It's not just media, but the education system as well. More educated people are significantly more, not less likely to fail Intellectual-Turing-Tests about people with opposing views. i.e. far from increasing openness to experience, education itself is functioning much like indoctrination into a fundamentalist religion! The effect starts already at a High-School level and becomes worse and worse as educational attainment rises:
What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to, and that very few people actually do. Seems to me to be a problem with the teams.
> What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to
I'm not sure that's consistent with the evidence. People are actively getting worse and worse at modeling the other "team", which strongly suggests that polarization is quite real indeed and not just a matter of different labels.
Democrats with higher education are getting worse and worse at modeling Republicans. I think that means that, in higher education, Republicans get exposed to real Democrats, and Democrats get exposed to a caricature of Republicans.
If true, that seems odd. There was an awful lot of very public searching for "what are Republicans, and how can we understand and empathize with them more?" after the last election. Tons. It's ongoing, in fact. It's mostly been—to an almost absurd degree—very gentle and good-hearted. If there's ever been anything like this sort of massive effort by Republican media figures and public intellectuals, I'd love to know about it, because their findings would surely be fascinating. I doubt there has been, at least in the last 30 years or so.
I would say there was some people trying to understand. It just gets lost in all the people saying "Trump is evil! How could you be so stupid? You're all such idiots!" Those people are both more numerous (in my opinion) and closer to the microphones.
And of those trying to understand, some were trying to understand, and some were trying to understand how to get votes better.
I'd like to see a comparison between a survey of espoused party values and the oppositions understanding - I wonder if someone was to look at the values that the political leaders are saying and voting for would there be as wide a gap, or would it fall more in line with what people believe of a party and it's members?
On a person per person basis there's dehumanizing caricature, but I wonder if you compare it to the party to which the person claims to belong, if it would be as out to lunch.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republican...
If this doesn't scare the s--t out of you, I don't know what would.