Abstract
Belief polarization occurs when individuals diverge in their beliefs about some hypothesis when updating on certain kinds of evidence. It a persistent feature in society, with important ramifications for scientific, political and cultural discourse. Conventionally, belief polarization has often been treated as a consequence of irrationality. However, a spate of recent work in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science has tried to better understand its causes. A number of authors in fields such as psychology and cognitive science, economics and philosophy have claimed that belief polarization arises even in rational agents, updating on the same evidence. Efforts to study belief polarization, its causes and consequences, have utilized a number of very different assumptions about the types of agents, their boundedness, the logical and probabilistic relationships between their beliefs and their epistemic relationships with other agents. This symposium will address the origins of belief polarization, and consider whether this picture is compatible with Bayesian rationality. This interdisciplinary symposium serves to connect several active research programs investigating the phenomenon of belief polarization from different perspectives in order to better understand the origins of belief polarization. It will present the state-of-the-art of the literature. Furthermore, it will serve to foster intellectual progress in the field by connecting scholars from a range of diverse and active research programs and backgrounds, including social epistemology, social political philosophy and cognitive science.
