As a philosopher working on interdisciplinary issues such as the polarization of public opinion, I’m often asked two things: what role philosophy plays in relation to this topic and what can be done to reduce polarization. In this post, I’ll address both of these points with the aim of showing that philosophy is crucial for studying polarization, and that certain interventions only become visible when we approach the issue from philosophy.
Let’s start by laying out the standard, widely accepted story about what’s happening with public opinion in many contemporary democracies. Several opinion surveys include questions asking participants to report their feelings toward political parties, political leaders, and partisans—usually on a scale from 0 to 100, where “0” means cold or unfavorable feelings and “100” means warm or favorable ones. Drawing on data from various sources, Shanto Iyengar and other scholars found in 2012 that the gap between citizens’ positive feelings toward their own group and their negative feelings toward the opposing group had grown in the U.S. They coined the expression “affective polarization” to refer to this peculiar type of public opinion division. Since then, this growing animosity and dislike across partisan lines has been confirmed not only in the U.S., but in many other contemporary democracies—and through different methods. Thus, from the fact that citizens are reporting more negative feelings toward the other side, many have concluded that a distinctive feature of what’s going on in contemporary democracy is citizens’ emotions.
Theoretically, this empirical discovery has been grounded in some psychological theories, such as social identity theory, that basically claim that we humans exhibit a tendency to form groups, and to favor those in our own group while disadvantaging or disfavoring those in opposing groups, simply because they belong to the outgroup, even when the ingroup-outgroup divide is based on something superficial or arbitrary. Identity is a powerful force, and politics is increasingly becoming a matter of identity.
Thus, affective polarization is standardly conceived as an increase in our negative emotions toward the others based on an increased partisanship. According to this story, people feel more animosity toward their political opponents because they have become ardent supporters of their own parties, and this is pushing political discussion into a very dark place. Public opinion divisions are no longer issue-based or ideological in the sense of stemming from different positions on specific topics. Instead, people are supposedly less interested in truth or genuine political discussion; they are more agitated, more angry, and they dislike the other side more as a result of their growing partisanship.
One obvious way philosophy might seem useful here is by inquiring, in a metaphysical sense, what emotional states actually are. If contemporary democracies are affectively polarized, the reasoning goes, then maybe we need to know what kinds of things feelings, emotions, and other affective states are. I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. It’s the kind of question a philosopher who doesn’t really care about public opinion polarization might pose, as an excuse to get their philosophical hands on a hot topic. But if we actually care about polarization and are genuinely concerned about the problem, there are other, much more interesting and useful things philosophers can do to help us understand what’s going on.
One of the first things philosophy can do is to draw attention to a key assumption in the standard story that may be mistaken: the fact that citizens report more negative feelings toward the other side does not necessarily mean they actually experience more negative feelings in a phenomenological sense. It doesn’t automatically follow that people are more agitated or angrier, as the story assumes. People’s answers on surveys may not be literal reports of what they feel inside when asked. And importantly, even if citizens are conveying something about their feelings, that’s not the only possible interpretation of the data; it may tell us something else, as it will be suggested in what follows. So one valuable contribution philosophy can make is to clarify what it means for a polarization process to be “affective.”
How so? A useful philosophical question here is what citizens are actually doing when they say they have more negative feelings toward the other side. A classic distinction in the philosophy of language—one that’s also pretty intuitive outside philosophy—is the distinction between descriptive and evaluative uses of language, between stating facts and expressing opinions. Sometimes we use language to describe how things are, like when we tell someone what time a relative got home yesterday. Other times, we use language to express our assessment of things, like when we say we don’t like our relatives coming home at that hour. When citizens say they have negative feelings toward the opposite side, it seems much closer to an evaluative act than to a description or report of an inner emotional state.
The question of what we do through the evaluative use of language has a long history in the philosophy of language. One thing we know is that this kind of use is tied to expressing a speaker’s worldview or mindset. A worldview, as some have argued, isn’t just a purely subjective matter that depends on whatever is relative to each individual. Worldviews depend on sets of social practices, on forms of life. So, through evaluative language, we express our affinities and our alignment with certain practices and ways of living. In this light, when people say they dislike those on the other side more, they may be expressing their way of seeing the world, their values and the practices they’re involved in, or at least those they explicitly claim to endorse. More specifically, when citizens report having more negative feelings toward the other side or say they “hate” them more, they may be expressing how confident they are in the truth of certain ideas that sit at the core of their worldview. These include the ideas central to the political identity they embrace in contrast to opposing identities.
Confidence is an affective, graded attitude. We feel more or less confident about all sorts of things. One reason we might feel confident about an idea is that we have good evidence supporting it. Another, complementary reason may be that the idea feels compelling given our past experiences, or that it comes from people who care about us, or simply because it fits well with many of our existing beliefs. These are also reasons—often good ones—that factor into how we assign a certain level of credibility to an idea.
Thus, when we look at the findings on affective polarization through this philosophical lens, it becomes much less obvious that the phenomenon boils down to emotions and identities, or that people are uninterested in truth, or that they’re simply more agitated and angry. The available data may instead suggest that citizens are more affectively attached to the ideas at the core of a particular worldview because they believe those ideas are true and think they have reasons to support them. In this sense, affective polarization could be the result of an ordinary cognitive process. If that’s right, this approach pushes us to rethink the standard diagnosis of the situation, as well as the processes and motivations driving affective polarization.
In this way, philosophy becomes crucial for challenging certain assumptions and for shedding light on aspects that only emerge when we use the kinds of conceptual distinctions philosophy specializes in. A philosophical approach opens up the possibility that the standard story about what’s happening in many contemporary democracies is incomplete, and that some of its claims may be mistaken. Rethinking the issue from this perspective suggests that affective polarization involves more dimensions than we typically assume, and it also enables a more nuanced way of detecting and intervening in affective polarization processes.
One dimension that suddenly comes into view has to do with the processes through which citizens come to strongly embrace a particular worldview via their adherence to a given political ideology. A clear candidate here is narratives. Narratives are discourses with a certain structure which, although they sometimes seem to serve a purely descriptive function (simply reporting something that happened), in fact always encode a perspective, a worldview. As an example of a narrative, consider the story according to which in recent years citizens’ ability to think deeply and reflectively has declined because they have become increasingly dogmatic and gullible. Narratives are highly persuasive because they direct our attention, in a non-transparent way, toward elements that may resonate with aspects of our existing perspectives, gradually increasing our willingness to embrace certain ideas.
From this point of view, one way to fight polarization is to try to shape the narratives that dominate public opinion. Creating narratives that resonate positively with large segments of the population (e.g., by appealing to our duty to carry forward the legacy of previous generations in improving the world, or to the need for unity in confronting the challenges of our time) would be one way to counteract one of the drivers of affective polarization. There are no magic formulas for doing this, but philosophy offers important insights into the nature of communication and the ways language promotes attitudes.
Manuel Almagro
Manuel Almagro is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Valencia. He works on political philosophy of language, political epistemology, and experimental philosophy. He is the author of The Rise of Polarization: Affects, Politics and Philosophy, published with Routledge and shortlisted for the Nayef-Al Rodhan Book Prize 2025.
