It is common wisdom that Americans live in information echo chambers that shape their views of the world, stifle dialogue across ideological and cultural difference, and contribute to polarization. We all have our informational and social networks, “they” have theirs, and never the two shall meet. These segregated information silos can, it is believed, become entrenched to such an extreme that Americans do not meaningfully share a reality, disrupting collective governance and leaving us vulnerable to exploitation by profiteers and other malign actors, both foreign and domestic.

While there are elements of truth to this conventional narrative, it may also be misleading in important ways, ways that inform the most promising avenues toward overcoming our political paralysis. First, there is significant evidence that, for most people, spending time on the Internet and on social media increases rather than decreases their exposure to ideologically diverse content (in addition to increasing exposure to opinion-reinforcing content).1 1. Pablo Barberá, “Social Media, Echo Chambers, and Political Polarization,” in Social Media and Democracy 34, 37–40 (Nathaniel Persily & Joshua A. Tucker eds., 2020); Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, & Justin M. Rao, “Filter Bubbles, Echo chambers, and Online News Consumption,” 80 Public Opinion Quarterly (2016), 298; Matthew Barnidge, Exposure to Political Disagreement in Social Media Versus Face-to-Face and Anonymous Online Settings, 34 Political Communication (2017), 302; Laura Silver, Christine Huang, & Kyle Taylor, “In Emerging Economies, Smartphone and Social Media Users Have Broader Social Networks,” Pew Research Center (2019).Part of this counterintuitive phenomenon might be explained by the fact that inadvertent exposure to diverse content is more common online, but it might also reflect the fact that a significant proportion of the people we engage with online are not embedded in our closest social networks, and therefore are not (in a sense) prescreened for ideological conformity.2 2. Barberá at 41.

Second, there is also evidence that exposure to diverse viewpoints increases rather than decreases mutual distrust and political polarization.3 3. Barberá at 46–47; Jaime E. Settle, Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America (2018). How might this happen? There may be good reason to think exposure to contrary ideas affirms our political identities and feeds into so-called “affective” polarization, which is grounded less in specific issue positions than in partisan social identity.4 4. Barberá, supra note 3. Awareness of the views of others can reinforce all the ways they are different from us and can inhibit our ability to be persuaded by their perspective.5 5. Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (2018).

One need not take a definitive position on this research, which is mixed, to recognize that any approach to diversifying the information ecosystem for individual users must take account, not just of the bare existence of diverse information flows, but also of its actual effects on the behavior of listeners and readers. Understanding which interventions are most productive also requires assessing what, precisely, exposure to information is meant to achieve.

Consider four different justifications for exposing people to diverse information:

• Understanding. We might expose people to diverse information to promote understanding and awareness. Someone who receives information from a narrow range of sources may not be receiving a full factual picture and may not be hearing the range of arguments in support of or against a policy.
• Persuasion. We might also seek to expose people to diverse viewpoints to try to persuade them that those viewpoints are correct or should be adopted.
• Self-fulfillment. We might wish to promote diversity of viewpoint so that people holding diverse views obtain the fulfillment of expressing themselves and being heard. This rationale could also be expressed in terms of equality of opportunity for diverse voices to influence the public sphere.
• Collaboration. We might make people aware of diverse information so that information can serve as an input into decision-making. This rationale is distinct from “understanding” because it is action-oriented, and it is distinct from “persuasion” because the interest in collaboration can be satisfied without the information actually convincing anyone to change their view.

These different justifications for diversifying someone’s information environment support different kinds of interventions. For example, bringing diverse speakers onto a college campus or promoting the visibility of diverse content on social media may increase awareness, but inducing people to be open to changing their views may require attention to the speaker’s identity and their rhetorical strategy. Failing to be attentive to these dynamics may promote awareness, self-fulfillment, or equality of opportunity—the values that not incidentally are heralded as underlying the First Amendment’s commitment to robust free expression—but it can be counterproductive in sustaining social trust, much less increasing it.

To my mind, the public discourse has not paid sufficient attention to the fourth of these justifications for exposure to diverse information: enabling collaboration. A personal anecdote may help set the stage. In 2022, the National Constitution Center convened three groups of scholars from diverse political perspectives—a “progressive” group, a “conservative” group, and a “libertarian” group. (I was a member of the first group.) In the first stage of the project, each group drafted its own ideal constitution. In the second stage, the groups convened a virtual constitutional convention and drafted amendments to the Constitution. Unsurprisingly, each of the “ideal” constitutions drafted in the first stage, among fellow ideological travelers, was quite different from the others. Remarkably, though, the groups were able to agree to five amendments that, if adopted, would be fairly consequential.

The key to achieving this level of consensus wasn’t that there was substantial agreement among the participants—indeed, the participants were truly ideologically diverse. The first stage of the project made each group aware of the positions of the others, but speaking for myself, this awareness was at least as alienating as it was unifying, as it clarified the degree of difference between the groups. Moreover—again speaking for myself—learning that some particular reform was supported by other participants led me to question rather than affirm my own support, as it made me worry that I had not sufficiently reflected on the consequences of the reform. This is how affective polarization works, and it’s a heck of a drug.

Nor did consensus over amendments follow from successful persuasion among the groups. The second stage of the project did not, so far as I can recall, cause anyone to revisit their highly disparate positions as to what an ideal constitution should contain.

What the collaboration stage did instead was force the groups to take collective action. Doing so requires modifying one’s position to accommodate the positions of others. Importantly, collaborative action does not require agreement or persuasion. It does require a shared commitment to the collective enterprise. Understanding the beliefs and commitments of other members of the collective enabled us to propose informed compromises.

My own experience with the National Constitution Center is consistent with longstanding research in social psychology dating back at least to Muzafer Sherif’s foundational “Robbers Cave” experiment in the 1950s.6 6. Muzafer Sherif, Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (1961). This research suggests that mere contact or coexistence can be unhelpful in mitigating intergroup conflict, but that requiring conflicted groups to focus on what psychologists call a “superordinate” task—one that no single group can accomplish alone—can induce cooperation and improve intergroup relationships.7 7. Kelly Kirkland et al., Promoting Prosocial Behavior in an Unequal World, 13 Frontiers in Psychology (2023).

My little anecdote and this body of research do not offer a panacea. Even on its own narrow terms—a fake constitutional convention—participants in the constitutional drafting project were not especially diverse along professional or other socioeconomic dimensions, and there is evidence that economic inequality can impede intergroup cooperation.8 8. Kelly Kirkland, Jolanda Jetten, & Mark Nielsen, The Effect of Economic Inequality on Young Children’s Prosocial Decision-Making, 38 Developmental Psychology 512 (2020). Still, they serve to emphasize that shaping the flow of information depends in large part on what one hopes information will accomplish, and that collaboration is an important objective we may wish to prioritize.

We would do well then—or better, anyway—to imagine ways in which we don’t merely communicate, but also are required to collaborate, across difference. This might mean increasing funding for deliberative mini-publics, what the political scientist Robert Dahl called “minipopuli,”9 9. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics 340 (1989). tasked with offering targeted governance proposals. Universities could increase funding for programming jointly designed by ideologically diverse groups, such as the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society. Media outlets could be induced to provide dedicated space for co-authored commentary that provides specific policy recommendations. Platform algorithms could boost content cross-posted across ideological difference. We could continue to disagree, as we always will, but we could seek to innovate around disagreeing constructively, rather than merely for its own sake.