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The most politically extreme citizens perceive greater polarization than there actually is, study finds

During a general election year, the political divide in America is frequently on display in living color in the form of those ubiquitous “Red vs. Blue state” maps. No surprise, then, that many Americans believe that political polarization is on the rise.

And as it turns out, the more extreme people are in their political views, the more they perceive extremity in their fellow Americans.

That’s one finding in new research by Charles M. Judd and Leaf Van Boven of the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and David K. Sherman of the University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

“People project the extremity of their own partisan attitudes onto others such that those with more extreme attitudes perceive greater polarization than do those with less extreme attitudes,” the researchers write in a recent edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Using surveys evaluating attitudes toward 2008 presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama and controlled laboratory studies in which undergraduates were asked to evaluate a hypothetical policy regarding resource allocation among state residents and non-residents, the researchers found that the more extreme people’s views, the more they assume others — whether on their side of the partisan divide or the other — also hold extreme partisan views.

That’s in part because such people perceive that others think and process information in the same way they do. They end up projecting the kind of political processes they engage in onto other people, Van Boven says.

And you might not know it listening to more extreme partisans, but such “polarization projection” is not the province of one side or the other of the political divide.

“Everyone is equally guilty of this,” Van Boven says. “In none of our analyses have we ever seen any kind of liberal-conservative divide. Extreme liberals perceive Americans to be just as polarized as extreme Republicans.”

The research also found that those who perceive more polarization are more likely to vote. That creates a kind of multiplier effect, in which more polarized Americans are more likely to determine which candidates will be nominated and win elections.

“We believe that the present results shed light on an important source of political rancor and conflict,” the authors write. “By perceiving greater polarization, individuals with extreme attitudes may see partisan others as stereotypic caricatures of the Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives.”

The media tend to amplify the portrayal of polarization even as they simplify what is presented to readers, viewers and surfers. When the media assume that audiences are not capable of grasping complexities “and they craft the message accordingly, that becomes self-fulfilling,” Van Boven says.

The findings have raised further questions, such as whether those with more extreme views may have more “simplistic cognitive styles … that cause them to see attitude distributions as more simplistic, polarized and ‘black and white’ (or ‘Red and Blue,’ in this case).”

The findings give “cause for questioning whether our political processes really operate in a way that best serves our interests,” Van Boven says.

“We believe that the present results shed light on an important source of political rancor and conflict,” the authors write. Extreme partisans’ “perception of a polarized, stereotypic partisan landscape may lead them to adopt confrontational and defensive partisan behavior. Such aggressive politicking on the part of partisan extremists may explain why they seem to live in a different political reality.”