disproportionately little weight. The result can be “hidden profiles”—important information that is not shared within the group.12 Group members often have i
nformation but do not discuss it, and the result is to produce inferior decisions.

  Consider a study of serious errors within working groups, both face-to-face and online.13 The purpose of the study was to see how groups might collaborate to make personnel decisions. Résumés for three candidates, applying for a marketing manager position, were placed before the groups. The attributes of the candidates were rigged by the experimenters so that one applicant was clearly the best for the job described. Packets of information were given to subjects, each containing a subset of information from the résumés, so that each group member had only part of the relevant information. The groups consisted of three people, some operating face-to-face, some operating online.

  Two results were especially striking. First, group polarization was common, as groups ended up in a more extreme position in accordance with the original thinking of their members. Second, almost none of the deliberating groups made what was conspicuously the right choice, because they failed to share information in a way that would permit the group to make an objective decision. Members tended to share positive information about the winning candidate and negative information about the losers, while also suppressing negative information about the winner and positive information about the losers. Their statements served to “reinforce the march toward group consensus rather than add complications and fuel debate.”14

  This finding is in line with the more general suggestion that groups tend to dwell on shared information and to neglect information that is held by few members. It should be unnecessary to emphasize that this tendency can lead to large errors. To understand this particular point, it is necessary to explore the mechanisms that produce group polarization.

  Why Polarization?

  Why do like-minded people go to extremes? There are three main answers, involving information, corroboration, and social comparison.15

  The most important answer, involving informational influences, is similar to what we have seen in connection with conformity and cascades. The simple idea here is that people respond to the arguments made by other people—and the “argument pool,” in any group with some initial disposition in one direction, will inevitably be skewed toward that disposition.16 A group whose members tend to think that Israel is the real aggressor in the Middle East conflict will tend to hear many arguments to that effect and relatively few opposing views. It is almost inevitable that the group’s members will have heard some, but not all, of the arguments that emerge from the discussion. Having heard all of what is said, people are likely to move further in the anti-Israel direction. So too with a group whose members tend to oppose immigration: group members will hear a large number of arguments against immigration and a smaller number of arguments on its behalf.

  If people are listening, they will have a stronger conviction, in the same direction from which they began, as a result of deliberation. An emphasis on limited argument pools also helps to explain the problem of “hidden profiles” and the greater discussion of shared information during group discussion. It is simply a statistical fact that when more people have a piece of information, there is a greater probability that it will be mentioned.17 Hidden profiles are a predictable result, to the detriment of the ultimate decision.

  The second answer points to the relationships among confidence, corroboration, and extremism.18 The intuition here is simple: people who lack confidence, and who are unsure what they should think, tend to moderate their views. It is for this reason that cautious people, not knowing what to do, are likely to choose the midpoint between relevant extremes. But if other people seem to share your view and corroborate your beliefs, you are likely to become more confident that you are correct—and hence to move in a more extreme direction. You might think that on a scale of 1 to 10, the likelihood that climate change is occurring is 7—but if most people in your group agree that climate change is occurring, you might move up to 9.

  In a wide variety of experimental contexts, people’s opinions have been shown to become more extreme simply because their view has been corroborated and because they have been more confident after learning of the shared views of others.19 Note that there is an obvious connection between this explanation and the finding, mentioned above, that a panel of three judges of the same party is likely to behave quite differently from a panel with only two such judges. The existence of unanimous confirmation from two others will strengthen confidence and hence strengthen extremity.20

  The third answer, involving social comparison, begins with the claim that people want to be perceived favorably by other group members and also to perceive themselves favorably.21 Their views may, to a greater or lesser extent, be a function of how they want to present themselves. Once people hear what others believe, they adjust their positions in the direction of the dominant position, to hold onto their preserved self-presentation. They may want to signal, for example, that they are not cowardly or cautious, especially in an entrepreneurial group that disparages these characteristics, and hence they will frame their position so they do not appear as such by comparison to other group members. And when they hear what other people think, they might find they occupy a somewhat different position, in relation to the group, from what they hoped, and they shift accordingly.

  For example, if people believe they are somewhat less opposed to immigration than most people, they might shift a bit after finding themselves in a group of people who are strongly opposed to immigration, to maintain their preferred self-presentation. The phenomenon appears to occur in many contexts. People may wish, for example, not to seem too enthusiastic, or too restrained in their enthusiasm for, affirmative action, feminism, or an increase in national defense; hence their views may shift when they see what other group members think. The result is to press the group’s position toward one or another extreme and also to induce shifts in individual members. There is a great deal of support for this account of group polarization.22

  Note that an emphasis on social comparison gives a new and perhaps better explanation for the existence of hidden profiles and the failure to share certain information within a group. People might emphasize shared views and information, and downplay unusual perspectives and new evidence, simply from a fear of group rejection and a desire for general approval.23 In political and legal institutions, there is an unfortunate implication: group members who care about one another’s approval, or who depend on one another for material or nonmaterial benefits, might well suppress highly relevant information. Hence this account of group polarization is connected with the idea of reputational cascades, where blunders are highly probable.

  Skewed Debates

  In the context of punitive damage awards by juries, a particular finding deserves emphasis. Thus far my discussion of the relevant study has stressed how deliberation affected punitive intentions, measured on a bounded numerical scale. But jurors were also asked to record their monetary judgments, in advance of deliberation, and then to deliberate to monetary verdicts. Did high awards go up and low awards go down, as the idea of group polarization might predict?

  Not quite. The principal effect was to make nearly all awards go up, in the sense that the jury’s monetary award typically exceeded the median award of individual jurors.24 Indeed, the effect was so pronounced that in 27 percent of cases, the jury’s verdict was as high as, or higher than, the highest predeliberation judgment of jurors!25

  There is a further point. The effect of deliberation in increasing dollar awards was most pronounced in the case of high awards. For example, the median individual judgment, in the case involving the defective yacht, was $450,000, whereas the median jury judgment, in that same case, was $1,000,000. But awards shifted upward for low awards as well.

  Why did this happen? A possible explanation, consistent with group polarization, is that any positive median award suggests a predeliberation tendency to punish, and deliberation aggravates that tendency by increasing awards. But even if it is right, this explanation seems insufficiently specific. The stri
king fact is that those arguing for higher awards seem to have an automatic rhetorical advantage over those arguing for lower awards. A subsequent study of law students supports this claim, suggesting that given existing social norms, people find it easy, in the abstract, to defend higher punitive awards against corporations and harder to defend lower awards.26 The basic idea is that even if you know absolutely nothing about the facts of a controversy, you might find it easy to come up with arguments in favor of more severe punishment—for example, to give a strong deterrent signal or to reflect the outrage of the community. And you might find it harder to come up with arguments in favor of smaller awards. Whenever social norms are in place, they might make it easier to produce arguments in favor of a particular side—which might mean that deliberating groups will naturally tend to move in the direction of that side.

  Findings of rhetorical advantage have been made in seemingly distant areas. Suppose that doctors are deciding what steps to take to resuscitate patients. Are individuals less likely to support heroic efforts than groups? Evidence suggests that as individuals, individual doctors are less likely to do so than groups, apparently because those who favor such efforts have a rhetorical advantage over those who do not.27 The underlying dynamics are intriguing, and here is a speculation about how they work. Individual doctors do some kind of cost-benefit calculation, and they are willing to say that all things considered, heroic efforts are not a terrific idea. But when they are in groups, individual doctors start to feel a bit ashamed about cost-benefit calculations, and they lean in the direction of trying to save the patient. Norms favor that kind of leaning.