The Collective Wisdom of a Divided Crowd: Joaquín Navajas on Polarization & Democracy (video)

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The project, which falls under TWCF's Listening and Learning in a Polarized World (LLPW) Priority, is directed by Navajas at Fundación Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and co-directed by Amit Goldenberg at Harvard University. Across survey experiments in 20 countries in the Americas, the project team explores why people may be drawn to politically similar others as well as to more extreme views, including political acrophily — a preference for interacting with people who hold more extreme political views — and affective polarization  — animosity toward one’s political out-group. 

For TWCF, inquiries like these are not only about politics. They are also part of a larger effort to support scientific discoveries that shed light on human nature and open new ways of thinking about meaning, purpose, truth, and the conditions for progress.

In the TED Talk, Navajas brings these questions into a broader reflection on democracy, collective intelligence, and the difference between disagreement and violence.

Key moments from the talk:

• Navajas begins with a provocative question: “What if polarization actually brings some benefits to democracy?” To explain how groups can sometimes think better together, he points to the “wisdom” of the crowd. “People can be wrong at the individual level but collectively wise.”

• In his own experiment, Navajas expected polarization to undermine collective intelligence. Instead, he says, “When I combined both groups, the too few and the too many, the average was closer to the truth than any non-polarized crowd.”

• The reason, he explains, is that collective judgment depends on difference: “The wisdom of the crowds needs diversity to work so that different errors will cancel out.”

• But Navajas is careful to draw a line between disagreement and danger: “Polarization alone doesn’t break a democracy. But what does break a democracy is polarization combined with political violence.”

• His closing message is not that polarization is simple or safe, but that democracies may need to better understand the difference between disagreement that sharpens collective judgment and violence that destroys democratic life. 

Find details about the related TWCF-funded project here: Individual and cross-cultural differences in the attraction to political extremes