Polarization Of Conformity And Persuasion

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Group polarization has long been a recognized phenomenon in social psychology, where groups of people make riskier choices and take on more extreme opinions as a function of being in a group, relative to their individual attitudes and positions when they are alone (Myers & Lamm, 1975). This phenomenon finds a contemporary application in the discourse of opinion facilitated by social media technologies. In the first place, even if social media is comprised of initially unrelated individuals separated in space, people with the same attitudes (by principles of social identity) are able to form post hoc groups based on the similarity of their ideologies and attitudes; this grouping ultimately leads to the polarization of opinion—with the phenomenon …show more content…
to be more decisive and pronounced in their positions) is mitigated by the processes of conformity and persuasion.
The affective state elicited by the sentiment influences the extent to which the latter is propagated, with anger-based opinions being most influential (Berger & Milkman, 2012); persuasion then takes a peripheral route, such that support for any opinion becomes more determined by the affective than cognitive (i.e. rational) facet of an attitude. In conjunction, extreme positions can also be misinformed and miseducated; opinions are then held only due to affective attachment regardless of rational truth or evidence.
Similarly, in cases where individuals hold neutral positions about an issue, they may become persuaded to taken on a more extreme stance through the former mechanisms; alternatively, the sentiments held by people in power (i.e. authority) or by the majority (i.e. the popular opinion) can be assimilated as one’s personal stance, through a process of informational influence on conformity (e.g. Bandura, 2002). Regardless of the manner of persuasion, these initially neutral individuals become engaged in the bandwagon of the opinion they subscribed to, such that all individuals who share the opinion are deindividuated (i.e. more identified as a group than individually) and thus bolstered to express their polarized

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