by Allegra Chen-Carrel In an increasingly polarized country, we hear a lot about the perils of divisive politics. We know disparate political beliefs can lead to uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinners and a tendency to hunker down into echo chambers where we only engage with like-minded people and ideas. But what if ideological polarization has an upside? Recent research suggests that when people with vastly divergent political leanings work together, they actually produce better results than homogeneous teams or even groups of moderates. By analyzing Wikipedia articles on fraught political and social issues such as the “free market,” “climate change,” and “Hillary Clinton,” these researchers found that articles tended to be rated higher in quality when they had an even balance of contributors with polarized political beliefs. On the back end “talk pages” where contributors and Wikipedia editors debate and construct entries, conversation between polarized collaborators tended to be longer, more constructive, competitive, focused and linguistically diverse. Interestingly, even though the outputs of polarized contributors were rated to be of higher quality, the contributors themselves often did not enjoy the intense partisan debate over seemingly obvious points.        The takeaway? While engaging with extremely different political ideologies can be a painful and frustrating process, if there is a way to collaborate across divides, the output can benefit. Also, relying on political moderates for balanced information may not be the answer- rather it is debate between extreme views which often leads to higher quality integrated knowledge. This suggests that when it comes to contested knowledge, sourcing political diversity can be a step towards creating deeper insight.
  Shi, F., Teplitskiy, M., Duede, E., & Evans, J. A. (2019). The wisdom of polarized crowds. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0541-6