Link: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/18/17989856/twitter-polarization-echo-chambers-social-media

This story suggests a straightforward solution: If only we crossed the informational aisle, if only the liberals would watch a bit of Fox and the conservatives would spend some time with Rachel Maddow, we would realize the other side is more like us than we thought, that they make some good points too, and our enmity and polarization would ebb.

Beginning in October 2017, a group of political scientists and sociologists decided to test this theory. In the largest study of its kind ever conducted, they paid 1,220 regular Twitter users who identified as either Democrats or Republicans to follow a bot retweeting elected officials, media figures, and opinion leaders from the other side. The participants took regular surveys asking about their views on 10 issues ranging from immigration to government waste to corporate profits to LGBTQ rights. Those surveys — this will be important later — let them mark their view on a 7-point scale ranging from most conservative to most liberal.

The researchers were testing the collision between two popular models. In one, “contact between opposing groups can challenge stereotypes that develop in the absence of positive interactions between them.” In the other, “exposure to those with opposing political views may create backfire effects that exacerbate political polarization.”

The backfire theorists won the day. The results of the month-long exposure to popular, authoritative voices from the other side of the aisle was an increase in issue-based polarization. “We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative posttreatment,” write the authors. “Democrats exhibited slight increases in liberal attitudes after following a conservative Twitter bot, although these effects are not statistically significant.”

The belief that everything in the universe is part of the same fundamental whole exists throughout many cultures and philosophical, religious, spiritual, and scientific traditions, as captured by the phrase 'all that is.' The Nobel winner Erwin Schrodinger once observed that quantum physics is compatible with the notion that there is indeed a basic oneness of the universe. Therefore, despite it seeming as though the world is full of many divisions, many people throughout the course of human history and even today truly believe that individual things are part of some fundamental entity.

In a recent series of studies, Kate Diebels and Mark Leary set out to find out. In their first study, they found that only 20.3% of participants had thought about the oneness of all things "often" or "many times", while 25.9% of people "seldom" thought about the oneness of all things, and 12.5% of people "never" had thought about it.

Those who scored higher on this scale were much more likely to have an identity that extends beyond the individual to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, nature, and even the cosmos. In fact, a belief in oneness was more strongly related to feeling connected with distant people and aspects of the natural world than with people with whom one is close! Also, while a belief in oneness was related to actual experiences of oneness ("mystical experiences" ), there was no relationship between a belief in oneness and feeling closer to God during a spiritual experience.

Read the whole article at the link: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/what-would-happen-if-everyone-truly-believed-everything-is-one/