Blame the Internet

Long-time political analyst Stuart Rothenberg writes for Roll Call about a peculiar symmetry between the two parties. It isn't just the Republicans who are becoming more extreme, more ideological, and less willing to compromise. Democrats are similarly afflicted.

Many theories have been advanced to explain the drift from the middle, the hollowing out of the political center. For what it's worth, here's mine.

I believe the Internet has enabled people to find like-minded individuals and the resulting virtual groups are self-reinforcing. As grad students in Org. Psych., we learned research shows if even one person agrees with you it becomes vastly easier to hold unpopular views.

However, if a group agrees on something, a phenomenon called "risky shift" or "groupshift" occurs, for as Wikipedia notes:

Groupshift is a phenomenon in which the initial positions of individual members of a group are exaggerated toward a more extreme position. When people are in groups, they make decisions about risk differently from when they are alone. In the group, they are likely to make riskier decisions, as the shared risk makes the individual risk less.

Needing a group to agree with, to hang with, is one of the imperatives of a social species like ours.