Report: News Consumption 'Pure Polarization'

Americans are consuming more news than ever — and it’s driving us further and further apart.

That’s according to a new paper from Neil Johnson, a physicist who now runs the University of Miami’s Complexity interdisciplinary group, which is examining collective behavior in a number of fields.

The Miami Herald reports Johnson and his team have found that when it comes to digesting news of any kind, Americans now exist in a state of pure polarization: the size of the extremes of the left and right are now so large that they outnumber those in the middle ground.

It doesn’t even matter whether news is real or fake, let alone left or right: The mere act of absorbing news that everyone else is seeing causes a polarizing effect.

“Even on issues for which there is no conceivable counter-evidence, a surprisingly large number of people may [take] an ‘anti-crowd’ viewpoint, e.g. the many people who believe the world is flat and attended the 2017 Flat Earth International Conference,” Johnson and his team write. “Even within the community of professional scientists, there is a non-zero ‘anti-crowd’ that are skeptical about global warming.”

What causes this to occur? Johnson’s finding hinges on a basic assumption: that people make decisions based on rewards. Johnson compares his model to what happens when someone makes an investment decision based on a piece of information. If that individual gets a return on her investment, she will continue to assign value to the piece of information, as well as the source itself, until the returns start to dissipate.

Johnson finds that if you assume news consumers act on a piece of information using their own mental rewards system to make a decision like, say, voting, they will naturally polarize. Johnson’s model reproduces what Facebook researchers themselves have observed in their own data in terms of a U-shape showing large sub-populations with beliefs towards the extremes. It’s also confirmation of a 2014 Pew Research Center study that found a strong correlation between political engagement and polarization.

Johnson says that it’s not clear whether the polarization represents a new phenomenon, or whether it’s now just easier to model. But he has a hunch that more Americans now consume news than in the past — and that’s bringing out latent polarization that’s always been there.