Deliberation Among Informed Citizens: The Value of Exploring Alternative Thinking Frames
Ariane Lambert-Mogiliansky, Ir\'en\'ee Fr\'erot

TL;DR
This paper models how exploring diverse thinking frames among informed citizens can enhance consensus through deliberation, emphasizing the importance of perspective diversity, active participation, and facilitator-guided procedures.
Contribution
It introduces a quantum-like cognitive model to analyze how perspective diversity influences consensus, highlighting the role of thinking frame richness and structured deliberation.
Findings
Higher perspective dimensionality increases consensus probability.
Diversity of perspectives is essential for overcoming initial disagreements.
Facilitator-guided procedures improve deliberation outcomes.
Abstract
We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens cannot consider all relevant perspectives simultaneously: they are incompatible in the mind. These assumptions imply that opinions are intrinsically contextual. Formally, we capture contextuality in a simple quantum-like cognitive model. We consider a binary voting problem, in which two citizens with incompatible thinking frames and initially opposite voting intentions deliberate under the guidance of a benevolent facilitator. We find that when citizens consider alternative perspectives, their opinion may change. When the citizens' perspectives are two-dimensional and maximally uncorrelated, the probability for consensus after two rounds of deliberation…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEducation and Critical Thinking Development · Social Media and Politics · Service-Learning and Community Engagement
