[5] Moreover, in recent years, the Internet and online social media have also presented opportunities to observe group polarization and compile new research.
It is one of the effects of confirmation bias: the tendency of people to search for and interpret evidence selectively, to reinforce their current beliefs or attitudes.
[8] When people encounter ambiguous evidence, this bias can potentially result in each of them interpreting it as in support of their existing attitudes, widening rather than narrowing the disagreement between them.
[11] Social comparison processes have also been invoked as an explanation for the effect, which is increased by settings in which people repeat and validate each other's statements.
Later, both the pro- and anti-capital punishment people were put into small groups and shown one of two cards, each containing a statement about the results of a research project written on it.
[15]or:Palmer and Crandall (1977) compared murder rates in 10 pairs of neighboring states with different capital punishment laws.
Though group polarization deals mainly with risk-involving decisions and/or opinions, discussion-induced shifts have been shown to occur on several non-risk-involving levels.
The study of group polarization can be traced back to an unpublished 1961 Master's thesis by MIT student James Stoner, who observed the so-called "risky shift".
This measure required participants to consider a hypothetical scenario in which an individual is faced with a dilemma and must make a choice to resolve the issue at hand.
Consider the following example:"Mr. A, an electrical engineer, who is married and has one child, has been working for a large electronics corporation since graduating from college five years ago.
While attending a convention, Mr. A is offered a job with a small, newly founded company which has a highly uncertain future.
The new job would pay more to start and would offer the possibility of a share in the owner- ship if the company survived the competition of the larger firms.
Indicated by shifts in the mean value, initial studies using this method revealed that group decisions tended to be relatively riskier than those that were made by individuals.
[23] The discovery of the risky shift was considered surprising and counter-intuitive, especially since earlier work in the 1920s and 1930s by Allport and other researchers suggested that individuals made more extreme decisions than did groups, leading to the expectation that groups would make decisions that would conform to the average risk level of its members.
[20] The seemingly counter-intuitive findings of Stoner led to a spurt of research around the risky shift, which was originally thought to be a special case exception to the standard decision-making practice.
Many people had concluded that people in a group setting would make decisions based on what they assumed to be the overall risk level of a group; because Stoner's work did not necessarily address this specific theme, and because it does seem to contrast Stoner's initial definition of risky shift, additional controversy arose leading researchers to further examine the topic.
These explanations were gradually narrowed down and grouped together until two primary mechanisms remained, social comparison and informational influence.
[4] Informational influence, or persuasive arguments theory, has also been used to explain group polarization, and is most recognized by psychologists today.
Daniel Isenberg's 1986 meta-analysis of the data gathered by both the persuasive argument and social comparison camps succeeded, in large part, in answering the questions about predominant mechanisms.
In their experiment, participants gave pre-test, post-test, and group consensus recommendations on three choice dilemma item-types (risky, neutral, or cautious).
[29] Another similar study found that in-group prototypes become more polarized as the group becomes more extreme in the social context.
The rising popularity and increased number of online social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, has enabled people to seek out and share ideas with others who have similar interests and common values, making group polarization effects increasingly evident, particularly in generation Y and generation Z individuals.
[6] In a study conducted by Sia et al. (2002), group polarization was found to occur with online (computer-mediated) discussions.
[34] However, some research suggests that important differences arise in measuring group polarization in laboratory versus field experiments.
A study conducted by Taylor & MacDonald (2002) featured a realistic setting of a computer-mediated discussion, but group polarization did not occur at the level expected.
Furthermore, the experiment took place over a two-week period, leading the researchers to suggest that group polarization may occur only in the short-term.
[38] Researchers have suggested, for instance, that ethnic conflict exacerbates group polarization by enhancing identification with the ingroup and hostility towards the outgroup.
For example, students who do not belong to fraternities and sororities tend to be more liberal politically, and this difference increases over the course of their college careers.