Daniel Levitin Quotes

Anybody who tunes into Rush Limabaugh already knows what he's going to say and is already inclined to agree. So it winds up creating tribes.

Ideological amplification happens when like minded people deliberate…they push each other to extreme points of views….The argument pool in a group of liberals will be only liberal. Likewise with conservatives, the other way…. Most of us on most issues do not have a ton of information…we might be steered away from moderation…. Political correctness is a good example of ideological amplification.

Conservatives literally view it as a kind of a weakness to talk to people other than their own. Nothing would bore me more than to sit around talking and listening to a bunch of liberals all day.

Facebook Algorithms have got us all screwed up, where we only listen and talk to people with the same views as us, and I think it's not helping us as a culture to grow.

The separation of audience into tribes preferring to reinforce their own views with media of similar ideological stripe makes true debate impossible.

Technology has allowed the creation of media echo chambers, so that a person can reinforce, rather than debate, viewpoints.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.

People have now been absorbing only that they agree with. You know, part of it is if you're liberal, you consume liberal information. If you're a conservative, you consume conservative information. And there's a certain stridency in both that you know everything, and if somebody doesn't agree with you, you think they don't know what they're talking about, and you become intolerant.

For too many of us, it's become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or on college campuses, or places of worship or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

The big challenge our society faces is that we live in an increasingly open world with increasingly closed communities. This is also due to the evolution of the Internet, where people only read things that won't challenge their beliefs.

People of a certain political view tend to read material of only that point of view … except to cast contempt on the other points of view.

Who wants to hear that he is wrong when he can be told that he is right? …. We are losing the ability to change our mind because of our media.

Why is this polarization in America? Why is there these very different views about the world? Part of it is that there are very different worlds that people are inhabiting.

Not only is our electorate polarized, but their sources of information are polarized. Voters choose the sources of information that tells them what they want to hear.

The politicians are not the only people who are in their own silos. Many of our citizens only watch or listen to the news that they want to hear, and if there is anything else, they turn it off. We all need to listen to the people who are on the other side.

We live surrounded by people who sound like us, vote like us, spend like us. We get only the news we want to. And then scream into the social media echo chamber that is designed to serve us up information we already like.

Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.

What Americans seem to prefer — or at least the subset of them who live on social media — is a private square of people who already agree with them. The most successful of these preachers we call “influencers,” which basically means they get paid to manipulate you, and somehow you listen to them anyway.

The people who whine about Fox News are hypocrites - they say they're totally tolerant, but when they run into someone who doesn't share their assumptions, they say, 'Fox News is evil, and it must be stopped.'

One thing about liberals: It doesn't even occur to them that there is another side to an argument. They are so convinced of the righteousness of their own position that it doesn't dawn on them that a reasonable person might have a different viewpoint.

If I'm a conservative, I'll generally watch Fox. If someone's liberal, they'll generally watch MSNBC. They'll basically learn a set of facts that are completely distinct from one another. They'll get their views validated.

The more a President sits surrounded only by his own views and those of his personal advisors, the more he lives in a house of mirrors in which all views and ideas tend to reflect and reinforce his own.

In an ideological, polarized political environment, people see the reality that they want to see.

… the politically engaged will tend also to be the most closed-minded.

Even as the world becomes saturated with seemingly unlimited information, “the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions” writes author Bill Bishop, “is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.” The result is divisiveness, polarization, and rancor in our national discourse – First World tribalism – with crowds gathering at the poles of every issue.