As suggested by this new study, still preprint, people evaluate moderate political opinions more negatively compared to extreme ones.
People who deviate from group norms pose problems for their ingroup, but not all forms of deviation are equivalent.
Four different experiments
The study was divided into four experiments. Participants thought that both Democrats (Experiment 1) and Republicans (Experiment 2) would view moderate political candidates more negatively (e.g., less loyal, less principled, more likely to defect) than extreme candidates. Furthermore, these relatively negative evaluations of moderates extended to rank-and-file members of the Democratic (Experiment 3) and Republican (Experiment 4) parties.
These findings suggest that people intuitively understand subjective group dynamics, and when applied to politics, this understanding can have important consequences for how people with moderate and extreme beliefs engage in political discourse.
The underlying point, then, is that people who deviate from the group's prescriptive norms can harm their group by blurring perceptions of consensus, thereby eroding the legitimacy of a group's position.
Without a doubt, another proof of the tendency to affiliate with the most extreme, compared to the most moderate. And how democracy is affected by it, in addition to the fact that politicians also take advantage, becoming radicalized in their speeches, especially using demagoguery and populism.
That is why, perhaps, in the cradle of democracy, in fact, a machine was used to choose elected officials because one could not trust the whims of the administrators: the klerotherion It was this device, used in the polis during the period of Athenian democracy, to randomly select the citizens who would participate in the majority of state positions.
A kleroterion in the Agora Museum of Athens.
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The news
If you have moderate political opinions they will rate you worse than if you have extreme ones.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.