2024-04-01 08:30:08
By Ernesto Ganuza (CSIC)*
Deliberation is a topic widely worked on by political sociology. Its starting point could well be taken from the proverb: “talking makes people understand each other.” It’s true that it sounds a little strange today, when polarization eats up every debate imaginable, but there is a lot of scientific work that demonstrates the power of words. For political sociology, Deliberation is a mechanism by which people make better decisions.
Iuliia Sutiagina (Vecteezy)
However, deliberation is strange to many people because we tend to imagine ourselves with solid preferences and interests, difficult to change. In theory, we know what’s going on around us and what we see, and we seem to know exactly what we want. We then deduce that we don’t need anyone to think, much less are we going to change our minds because of what other people say.
The one who has passed for being the great defender of democracy, Rousseaueven defended a popular vote in silence, each with their thoughts. We have an idea of the mind as if it were a merely private matter or whose authenticity depended only on internal processes. From there, we imagine ourselves as ‘solitary thinkers’ capable of deciphering monumental enigmas or discovering unsuspected solutions.
But the problem is that many people also come to mind who are not capable of thinking ‘properly’ and this pushes us to marginalize people’s participation in politics. There is nothing more distressing than telling someone today that anyone could decide public affairs. How are we going to think about a problem between many people with such different abilities? “Not everyone is prepared,” we are told over and over again.
If we were ‘solitary thinkers’, deliberation would certainly not make any sense, among other things because deliberation proposes a process in which the aim is to share ideas, where all voices are valued and each one contributes to solving a problem. From the point of view of deliberation There are diverse solutions and all people have parts of the best solutions. In short, through deliberation everyone is listened to to understand and build knowledge to make decisions. There is much scientific evidence that supports both the suitability of deliberation for processing information, and the consequences that the use of deliberation has for our minds.
Social psychology, neuroscience and deliberation
Social psychology, for example, has long shown through experiments that people are unaware of internal mental processes and therefore act with a rather vague knowledge of what has been going on in their heads. This lack of knowledge means that in their justifications they use causal theories that come from cultural rules and not from internal logical deductions. These rules are not abstract, but are usually those used by the social network in which they are usually immersed. The conclusion of social psychology is that The mind always immerses us in justifications that connect us to a social network with which we identify. Being against or for it often has more to do with the people you know than with the calculating precision of the mind. That is why when we reject something or confirm a fact we are positioning ourselves with the judgments of those people who are a reference for us.
On the other hand, neuroscience has been questioning this idea of ’solitary thinkers’ for years. Hugo Mercier o Michael Gazzaniga They believe, for example, that language and speech arise to coordinate actions between individuals. In The Enigma of Reason Mercier y Sperber They tell what happens in experiments in which hieroglyphs have to be solved. When the task is done alone, about 80% of those who participate are not able to solve them well. On the other hand, when the task is done in a group, only 20% of participants do not solve it properly.
Cover illustration for ‘The Enigma Of Reason’
As social psychology showed from another angle, the mind sees the result of a process to which it does not have access. This greatly conditions the argument, since it always takes place after the fact. This does not mean that the argument is useless, but as the psychologist says Haidt in The Righteous Mind: “the mind is a narrative processor, rather than a logical processor.” From this point of view, Argumentation facilitates coordination between diverse people. If anyone has not seen the video of The Invisible Pass, I invite you to do so and see how this experiment clearly shows that the reality we see depends a lot on our attention, and everyone pays attention to different things. That’s why, From neuroscience, we insist on dismantling this myth of the individual capable of seeing everything only from your internal mental processes.
If, as social psychology and neuroscience tell us, each person speaks from a different perspective about what has happened to them and justifies it from codes and causal relationships that are culturally related, deliberation makes perfect sense. Instead of thinking that everything can be solved by a single person due to his high capabilities, Social science has shown that the participation of different people in solving problems makes it easier to reach a solution that is more adjusted to the diversity of realities we have.
Deliberation is possible and makes sense
Through deliberation people can contrast their narratives, that involve explicit causal theories and different social realities, and investigate solutions that consider the set of visions presented, in addition to the present groups and experiences. This does not mean that deliberation is easy, nor that solitary reasoning is meaningless, but rather that deliberation is possible and makes sense.
We must consider that what the deliberation is talking about is not about a person reasoning in isolation about, for example, climate change, but about a group of people deliberating together about a phenomenon that affects everyone. Under these conditions the results are very different. Faced with the prejudices and cognitive biases that we have, which form our daily references and rules to understand what is happening, we will encounter other people with other biases and prejudices. If there is a space that encourages deliberation, that will help people reflect on their judgments and little by little they will move towards a space in which their positions can coexist.
People gathering at a gram sabha in the Jhabua district of Madhya Pradesh, India. Gram sabhas are village assemblies in India that are among the largest deliberative institutions in the world. / UN Women India (Gaganjit Singh)
During the last decades, there have been many experiments that social science has carried out related to deliberation, as we can read in the article written by various social researchers in the magazine Science about the existing scientific evidence in favor of deliberation. In deliberative spaces it has been shown that any person is capable of joining and participating fully in the group’s reasoning regardless of their training.
If we understand reasoning as a process of giving reasons and listening respectfully, In deliberation that is reinforced. Throughout the deliberation, the ability of people to modify their opinion has been confirmed, a change that is based on arguments and not on group manipulation dynamics. Deliberation can even avoid polarization, since the elements that characterize it do not operate under a deliberative context, because the groups become less extreme. In short, deliberation can help us think about problems with a renewed perspective.
* Ernesto Ganuza He is a sociologist and researcher at the Institute of Policies and Public Goods (IPP) of the CSIC. Author, together with Arantxa Mendiharat, of Democracy is possible.
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