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ABSTRACT
The US populace appears to be increasingly polarized on partisan lines. Political fissures bifurcate the country even on empirical matters like vaccine safety and anthropogenic climate change. There now exists an ever-expanding interdisciplinary research program in which theorists attempt to explain increases in political polarization and myriad other phenomena collected under the “post-truth” heading by appeal to social-epistemic structures, like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, that affect the flow and uptake of information in various communities. In this paper, I critically analyze C. Thi Nguyen’s important and popular analysis of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. As I demonstrate, the explanatory mechanisms on which Nguyen focuses are, arguably, overly cognitive and obscure significant effects of social-epistemic structures on our affective lives. The broader lesson to draw from my discussion is the following: commonly used expressions intended to refer to social-epistemic problems, like “political polarization”, possess no univocal definition across theorists, and various ways of making the terms precise are differentially successful in characterizing verifiable phenomena. Theorizing about social-epistemic structures should be responsive to relevant empirical work on various phenomena that we have good reason to believe constitute real and substantive problems that result from the flow and uptake of information.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Kevin Mills for countless discussions that contributed to the generation of this paper as well as his insightful remarks on earlier drafts. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful commentary.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Most of the empirical work I cite focuses on a contemporary American political context. Thus, my claims throughout the paper should be understood to be restricted to the current US political environment.
2. See (Lackey, Citation2018, Citation2021) for an analysis of what, if anything, is epistemically wrong with epistemic bubbles at a structural level.
3. In offering a more capacious understanding of echo chamber membership, Benjamin Elzinga (Citation2020) writes that echo chambers consist of “epistemic agents” in a broad sense of the term that includes individuals, groups, and institutes that are capable of “processing and producing belief expressions,” where belief expressions, “include the transmission of any propositionally structured representation and especially cases of telling, where one agent gives their assurance to another agent that something is true” (ibid., p. 3). Although this is a better specification of echo chamber membership, I object to Elzinga’s focus on propositionally structured representations. There are countless examples of visual propaganda—that is, propagandic images that are non-propositionally structured representations—intended to further a political cause or bolster/undermine political trust and that may be importantly exchanged amongst echo chamber members (e.g., Seo & Ebrahim, Citation2016).
4. I join Matthew Levendusky in defining political elites as “politicians holding elected office who have some control over policy”(M. Levendusky, Citation2009, p. 4).
5. Although, typically, by “echo chambers” these researchers intend to pick out the social-epistemic structures Nguyen labels “epistemic bubbles”.
6. Although the distinction between cognitive-based and affective-based trust is commonly employed in empirical literature on organizational management, I believe the distinction is applicable to other group settings.
7. Similarly, in their monograph on polarization and political trust, Marc Hetherington and Thomas Rudolph argue that the downward trend in political trust is, in part, caused by affective polarization (Hetherington & Rudolph, Citation2015). As Hetherington and Rudolph write, “[p]artisans” increased hostility toward the opposing party helps to explain the recent emergence of polarized political trust. People are typically unwilling to trust people and institutions they dislike”(Hetherington & Rudolph, Citation2018, p. 583).
8. For more on how, mathematically, one operationalizes a trend toward a divergent bimodal distribution see, e.g., (Bramson et al., Citation2017; DiMaggio et al., Citation1996; Lelkes, Citation2016).
9. Instead of talking about individual policy issues, we might wonder whether Americans self-identify as more conservative or more liberal, thus trending toward a bimodal distribution on a measure of self-identified ideology. Again, there is little evidence for this trend amongst the mass public. Finally, we might wonder about party identification. Have the number of third-party identifiers decreased such that Americans have moved toward everyone either identifying as Republican or Democrat? Again, no (Gentzkow, Citation2016).
10. Climate change skepticism is considerably more prevalent amongst conservative, white male (McCright & Dunlap, Citation2011a) and conservative, religious populations (Haltinner & Sarathchandra, Citation2021) as compared to other demographic groups.