Aside from the interventions you and Tobias list, promoting (participation in) forecasting tournaments might be another way to reduce excessive polarization.
Mellers, Tetlock, and Arkes (2018) found that
“[...] participants who actively engaged in predicting US domestic events
were less polarized in their policy preferences than were non-forecasters. Self-reported political attitudes were more moderate among those who forecasted than those who did not. We also found evidence that forecasters attributed more moderate political attitudes to the opposing side.”
However, people who are willing to participate in such a tournament for many months are presumably quite unrepresentative of the general population. Generally, my hunch is that it would be very difficult to convince many people to participate in such tournaments, especially if this requires active participation for a considerable amount of time. Still, promoting the institution of forecasting tournaments would have several other benefits.
(To be clear, I’m not sure that this intervention is particularly promising, I’m mostly brainstorming.)
Good point. Maybe it could be possible to convince some pundits and thought leaders to participate in such tournaments, and maybe that could make them less polarised, and have other beneficial effects.
Great post, thanks for writing this!
Aside from the interventions you and Tobias list, promoting (participation in) forecasting tournaments might be another way to reduce excessive polarization.
Mellers, Tetlock, and Arkes (2018) found that “[...] participants who actively engaged in predicting US domestic events were less polarized in their policy preferences than were non-forecasters. Self-reported political attitudes were more moderate among those who forecasted than those who did not. We also found evidence that forecasters attributed more moderate political attitudes to the opposing side.”
However, people who are willing to participate in such a tournament for many months are presumably quite unrepresentative of the general population. Generally, my hunch is that it would be very difficult to convince many people to participate in such tournaments, especially if this requires active participation for a considerable amount of time. Still, promoting the institution of forecasting tournaments would have several other benefits.
(To be clear, I’m not sure that this intervention is particularly promising, I’m mostly brainstorming.)
Good point. Maybe it could be possible to convince some pundits and thought leaders to participate in such tournaments, and maybe that could make them less polarised, and have other beneficial effects.