Existing research into the psychological roots of political polarization centers around two main approaches: one studying cognitive traits that predict susceptibility to holding polarized beliefs and one studying contextual influences that spread and reinforce polarized attitudes. Although both accounts have made valuable progress, political polarization is neither a purely cognitive trait nor a contextual issue. We argue that a new approach aiming to uncover interactions between cognition and context will be fruitful for understanding how polarization arises. Furthermore, recent developments in neuroimaging methods can overcome long-standing issues of measurement and ecological validity to critically help identify in which psychological processing steps—e.g., attention, semantic understanding, emotion—polarization takes hold. This interdisciplinary research agenda can thereby provide new avenues for interventions against the political polarization that plagues democracies around the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

中文翻译：

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背景下的两极分化思维：政治两极分化心理学的跨学科方法。


现有对政治极化心理根源的研究主要围绕两种主要方法：一种研究预测持有极化信念的易感性的认知特征，另一种研究传播和强化极化态度的背景影响。尽管这两种说法都取得了宝贵的进展，但政治两极分化既不是纯粹的认知特征，也不是背景问题。我们认为，旨在揭示认知和情境之间相互作用的新方法将有助于理解极化是如何产生的。此外，神经影像方法的最新发展可以克服长期存在的测量和生态有效性问题，以批判性地帮助确定哪些心理处理步骤（例如注意力、语义理解、情绪极化）占据主导地位。因此，这一跨学科研究议程可以为干预困扰世界各地民主国家的政治两极分化提供新途径。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）