Have We Been Wrong about What the Other Side Thinks?

Polarization has reached such a fever pitch in the United States that each side of the political divide sees the other as an existential threat to democracy. Partisans use the same pejoratives to describe the other’s beliefs: arrogant, uninformed, incomprehensible. But what if people are wrong about what the other side thinks? What if we’ve actually got more in common? This idea has come up before on In Reality with the survey firm Populace, but its best-known support derives from work done by the global research firm, More in Common. Today, host Eric Schurenberg joins the co-founder and CEO of More in Common, Mathieu Lefevre, to discuss the gaps in perception between what people think the other side thinks and what they really do, why those gaps persist, whether More in Common is subject to its own confirmation bias, and why content moderation is a losing game.

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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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