I return to the question I was debating a few days ago with Chris, namely, whether or not people are inclined to learn through discussion, through considering different points of view. The occasion for my returning to it is a column in the New York Times in which Cass Sunstein summarizes research that appears to cast doubt on the learning-through-debate point of view.
Sunstein says: that it's 'well known that when like-minded people get together, they tend to end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk'; that it might be supposed the remedy for this would be to provide balanced information to people on opposing sides on some disputed question; but that balanced presentations 'may not help', since academic studies on this issue suggest 'people's original beliefs tend to harden and the original divisions typically get bigger' - this on account of 'biased assimilation', that is to say, the assimilation of new information in a selective fashion, to support the view originally held.
I'm not going to let the fact that I haven't done any research on this subject myself prevent me from pointing (again) to a problem with the Sunstein-Dillow viewpoint. I shall do so by returning here to Sunstein's starting point in the linked-to article. That starting point was that like-minded people flocking and talking together tend to think what they thought before, only more so. And we now also have from Sunstein's further explanations that people presented with balanced evidence and argument on disputed issues tend to think what they thought before, only more so. So people, at least so far as being presented with opposing cases goes, simply tend to stick with what they thought before and that's it. There's a comparative dimension missing here, concerning the more and the less likely circumstances of their being willing to modify their thinking. And I'm bound to say I remain suspicious of this result.
Here's why. Two schools. In one the children are given a broadly liberal education, in fully liberal spirit; are taught to know that there are different points of view on pretty well every question, that the truth is hard to find, that one can learn from listening to others even when convinced that their overall view of the world is faulty in some serious way, that the weighing of evidence and the analysis of argument are important activities, and so on. In the other school the children have drilled into them the would-be truths of a single overriding doctrine and are discouraged from questioning these. Now, in parallel, two whole societies. I won't give the details of the difference between them; let us just say it is a difference broadly corresponding to the one I just outlined between the two schools.
We are to believe that the results in both cases will be pretty much the same: people in the same numbers, or proportions, equally resistant to learning from others, and from the consideration of opposing points of view? Well, I don't believe it. I believe that the relevant research is either badly conceived and structured or badly reported or both; or maybe it's just in need of being supplemented by other research.