Why is it so difficult to relate to individuals who are capable of expressing nuanced or moderate viewpoints about broad public opinion matters and sometimes even trivial issues? Whether it’s the war in the Middle East, the virtues and flaws of artificial intelligence, or the U.S. presidential election, polarization and tribalization seem the norm rather than the exception.
This is firmly at odds with what both common sense and science dictate, namely that most things, including the strength of attitudes and beliefs, should be average or moderate by definition.
As we transition to the second half of a year that will see 50% of the world’s population electing their national leader, with divisive political campaigns heating up, it seems timely to wonder about the human potential—both the ability and willingness—for holding moderate viewpoints and making rational decisions based on facts and evidence, as opposed to acting based on our tribal, emotional, or passionate impulses.
This is particularly important since to work (and live) with others, we must always find a compromise between their views and our own, and ideally find a way to understand and accept things from other people’s perspectives, even if their values and beliefs are rather different or even incompatible.
As I illustrate in my latest book, I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, AI-fueled social media platforms, and the inherent complexity of modern life, make us gravitate toward extremism. Extremist views are simple because they avoid ambivalence and ambiguity while conveying the illusion of clarity and certainty. This saves mental resources and lubricates our self-concept. One of the easiest ways to feel smart is to distort reality so that it fits with our values, beliefs, and aspirations.
And yet there are clearly many underrated virtues to holding moderate viewpoints.
Provides a reality check
Reality doesn’t go away just because you stop thinking about it. Understanding the world is key to making accurate predictions about key events in everyday life, which is critical for building and maintaining healthy interpersonal relations with others and achieving personal and professional success.
In contrast, reality distortion is linked to clinical syndromes and psychopathological disorders that hinder our physical and mental well-being and account for the vast majority of intrapersonal problems. Moderate viewpoints are always closer to rationality than extreme views, which detach people from facts, evidence, and reality.
Encourages flexibility
Intellectual flexibility enables you to connect with a broader spectrum of humans. Unlike in medieval times, the modern world goes to great lengths to foster a climate of diversity and inclusion so that large societies (and organizations) can accommodate people from different backgrounds—not only to tolerate each other and live in peace but to produce creative and innovative team behaviors.
Your ability to produce anything innovative is significantly enhanced by your capacity to avoid one-dimensional thinking and see things from multiple perspectives, and this is also an essential prerequisite for having a rich social life and collaborating effectively with people who don’t share your values and beliefs.
Enables tolerating complexity
Nature is complex, particularly human nature. If it were easy the world would not be as prejudiced, biased, and flawed as it is. On the upside, much of the progress we have seen over the past millennia is a direct result of our ability to cope with complexity, tolerate ambiguity, and understand complicated issues deep down, all of which is a testament to the mighty power of human intelligence, especially when we harness it collectively through cooperation. Unsurprisingly, several studies have shown a positive correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and cognitive ability.
Accesses a wider range of experiences
We all inhabit multiple selves, as life requires us to play different roles (e.g., boss, employee, child, partner, president of the debating society, etc.). Only narrow-minded or cult-like people reduce their whole identity and self-concept to a single noun or dimension.
However, people differ in their self-complexity. Only a small portion of the population can combine unusual (usually incompatible) identity features like being vegan and liking guns. The interesting people at the intersection are the outliers who don’t fit expectations. Oscar Wilde once noted that the secret to happiness is having very strong moral rules and breaking them. This, he noted, is much more pleasurable than not having any rules at all, or adhering to one’s strict principles all the time. Likewise, self-complexity enhances our personal hedonism by inhibiting the self-imposed barriers we create to constrain our own freedom and experimentation.
Resistance to psychological manipulation
Extreme thinking leads to categorical views of the world that undermine rational thinking and make us more prone to other people’s influence and persuasion. In fact, the stronger your conviction that you shouldn’t do X, the easier it is to manipulate you into doing Y.
When we seek constant validation for our existing attitudes and beliefs, we fall victim to narrow-mindedness, embracing any narrative or views of the world that confirm our own biases—the perfect way to deceive ourselves into thinking that our biases are facts.
Being less defensive, aggressive, and tribal
Prejudice and discrimination stem from an authoritarian mindset and the need to feel superior to others, which results in making categorical interpretations of the world and reducing people to our own (overly simplistic) mental models of how things should be.
Moderate viewpoints give us the ability and patience to understand individuals for who they really are. This would significantly reduce prejudice, bias, and antisocial behavior. Furthermore, fewer people would feel the need to bring other people down to feel better about themselves, since deep personal insecurities always underpin prejudice and discrimination.
Though the tendency to embrace moderate viewpoints is somewhat linked to personality and values—particularly scoring low on authoritarianism—there are many things you can do to become less radical and more moderate in your attitudes and thinking. For example, try spending time with people who don’t think like you, as well as those who come from different walks of life and have different values and attitudes. Exposing yourself to media and news content outside your filter bubble and echo chamber, and seeking novel experiences in general, contributes to broadening your perspective and deflating your fixed beliefs and categorical views.
Even generative AI, via platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity, can help you understand different sides of an argument or different perspectives on contentious political issues. Simply prompting these large language models to take both sides of an argument, or present reasons why someone believes in X or supports Y, can enlighten you about simple facts and realities that you may generally ignore or not know.
Potential downsides to moderate viewpoints
If you want to approach any issue with an open mind and think hard about the pros and cons and different sides of the argument, you will spend a great deal of time thinking, which is probably not very efficient and more time-consuming than not thinking at all.
Then again, if you let your thinking muscles go dormant there are questionable benefits and many of the drawbacks underpinning the above six points. Also, in a world that is becoming more narrow-minded, being too open to ambiguity and embracing moderation could make you a freak and make it hard for others to understand you. This will cause them problems, especially if they are interested in seeing everything as black and white.
Finally, it is much harder to know how to behave or what to do in any given situation when you are generally agnostic or ambivalent about the world. Albert Einstein’s wardrobe consisted of identical sets of blue suits so that he didn’t have to waste time thinking about what to wear.
All moral codes, whether religious, political, or intellectual, serve the same purpose: eliminating the mental inefficiencies that connect environmental stimuli or events to specific behavioral actions and responses. A simple life has benefits, but if you read this far I suspect this doesn’t appeal to you.
