Dr. Jaime Settle Speaks with The New York Times on Political Polarization
Despite the raging fires consuming the western United States and the resurgence of COVID, the US is more polarized than ever, and it seems like the polarization will continue to worsen. Dr. Jaime Settle of the Government Department says, “political elites have every incentive to politicize these things early on, and so people who are paying attention to politics pick up on the frame elected officials and the media are using,” in a New York Times article. As a result, even when two people of the opposite political spectrum witness the same events, they will not come to the same or similar conclusion because they will “interpret these events from the framework they started with.” Dr. Settle goes further to say that it is difficult to change other people’s points of view, especially on the internet, because arguments are based on what would change our own minds and not what would change another person’s mind.
