IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ste/nystbu/16-03.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Theory of Rational Attitude Polarization

Author

Listed:
  • Jean-Pierre Benoit
  • Juan Dubra

Abstract

Numerous experiments have demonstrated the possibility of attitude polarization. For instance, Lord, Ross & Lepper (1979) partitioned subjects into two groups, according to whether or not they believed the death penalty had a deterrent effect, and presented them with a set of studies on the issue. Believers and skeptics both become more convinced of their initial views; that is, the population polarized. Many scholars have concluded that attitude polarization shows that people process information in a biased manner. We argue that not only is attitude polarization consistent with an unbiased evaluation of evidence, it is to be expected in many circumstances where it arises. At the same time, some experiments do not find polarization, under the conditions in which our theory predicts the absence of polarization.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Jean-Pierre Benoit & Juan Dubra, 2016. "A Theory of Rational Attitude Polarization," Working Papers 16-03, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:ste:nystbu:16-03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/economics/docs/workingpapers/2016/A%20Theory%20of%20Rational%20Attitude%20Polarization.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jan Stoop, 2014. "From the lab to the field: envelopes, dictators and manners," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 17(2), pages 304-313, June.
    2. Sandeep Baliga & Eran Hanany & Peter Klibanoff, 2013. "Polarization and Ambiguity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(7), pages 3071-3083, December.
    3. Ignacio Palacios-Huerta & Oscar Volij, 2009. "Field Centipedes," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(4), pages 1619-1635, September.
    4. Jean-Pierre Benoit & Juan Dubra, 2004. "Why Do Good Cops Defend Bad Cops?," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 45(3), pages 787-809, August.
    5. Dixit, Avinash & Weibull, Jörgen, 2006. "Political Polarization," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 655, Stockholm School of Economics, revised 19 Apr 2007.
    6. Roland G. Fryer, Jr. & Philipp Harms & Matthew O. Jackson, 2013. "Updating Beliefs with Ambiguous Evidence: Implications for Polarization," NBER Working Papers 19114, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Sebastian Galiani & Paul Gertler & Ernesto Schargrodsky, 2005. "Water for Life: The Impact of the Privatization of Water Services on Child Mortality," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(1), pages 83-120, February.
    8. Jan Stoop & Charles N. Noussair & Daan van Soest, 2012. "From the Lab to the Field: Cooperation among Fishermen," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(6), pages 1027-1056.
    9. , & , & ,, 2016. "Fragility of asymptotic agreement under Bayesian learning," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 11(1), January.
    10. John A. List, 2004. "Neoclassical Theory Versus Prospect Theory: Evidence from the Marketplace," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(2), pages 615-625, March.
    11. John A. List, 2007. "On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(3), pages 482-493.
    12. Péter Kondor, 2012. "The More We Know about the Fundamental, the Less We Agree on the Price," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 79(3), pages 1175-1207.
    13. John A. List, 2006. "The Behavioralist Meets the Market: Measuring Social Preferences and Reputation Effects in Actual Transactions," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 114(1), pages 1-37, February.
    14. Ariel Rubinstein, 2003. ""Economics and Psychology"? The Case of Hyperbolic Discounting," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 44(4), pages 1207-1216, November.
    15. Palacios-Huerta, Ignacio & Serrano, Roberto, 2006. "Rejecting small gambles under expected utility," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 91(2), pages 250-259, May.
    16. Charles R. Plott & Kathryn Zeiler, 2005. "The Willingness to Pay–Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(3), pages 530-545, June.
    17. James Andreoni & Tymofiy Mylovanov, 2012. "Diverging Opinions," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(1), pages 209-232, February.
    18. Edward L. Glaeser & Cass R. Sunstein, 2013. "Why Does Balanced News Produce Unbalanced Views?," NBER Working Papers 18975, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Steven D. Levitt & John A. List & Sally E. Sadoff, 2011. "Checkmate: Exploring Backward Induction among Chess Players," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 975-990, April.
    20. Charles R. Plott & Kathryn Zeiler, 2007. "Exchange Asymmetries Incorrectly Interpreted as Evidence of Endowment Effect Theory and Prospect Theory?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(4), pages 1449-1466, September.
    21. Matthew Rabin & Joel L. Schrag, 1999. "First Impressions Matter: A Model of Confirmatory Bias," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(1), pages 37-82.
    22. Timothy N. Cason & Charles R. Plott, 2014. "Misconceptions and Game Form Recognition: Challenges to Theories of Revealed Preference and Framing," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 122(6), pages 1235-1270.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Björn Toelstede, 2019. "How path-creating mechanisms and structural lock-ins make societies drift from democracy to authoritarianism," Rationality and Society, , vol. 31(2), pages 233-262, May.
    2. Isaac Loh & Gregory Phelan, 2019. "Dimensionality And Disagreement: Asymptotic Belief Divergence In Response To Common Information," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 60(4), pages 1861-1876, November.
    3. Ceren Baysan, 2017. "Can More Information Lead to More Voter Polarization? Experimental Evidence from Turkey," 2017 Papers pba1551, Job Market Papers.
    4. Allcott, Hunt & Boxell, Levi & Conway, Jacob & Gentzkow, Matthew & Thaler, Michael & Yang, David, 2020. "Polarization and public health: Partisan differences in social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    5. Kim Strandberg & Kim Backström & Janne Berg & Thomas Karv, 2021. "Democratically Sustainable Local Development? The Outcomes of Mixed Deliberation on a Municipal Merger on Participants’ Social Trust, Political Trust, and Political Efficacy," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(13), pages 1-17, June.
    6. Jordi Brandts & Leonie Gerhards & Lydia Mechtenberg, 2018. "Deliberative Structures and their Impact on Voting under Economic Conflict," Working Papers 1022, Barcelona School of Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Benoît, Jean-Pierre & Dubra, Juan, 2018. "When do populations polarize? An explanation," MPRA Paper 86173, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Engelmann, Dirk & Friedrichsen, Jana & Kübler, Dorothea, 2018. "Fairness in Markets and Market Experiments," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 64, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    3. Isaac Loh & Gregory Phelan, 2019. "Dimensionality And Disagreement: Asymptotic Belief Divergence In Response To Common Information," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 60(4), pages 1861-1876, November.
    4. Stefano DellaVigna, 2009. "Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(2), pages 315-372, June.
    5. James C. Cox & Vjollca Sadiraj, 2018. "Incentives," Experimental Economics Center Working Paper Series 2018-01, Experimental Economics Center, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
    6. Matteo M. Galizzi & Daniel Navarro-Martinez, 2019. "On the External Validity of Social Preference Games: A Systematic Lab-Field Study," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(3), pages 976-1002, March.
    7. Jonathan E. Alevy & Craig E. Landry & John A. List, 2015. "Field Experiments On The Anchoring Of Economic Valuations," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 53(3), pages 1522-1538, July.
    8. Fernandes, Marcos R., 2023. "Confirmation bias in social networks," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 59-76.
    9. Schmidt, Robert & Schwieren, Christiane & Sproten, Alec N., 2020. "Norms in the lab: Inexperienced versus experienced participants," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 173(C), pages 239-255.
    10. Le Yaouanq, Yves, 2018. "A Model of Ideological Thinking," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 85, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    11. Jeong, Daeyoung, 2019. "Using cheap talk to polarize or unify a group of decision makers," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 180(C), pages 50-80.
    12. Jiqiang Wang & Fu Gu & Yingpeng Liu & Ying Fan & Jianfeng Guo, 2020. "An Endowment Effect Study in the European Union Emission Trading Market based on Trading Price and Price Fluctuation," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(9), pages 1-13, May.
    13. Omar Al-Ubaydli & John List & Claire Mackevicius & Min Sok Lee & Dana Suskind, 2019. "How Can Experiments Play a Greater Role in Public Policy? 12 Proposals from an Economic Model of Scaling," Artefactual Field Experiments 00679, The Field Experiments Website.
    14. Giovanna Devetag & Andreas Ortmann, 2007. "When and why? A critical survey on coordination failure in the laboratory," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 10(3), pages 331-344, September.
    15. Omar Al-Ubaydli & John List, 2016. "Field Experiments in Markets," Artefactual Field Experiments j0002, The Field Experiments Website.
    16. Kim, Younjun, 2015. "Essays on firm location decisions, regional development and choices under risk," ISU General Staff Papers 201501010800005579, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    17. Holden, Stein & Bezu, Sosina, 2014. "Tools, Fertilizer or Cash? Exchange Asymmetries in Productive Assets," CLTS Working Papers 13/14, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Centre for Land Tenure Studies, revised 11 Oct 2019.
    18. Cheng, Ing-Haw & Hsiaw, Alice, 2022. "Distrust in experts and the origins of disagreement," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 200(C).
    19. Brian Albrecht & Omar Al-Ubaydli & Peter Boettke, 2022. "Testing the Hayek hypothesis: Recent theoretical and experimental evidence," Artefactual Field Experiments 00759, The Field Experiments Website.
    20. Fehr, Dietmar & Hakimov, Rustamdjan & Kübler, Dorothea, 2015. "The willingness to pay–willingness to accept gap: A failed replication of Plott and Zeiler," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 120-128.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • D90 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ste:nystbu:16-03. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amanda Murphy (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ednyuus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.