What Kind of Content Drives Perception Gaps?

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Basi: I wonder if you imagine being facebook and doing large scale studies where you're tracking millions of news feed all the content going through it. My hunch is that a lot of the click bait miss and disinformation would sort of be correlated with this kind of distorted world view. Have you done any research like that? Basi: No, not on the scale or i many think what you describe wo be so facinated. So we haven't done that. What we have done is more, we've done small scale tests on, again, like more focus group kinds of activities.

What do you think the other side thinks? Guest Dan Vallone is the Director of More in Common U.S.A., an organization that’s been asking Democrats and Republicans that critical question. Their work has uncovered countless “perception gaps” in our understanding of each other. For example, Democrats think that about 30 percent of Republicans support "reasonable gun control," but in reality, it’s about 70 percent. Both Republicans and Democrats think that about 50 percent of the other side would feel that physical violence is justified in some situations, but the actual number for each is only about five percent. “Both sides are convinced that the majority of their political opponents are extremists,” says Dan. “And yet, that's just not true.” Social media encourages the most extreme views to speak the loudest and rise to the top—and it’s hard to start a conversation and work together when we’re all arguing with mirages. But Dan’s insights and the work of More in Common provide a hopeful guide to unraveling the distortions we’ve come to accept and correcting our foggy vision.