Common Ground: has the internet turned a shared reality into an algorithmic battlefield? – Andres Reiljan

Gareth King (00:34)

Andres, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the show.

Andres Reiljan (00:37)

Hi Gareth. Thank you for the invitation, very excited to be here.

Gareth King (00:40)

Before we get into it, can you tell us a little bit about the work that you do and how you came to this area of expertise?

Andres Reiljan (00:46)

Sure, I'm a political scientist. So, I study well politics and especially people's attitudes and feelings about politics. Political polarisation has been my central topic and especially affective polarisation. Maybe we get more to it later what it means, but put it simply, it's polarisation in feelings towards your political opponents, your political in-groups. So, I work on that.

I started with it 10 years ago when I went to European University Institute in Florence, Italy to do my PhD. So, I got a bit interested in it before when I was studying in Estonia, where I'm from, a small country in Eastern Europe. So, I was thinking how can we measure polarisation better so that they can be compared. So, like also Eastern European countries that are not so ideologically structured that we can compare them better with like Western democracies.

Over the last 10 years I defended my PhD meanwhile in 2021. Now I'm a researcher still at the European University Institute and also in the University of Tartu in Estonia. So, for the last 10 years I'm working on this polarisation topic, predominantly that.

Gareth King (01:56)

Yeah cool, and I think that you've just alluded to affective polarisation there a couple of times. To get us started, can you give us an explanation of what affective polarisation is and what it commonly looks like?

Andres Reiljan (02:08)

Yeah, sure. As I said, essentially it is polarisation in feelings. So, it means that you have positive feelings towards some group that is called the in-group and negative feelings towards some other group, the out-group.

So usually, the groups in the political science are political parties. It means that you like your own party a lot and you really dislike or even hate some other party, and also maybe even people who vote for that party. So essentially this means that society and politics is divided into groups that mutually dislike and distrust each other. It can have many implications on society.

So it essentially can look like that in a Christmas dinner families get into conflict because some of them are liberals, others are conservatives, and they have very strong feelings about some polarising political figures and you know, Christmas dinner ends early. Or that you don't want to be friends with people who support the party you dislike, you don't want to date with them. There's a big research on that too. Essentially, maybe you don't even want to live next to them, there is some data also showing that people are segregating into neighbourhoods. You don't want to see the yard sign of a party you don't like next to your house.

So, in the end, it looks like a divided society, and then divided politics, and divided also in terms of feelings. So it is possible to disagree with each other respectfully. You think this about this ideological issue, I think that, but we don't hate each other. But affective polarisation means that you also really dislike each other.

Gareth King (03:42)

Right. It's interesting that it does obviously have so much of its focal area within politics, because as we all know, and we all see everywhere, like politics just seems to be just encompassing everything. Like depending on where you are in the world, the impact that it's having on that polarisation is completely extreme. So, it's interesting that there's all those different degrees within that.

But with so much of that polarisation having its roots in politics, is there a reason why politics become the nucleus for polarisation that it has?

Andres Reiljan (04:17)

I think we have to consider the motivations of people. I think politics is very much the nucleus because it's essentially a competition. People want to, in democracies different groups of people want to win power, and then they want to spread their message and there are competing groups. So, as a regular person not involved in politics at all you don't really have much of a motivation to do polarising stuff.

But as a politician, as someone who is very engaged in politics, you might have this motivation. I think politicians might often misperceive; they think that polarising strategies are the key to success. Sometimes they are, they are not necessarily so, but often I think it comes from this motivation to gain power essentially and this is the essence of politics and I think this is why politics is so central in it.

Gareth King (05:04)

Yeah, that's an interesting point around, I guess, the interest in gaining power. And I think we could draw parallels with that in the way that, as we get further through this discussion around polarisation in the digital space as well, there's obviously a power dynamic there too. But before we move on even from politics, can you break down the differences between party affective polarisation and leader affective polarisation, and what some key examples of those might be?

Andres Reiljan (05:33)

Sure, yeah that's something I've worked on, like to compare how people feel about parties as organisations, as groups of people and towards specific leaders. Of course, in let's say, in most established kind of consolidated democracies, the two are quite correlated, they are quite similar. So obviously you connect the person who is the leader of the party, you connect them with a party, so if you're asked how you feel about them, your feeling is quite similar, but they are not identical.

Some leaders can be especially polarising even more than the party, others the other way around. Maybe a good example could be 2020 US election where, you know, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump, very polarising character. So, data also showed that the Democratic voters, they hated Trump more than they hated the Republican Party. Whereas for Republicans, it was the other way around. They hated the Democratic Party more than Joe Biden as a person. So, I think that kind of shows, you know, that Trump as a character was much more polarising. Of course, they're still correlated, but they're not completely the same.

And maybe in some countries that do not have such a structured party system, actually just approaching it via leaders is much more useful. Like in Brazil, if you ask about feelings towards parties, you don't really get much. It's not such a structured party system. You have to ask how do you feel about Bolsonaro, the previous president? How you feel about Lula, the current president? And then you get the better picture of it. So yeah, they are often very similar, but still distinct concepts, let's say. I can get more scientific about it, but I think it will get more boring.

Gareth King (07:05)

No, I think that's pretty clear on the connection between some people may just hate a group as a whole, or as you've highlighted, there's certain figureheads like Donald Trump, you know, as everybody knows, he's probably the most polarising person on the planet. And I think that we could draw so much of the content and themes for this episode back to everything that comes out of America, especially in the digital space around how that polarisation is so driven by politics, which is driven by that man.

But all of that said, what would you say regarding polarisation, what would you say is the biggest misconception people have about it or how it's caused, whether that's offline in the real world or in an online space?

Andres Reiljan (07:52)

I would say, I would give it two misconceptions. I'd say one about how things are and other about how things should be. So, about misconception about how things are regarding polarisation is that people tend to think that different groups of voters or ideological groups that they are much more extreme than they actually are, and much more homogeneous than they actually are.

So, you think that your out group, especially this goes towards the out groups, the party and the party supporters that you do not like. So, you think that their views, and this is a very common phenomenon, people think that their views are more extreme and also kind of more unified, whereas actually many people are rather centrist.

And even within these party groups, yeah, maybe you listen to some very polarising leader, but if you look at the millions of people who vote for the party, they are not so homogenous and on average they are not that extreme. So that is one misconception. People think that the kind of ideological polarisation is higher than it actually is and then also that polarises them effectively against others because they think they are more different than they actually are.

Maybe the other one how things should be that I think is important to outline here is that there's like a linearity assumption meaning that more polarisation always means worse. And in reality it's not that simple. So, I would rather suggest to think of it as a U-curve. As in very low polarisation is problematic because it means that people just don't care at all, and politics is totally pointless. And very high polarisation becomes problematic because of these things that I mentioned about people starting to hate each other, all of that. So, it's more about finding the right amount of polarisation.

The least polarised country in the world is probably North Korea, you know, because no polarisation is allowed and that's definitely not the role model, right? So, I think a misconception is that this term is almost always used in a negative meaning, but we have to think of it in a bit more nuanced way. It's not always that just less polarisation good, more polarisation bad. It depends on a context and on the levels, yeah.

Gareth King (09:59)

Okay, yeah, what would be an example of say a positive benefit of polarisation?

Andres Reiljan (10:05)

Essentially, if you talk about ideological polarisation, it's that people have a more clearly differentiated competing policy packages. You go to the election, if there's no polarisation, then based on what do you vote? But it kind of makes voting and making informed decision easier. If you have, let's say, a left-wing party that offers a clearly defined left-wing view of how they want to govern and then a right-wing party that offers a clearly defined right-wing view, and then people can choose between that.

And then a bit more controversial thing is that there is quite some evidence also on affective polarisation that more polarised people are more likely to vote actually, because they care, you know. It's not always, let's say it's not the best motivation to vote, the affective polarisation. If you really vote based on hate, which many people do, voting against a candidate, it's not perfect, but there is some evidence, you know, that in the Western democracies, election turnouts were decreasing over the decades. Every decade, generally people voted less and less.

But now in the last decade, it has turned around a bit, like voting turnouts are again increasing and this can be tied to heightened polarisation. People are more engaged, they care more. So, there can be some positive aspects, but again, it's about finding this sweet spot, I would say, where people are polarised enough to care, to engage in politics, to vote, but not so polarised that they completely hate each other.

Gareth King (11:35)

Yeah that's a great point around that turnaround there over the last decade. And I think that kind of leads onto my next question. And it would make a lot of sense actually over the last decade, as we've seen the rise of so many new forms of social media and algorithms curating, and they're kind of driven by making people mad. And the madder you are, the more passionate you are, the more likely you are to go out and vote.

That said, a lot of people claim that algorithms themselves are the cause of polarisation in the world, which as you've outlined, just isn't truly the case, but surely they do have a huge impact on it. Do you believe that algorithms are amplifying a natural tendency for us to go towards bad news or rage-inducing news? Like what do algorithms do to make us angry that's kind of already in us?

Andres Reiljan (12:25)

Yeah, I agree that they don't cause polarisation as such, but they enhance it. So indeed, they push people towards outrage. And you know, in social media also acting on this outrage, you can very quickly type something and that's what the kind of the algorithms want. They want to get you engaged and react. But then again, like what are algorithms? Who created them? Who invented them? Humans did.

Behind these algorithms, behind this agenda that is pushed on people that polarises them, are humans with their human agenda, as you know, different groups of people who compete for power, who want to push their different agendas. So yeah, I would say that algorithms are used to enhance it, but they don't just invent it out of thin air. You can see on internet different videos about acts of kindness and people coming together. They can also get a lot of attention and many people also like that. So, it's not algorithms as such, it's rather I would say who controls them and who wishes the agenda, which are people.

Gareth King (13:22)

Yeah, that makes total sense too, that algorithms as a part of social media and the digital landscape, are simply another tool to do the same sort of thing that media or any kind of news and communication has been able to do for centuries, which is kind of fire up certain people and make someone else the other, and make people hate or make people love.

So, it's, there is definitely obviously a bit of both there, like we are naturally predisposed to a bit of polarisation. It’s not the cause, the internet is not causing it, but it's definitely exacerbating that offline polarisation, maybe condensing it into a much more focused delivery method when we are just looking at our screen. Would you say that there's any other problems that algorithms and this incessant stream of negativity and outrage-inducing content that people are viewing online is creating? Like what is that doing to people in a political sense and beyond?

Andres Reiljan (14:19)

One thing that I would bring out here is that algorithms and especially social media where information moves very fast, it is very good for spreading misinformation. And what that does, that enhances what I would say is the most clearly negative and problematic type of polarisation, which is what is sometimes in research called factual belief polarisation.

So, it means that not only do we just disagree on how things should be, like left-wing right-wing, that's normal, right? But we also disagree on actual facts, like, you know, whether climate change is real and caused by humans, what is the actual economic indicators, stuff like that. And this is, I think, where social media and social media algorithms help a lot. Again, it's not only that, media was already polarised before the internet era in the 90s, but just kind of, yeah, this velocity, this kind of huge reach the social media gives to it really, really helps with this very, very bad cause of polarising people also over how things are.

And this is a very big problem because you cannot really have a normal democratic debate about competing worldviews if people just believe completely different things. If some people believe that climate change is real and caused by humans and others believe that it is a hoax. Things about vaccines, great example there. We can have researchers who developed great vaccines, but if lots of people are informed about them making you autistic and stuff like that, they don't want to take these vaccines. I see this as a very problematic implication of social media, this enhancing the factual belief polarisation.

Gareth King (15:56)

Yeah, okay. That's interesting. Factual belief polarisation. I think that the way that digital channels, whether it's social media or even the internet in general, where we can go wherever we want to and look at what we want to, it just lets us curate our own information bubble and our own reality where those, you know, not a common set of facts, the opposite of that, like parallel narratives potentially lead us to lose the skills to engage with people who disagree with us.

What would you say people should keep in mind when they see something that outrages them so much that all they want to do is hate that person? What should they keep in mind, and how should they approach somebody with what they see as a viewpoint so different to their own?

Andres Reiljan (16:37)

I listened to your previous podcast with John DeDakis and I think he made a great point about curiosity. Have curiosity. And I would say that also instead of just immediately getting outraged, have curiosity about how these people that you disagree with so strongly, how did they reach these views that they had? Is it because they are very evil or very stupid or is it because they see totally different information than you do? Is it because they have very different moral groundings?

Doesn't mean that they are evil people but you have a kind of conservative religious roots of morals, have secular humanistic roots of morals. So, think about that. Think how do they reach these views and is it really that they're evil as people or could there be something more there?

And yeah, be curious. I mean, when I talk to people who I disagree with, I try to rather ask questions from them and figure out why do they think what they think rather than immediately thinking how to dunk on them or say, no, no, no, no, no, that's stupid and you have to change your mind. But unfortunately, social media very much pushes this dunking on the outgroup culture. If you want to gain a big following you cannot have a detailed debate. Rather you have one two-liner where you make your opponent look very stupid and that's rewarded there more. And I would say in that sense, maybe also don't use social media that much, would be one of the suggestions.

Gareth King (18:02)

There's a couple of good points in there, especially one around the way to build a following is to be just so extreme in whatever you're doing, that it becomes a kind of a magnet for other people that might believe, say, a small fragment of whatever you're saying.

But I think with that in mind, we know that some people have just such gigantic amounts of followings. They're responsible for a disproportionate amount of messaging being communicated between people, which as you said, you know, a few minutes ago makes things seem so much more polarised than they actually are when you're just seeing these extreme versions of everything hitting you in the face.

Is that a uniquely digital space problem, or is it the same offline in the real world as well where a few loud voices get a disproportionate amount of attention? Now we know one of those would be Donald Trump. Is he just a unique case, or is this something that humans just tend to happen through charisma, would you say?

Andres Reiljan (18:59)

I think it is there are parallels to it. Again internet changes a bit the form of these kind of loud voices, gives them easier ways to get this reach. But no it reflects, it reflects a more general turn in politics. You know it has changed over time like usually you had the politicians rather avoid saying controversial stuff. They try to say things that make them look competent & professional, but then nowadays it's much more common that politicians try to stick out by saying stuff that is very controversial.

But it's not only the internet phenomenon, but there are also, let's say, polarisers in a more broad sense. Of course, I would say that nowadays separating between the online and offline world is not anymore that simple. They are the same people who do stuff offline and online often, but the kind of polarising impulse very much comes from smaller, more engaged, more extreme, more partisan people. And, you know, they are there offline and online.

Gareth King (19:56)

How would you say that governments or organisations or even platforms use the mechanics of polarisation to either achieve their own goals or sabotage their enemies? And are these tactics the same, whether you're doing it offline or online, or do they change with the medium? What works better?

Andres Reiljan (20:14)

Here it's very important to clarify which kind of governments we mean. I would very much emphasise here the governments of dictatorships. Russia, China. There's a lot of evidence how Russia is supporting extremists in different Western democracies. Often extremists on both sides. So extreme right, extreme left. They do a lot to enhance polarisation because it weakens. It essentially weakens the democracies, the Western democracies that they see as the enemies.

It has proven to be a good strategy, I would say, for countries like Russia. Consider here I am from Estonia bordering Russia, so I don't have good feelings for this country, but there is a lot of evidence of Russia using this polarisation tactics to divide Western democracies, and the internet is giving them a lot of good tools for that. There are the troll farms, people who just sit somewhere in a basement and basically post polarising stuff all day long. Lots of lots of fake users, bots created by Russia.

I see this kind of a strategic use mostly there and it's kind of in a way an international thing, as in like governments of dictatorships use it because you know in dictatorship you don't really deal with polarisation because not, you know, you don't have the competition is not allowed. So, it in a way makes them more efficient in some terms.

So, they try to use the weaknesses of democracies and the more polarised, especially emotionally polarised, they managed to make us the better for them, you know, that the weaker the weaker is their enemy. So, I would say there's a lot of this strategic use. But to me the most, you know, I could also talk about how governments use it within countries in democracies. But I think the most important part here is this kind of dictatorships working against democracies. So, I would emphasise that.

Gareth King (22:07)

I'd be interested to hear how governments use it within democracies as well.

Andres Reiljan (22:11)

Well, again, I don't want to always go back to US, but you see, I think you see very well how Trump is using it. You try to get yourself off the leash and blame it on someone else. And the more polarised is the electorate, the more they hate the opponent, the more prone they are to believe it. And essentially, and what is the most dangerous phenomenon there is that they can use this kind of a strong polarisation to dismantle democracy.

And from this, we can also use examples like Hungary, Turkey, countries that have massively backslided in their democracy over the last 10-15 years and they are very polarised. Also data shows they are really polarised so that leaders Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, they can rely on their voters really hating the other side, and if you really hate the other side you are more cool - even if you generally support democracy - you're kind of more cool to violating different rules of democracy when it favours your party.

So, this has been used a lot. You frame it kind of as something that we have to do to win, to not let the hated, hated out party in power. And that's what many governments use and there's good, let's say good examples, essentially bad examples of that all over the world. So not only USA.

Gareth King (23:28)

No, for sure. And again, it's interesting that you just mentioned that same timeframe, 10 to 15 years. And I think that through all of these examples, yes, we know that social media plays a huge part in that because it's kind of, you know, a one-to-one conversation that you can make people so angry on their own. They're just kind of in their zone looking at their feed.

But while people blame algorithms and social media and even the internet for this polarisation and the way that people just can't find that common ground anymore, they're still just tools and methods for humans to use. So, it's not so much the method or the medium creating this polarisation. It's almost just relaying a message, and I guess the way it delivers it can assist with that polarisation, which is quite interesting.

And i'd love to, you know, maybe look into more why it's got so much worse over that last 10 to 15 years. Is there a direct correlation there with the massive explosion of just so much more social media over that time, or is that just a coincidence perhaps?

Andres Reiljan (24:36)

Yeah, it's a difficult question because there is quite some conflicting evidence on that. Polarisation is quite a complicated concept actually, so how different scholars measure it differs, that really drives the results. So, it's not so simple, it's not that social media comes, polarisation increases. But let's say I am rather in the camp that yes, it has increased it and will, you know, unless something changes, will keep increasing it.

There is also clear evidence that these echo chambers that social media allows and pushes for that they do polarise people. So those who more in social media echo chambers are more polarised. But at the same time, of course, there are, I agree with you that essentially these are tools, you know, and there are also structural reasons.

What also happened around 15 years ago, a bit more even now, was the great economic crisis that started in 2008. Many people lost a lot in their life quality. So, at the same time this rise of this kind of what we call the cultural issues, I'd say the woke and the anti-woke, all of that. It's enhanced by social media, by internet, but there are actual topics there that have just risen. This just makes people very angry about stuff, you know, if economy tanks, you don't feel good about it.

And even more so, even more so, this rise of just to say what is called cultural issues, essentially these kind of things like LGBT rights, abortion rights, immigration, immigrants rights, all of these topics that kind of go into our core beliefs, moral foundations. These are real topics, you know, they are not invented by internet and these have also massively increased over the last decades.

I think social media contributes to it because these are like in a way simpler topics, it's easier, it's easier to take a strong stance on, you know, trans rights or abortion rights in social media than to start discussing the details of a taxation system, you know, and whether the marginal rate of the richest people should be five percent higher or lower. You know, that just doesn't engage as much as just kind of things that go to our rights, our moral foundations. So again, yeah, I would say internet as a tool contributes to it, but there are also other more structural reasons of this polarisation that we are experiencing in the last, especially last 10-15 years.

Gareth King (27:00)

Yeah, look, there's a couple of really good things in there that make so much sense. One first of which was obviously we can draw that line back to 2008, you know, even like the Occupy Wall Street movement that came out of that. And in my own reading and looking into things, all of those cultural issues or, you know, as they call it culture war stuff, it all just came and got so big, conveniently taking the heat off what Occupy Wall Street was kind of focused on, which was just how bad this system had shafted basically everybody.

You said something quite interesting there that makes a lot of sense that in the social media or digital realm, you're not really spending time when you're scrolling, you're getting mad at stuff, but it is just like junk food issues. It's like you can read it very quickly, get angry, look for the next one. As you said, no one's scrolling through their Instagram or TikTok or whatever is trying to, trying to unravel like a complicated tax system. They just want something to get really angry at, and whether it is just trying to find that other, that outsider to put the blame on, it's a very, very effective tool to kind of distract from everything else that's going on. That's a huge, a huge other conversation.

Does that kind of anger then generate in an online space and then spill out offline? You know, I can probably count on one hand the amount of people I've ever encountered in my life that might've been so insanely passionate against abortion, for instance. But if you go anywhere online, it's like there's thousands of them everywhere. The offline space is a lot more in the shades of grey in the middle. We can all kind of get along and find that common ground and common humanity with each other.

So, I guess we could say that the internet and the digital world is having a real effect on breaking our ability to find shared beliefs or reality etc with other people, which is not great. But that said, would you say that the idea of common ground itself is perhaps a naive or outdated concept in the modern world? You know, especially since we're just surrounded and bombarded by so much more information and so much more fragmentation of information.

It's not like a couple of hundred years ago, you live in a town, everyone else lives in the town, you all do the same thing. Now we've all got infinite amounts of inputs into our life. So, being more unique than ever, are we kidding ourselves that we should just be able to find something in common with everybody?

Andres Reiljan (29:28)

Good question and no, I don't think it's a naive idea. What we have to think of is that we can disagree on different issues, different political issues, lifestyle choices. We have to just find a way to deal with it. But there is still a lot of agreement on more abstract kind of things. And I think the most important common ground, and again, when we talk about polarisation divisions, we usually talk about democracies or at least countries where you have competitive elections, right? And I think this is the very crucial common ground is that most people in all across the democratic world, most people support democracy as the best form of government. They support media freedom. They support the judicial freedom, freedom of, general freedom of speech.

People might understand these concepts a bit differently. They might think that their opponents are against it and they might think, you know, both say often that it's the other side who is censoring. There is some truth to it in some cases on both sides, but overall there is a common ground on that. And in the light of who are those who want us to be divided and weak, which are countries like Russia and China, especially in the face of that, I think we have to find this common ground.

We have to find ways that we understand that some of us are liberals and very secular people, others are conservatives and very religious people, but we all have to agree that we want to live in a democracy. And there is a lot of common ground on that. And I think that's very much a message that I would like to also to reflect more in the online space is that people do want to live in democracies.

Gareth King (31:08)

It's such a great point there around, I do wish that team that I potentially don't like all the best because I want the country to succeed. And one of the things that I've noticed, especially, you know, say over the last 10 years is that there's so many people actively wanting the country to fail when their team is not the one in charge. You said it earlier about dunking on people. Everything is just dunking except the stakes at like a national government level is just so insanely high that I don't, I don't know why anybody would wish for their country to fail just to dunk on the party that they didn't vote for. That just seems crazy to me.

And that, that is definitely a result of, I would say this increased polarisation that's being driven by these algorithms and then potentially like bad actors getting in there and sowing havoc amongst things. Hopefully we can get to a point where people kind of go, all right, well, what's best for us as a country, and everybody in every country where they can, can do that. I won't hold my breath.

You know, all of that said, we know if people are spending so much time online, it's so polarised, and it's now in the real world and it's so polarised. What would you say the psychological toll of just being constantly exposed to such polarisation, whether it's political or anything else, what's the toll of that on an individual and maybe even at a societal level?

Andres Reiljan (32:30)

Yeah, there is actually some solid data from it also that it does have a psychological toll. Like before the 2024 election in US, psychological studies about stress in America showed that around 70% of Americans stated the upcoming election as a source of stress in their lives. So, they're stressed about how it will go, who it will win, what will happen then if the other side wins.

I cannot say that, you know, that polarised people are always more stressed and less happy than the people who don't really care about politics, not necessarily, but overall there is good data showing that it stresses people out and it has a toll then on the whole society. If you have loads of people stressed about the election as if we don't have enough stuff to be stressed about already.

And yeah, as I said before, then it kind of drives us into mutually hating groups, which is essentially bad for society. I think many people would agree with that. So yeah, so you are a lot of stressed people who maybe get some short-term hits from these moments in social media. But yeah, as you also said, I think social media is like an internet equivalent of, or information equivalent of, junk food. So yeah, you might enjoy when you eat it for a moment, but it's not good for you.

Gareth King (33:42)

Knowing everything that you know around polarisation and the mechanics behind it and the science behind it, for those people who might be feeling overwhelmed and stressed by just the amount of conflict they're encountering, whether it's in their digital life or their real life, their offline life, what do you reckon that they can do to help them break free of that, and start looking for common ground with their quote unquote opposition?

Andres Reiljan (34:06)

Yeah, maybe what we already discussed a bit before was like have curiosity, acknowledge your own biases, think about whether you want to live in a democracy or not. And if you want to live in a democracy, how can we reconcile things with our opponents? But at same time, it's difficult just as an individual endeavour, you know, I think there has to be societal measures, you know, to drive this kind of bringing us together.

And there are ways, there are ways I've worked on it myself. I've developed a chatbot that we just tested in Poland, where they had a very polarised election where we mapped out people's misperceptions about the others and then corrected them. So, we asked people like, what do you think voters of that party think about this issue, and then we corrected their misperception. And then those who took, let's say, got this, we call it the treatment, like experimental treatment, those who used it, they significantly hated the outparty voters less. So, the affective polarisation decreased. There are several examples in the US also of similar research.

So, I would say a seek out like a non-partisan neutral information about different sides in politics with an open mind. But you know, for that also researchers have to make themselves and their content more heard. So, in a way, individual perspective seek out information, but then also from a societal perspective, we have to make this information available. Yeah, I would say politics, society and politicians and researchers and all kinds of people who want the world to be better, they have to contribute to it together. And then individuals can find more information that helps them understand some biases, some biases better.

Gareth King (35:47)

Yeah, for sure. Just to finish up then, as we look ahead, you've just mentioned that chatbot that you've built, so that's using technology and the internet to counteract this polarisation, the loss of the common ground. And I think that we were here today to look at whether technology was solely to blame for the current situation as so many people claim it is, which it clearly isn't by that.

But it sounds like what you're doing is you're actually now using it to try and solve a problem that it may not be directly responsible for, but it can play a part in directly solving. How do you see this chatbot evolving from here and what are some of the potential outcomes of it?

Andres Reiljan (36:25)

Yeah, essentially internet might be and social media, it might be behind partly at least, and I think is in this increase in polarisation, but also we cannot go back to the pre-internet era. We cannot start tackling traffic accidents by going back to horses. So even if internet is to blame, there is no way, I would say no other way. I mean, there are also other ways but definitely the internet has to be also part of this tackling this.

What I will do in the coming years is do a lot of research in developing more of these kind of tools to see what kind of mechanisms trigger this especially affective polarisation, and then how can we counteract it and reduce it, and also how to improve people's attitudes towards democracy so that they would be less willing to accept norm violations from their leaders, from their party leaders. I will work a lot on that.

So yeah, I see that there is a way to use online tools, internet also for the good. And I've been actually working on this kind of stuff like voting advice applications where people can learn about candidates. I've been working on it actually for over 10 years as a side thing. And now I start connecting it with the polarisation topic. Like how can they be used to reduce this kind of a negative toxic types of polarisation?

So, I hope it will go into promising and fruitful directions. And if I find something interesting, I will surely try to communicate it through all kinds of media.

Gareth King (37:53)

Absolutely, that sounds really cool. Where can people follow what you're up to with that? Is there any way that they can see what's happening or is it kind of, it just needs to come out with the research as it happens?

Andres Reiljan (38:04)

I have not invested much into building a personal brand. I usually let my research speak for myself. Although maybe I should go more in this direction. I really don't like social media very much. Yeah, I would say that if you're interested in my research, go to my Google Scholar profile and see, read my articles. If some of them are behind the paywall, drop me an email I will happily share with you a pdf. And yeah I will definitely if I again if I find something interesting I will go to media with it, and try to kind of spread the word  - spread the good word - about the potential of common ground.

Gareth King (38:41)

Good word. That's what we like to hear. A lot to think about there. And you've really showed us so much around what actually is causing that polarisation, in not just a social digital space, but in a real world one as well. Andres, thank you so much for your time.

Andres Reiljan (38:58)

Thank you, Gareth, it was very interesting, I really enjoyed the talk.