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tornpentacle t1_iykrikn wrote

Reply to comment by -domi- in The Impact of Political Memes: a Longitudinal Field Experiment. The study finds that political memes have limited persuasion and polarization effects. They mostly contribute to attitude entrenchment among strong party identifiers. by crazytoms2000

If the meme is center right, it will make a center right person more firm in his center rightness. If it's far-right, it won't make that same person move further to the right.

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DragoonXNucleon t1_iykullm wrote

Right... but think that through. If all far right people become more entrenched it means they also aren't shifting leftward.

That means unless all sides are equally targeted, they are not, then one side will win out overtime because they don't "lose" people while the other does.

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-domi- t1_iyleivs wrote

But it tends to leads to othering of other sections of the spectrum, so i feel like it's still polarizing. In fact, it might be turning the spectrum multi-polar, instead of how people typically look at it as bi-polar.

All of this is obviously just a personal perspective, i don't have data to back any of this up, unlike the authors. It just seems to me like the distinction between polarization and entrenchment might be valid, but all the bad stuff we can pin on polarization, would likely stick to entrenchment, too.

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