Having to explain how a political policy works leads people
to express less extreme attitudes toward the policy, according to new research
published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological
Science.
The research suggests that people may hold extreme policy
positions because they are under an illusion of understanding — attempting to
explain the nuts and bolts of how a policy works forces them to acknowledge
that they don’t know as much about the policy as they initially thought.
Psychological scientist Philip Fernbach of the Leeds School
of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder and his co-authors were
interested in exploring some of the factors that could contribute to what they
see as increasing political polarization in the United States.