This is the first book on group polarization from a philosophical perspective. The authors compare four models of group polarization to address important metaphysical and epistemological questions related to the phenomenon. Ultimately, the authors defend a collective vice model of group polarization over the competing alternatives.

Fernando Broncano-Berrocal is a Ramón y Cajal fellow at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He works mainly in epistemology, with an emphasis on virtue epistemology, philosophy of luck, social epistemology, and collective epistemology. He is the co-editor, with J. Adam Carter, of The Epistemology of Group Disagreement (Routledge, 2021). His work has appeared in such places as Philosophical Studies, Analysis, Synthese , and Erkenntnis .

J. Adam Carter is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, UK. His expertise is mainly in epistemology with particular focus on virtue epistemology, social epistemology, relativism, know-how, epistemic luck, and epistemic defeat. He is the author of Metaepistemology and Relativism (2016), co-author of A Critical Introduction to Knowledge-How (2018), and co-editor, with Fernando Broncano- Berrocal, of The Epistemology of Group Disagreement (Routledge, 2021). His work has appeared in Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Analysis , and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy .

Preface

Chapter 1. The Philosophy of Polarization Phenomena

Chapter 2. The Psychology of Group Polarization

Chapter 3. The Epistemology of Group Polarization

Chapter 4. Four Models of Group Polarization

Chapter 5. The Reductive Virtue/Vice Model

Chapter 6. The Collective Heuristic/Bias Model

Chapter 7. The Reductive Heuristic/Bias Model

Chapter 8. The Collective Virtue/Vice Model

Chapter 9. Mitigating the Epistemic Pitfalls of Group Polarization

Conclusion: Future Directions