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The global prevalence of social media and its potential to cause polarization are highly debated and impactful. The previous literature often assumes that the ideological bias of any media outlet remains static and exogenous to the polarization process. By studying polarization as a whole from an ecosystem approach, the authors aim to identify policies and strategies that can help mitigate the adverse effects of polarization and promote healthier online discourse.

To investigate online polarization, the authors perform a systematic review and analysis of approximately 400 research articles to explore the connection between cognitive bias and polarization, examining both causal and correlational evidence. The authors extensively evaluate and integrate existing research related to the correlation between online polarization and crucial factors such as public engagement, selective exposure and political democracy. From doing so, the authors then develop a PolarSphere ecosystem that captures and illustrates the process of online polarization formation.

The authors' review uncovers a wide range of associations, including ideological cognition, bias, public participation, misinformation and miscommunication, political democracy, echo chambers and selective exposure, heterogeneity and trust. Although the impact of bias on social media polarization depends on specific environments and internal/external conditions, certain variables exhibit strong associations across multiple contexts. The authors use these observations as a basis from which to construct PolarSphere, an ecosystem of bias-based polarization on social media, to theorize the process of polarization formation.

Based on the PolarSphere ecosystem, the authors argue that it is crucial for governments and civil societies to maintain vigilance and invest in further research to gain a deep comprehension of how cognitive bias affects online polarization, which could lead to ways to eliminate polarization.

This paper aims to investigate the mechanisms through which social media news consumption across different platforms leads to opinion polarization in society. To this end, the authors draw from cultivation theory to examine whether social media news consumption imparts a mainstreaming or resonance effect. Media consumption imparts a mainstreaming effect if frequent users, regardless of their social identity, develop homogenous attitudes about issues, whereas resonance is at play if there is a differing cultivation effect on various social groups depending on their relatability of life experiences.

The authors conduct the study in the developing context of India, using a population survey dataset from 2019. Regression-based mediation and moderation analyses were carried out to test the hypotheses.

The findings reveal that resonance is the most prominent mechanism through which social media news consumption cultivates opinion polarization, contrary to the mainstreaming effect imparted by television. Further, WhatsApp use was found to strengthen the polarizing effect of overall social media news consumption, while YouTube use weakened the cultivation of polarization.

The paper unearths how social media news consumption influences the opinion polarization of various social groups differently. The authors also find the differential effect of specific platform use. These findings have the potential to inform policymakers and developers about how to mitigate the detrimental effects of platform-based political persuasion.

This study offers significant contributions. First, the authors explain social media-induced polarization using the novel theoretical lens of cultivation. Second, the authors find that social media and television news consumption differ in their polarizing effects. Third, the authors find that while WhatsApp use amplifies the polarizing effect of social media news consumption, YouTube use weakens it.

Corporations are now taking stands on contemporary and controversial social issues that share no obvious connection to the corporations’ business practices. At the same time, political polarization continues to intensify, which begs the question: Are these corporate stands – referred to as corporate social advocacy (CSA) – and political polarization related to each other, and if so, how? The purpose of this study is to provide a conceptualization of the connections between CSA and political polarization through a series of propositions that can be tested in subsequent research studies. Corporations have influence in society, and the ways in which they communicate on controversial social issues could further intensify or help assuage political polarization. Conversely, political polarization may be causing CSA in the first place, which would put into question the legitimacy and desirability of CSA because of the environment from which CSA is cultivated.

This study is designed to be conceptual, and the approach is based on theory building.

The study conceptualizes the relationship between CSA and political polarization to be symbiotic because both are bidirectional causes of each other. Engagement in CSA is also argued to be positively associated with perceptions that corporations contain particular political ideologies, i.e. more “liberal-leaning” or “conservative-leaning.” This study also predicts that – dependent on particular conditions – CSA will also lead to an increase in both boycotts and skepticism.

This study will contribute to scholars’, practitioners’ and consumers’ understanding of the causes and effects of CSA. The way in which political polarization is potentially causing CSA puts into question the legitimacy of corporations engaging in CSA in the first place. If CSA is cultivated in the soil of political polarization, is CSA desirable for corporations? Conversely, the way in which CSA is potentially causing political polarization also puts the legitimacy of CSA into question. If CSA is causing political polarization, is CSA desirable for society?

Corporations are an influential part of society, and thus will influence how society views controversial social issues. If the predictions in this study hold, corporations will play an important role in either intensifying or reducing political polarization, and political polarization will also play an important role in how corporations communicate about CSA issues.

Research focused on CSA is burgeoning, yet limited studies have examined how CSA and political polarization interact. Although there could be positive aspects of corporate involvement in CSA, this study examines some of the potential negative aspects of corporate involvement in CSA. Future research will also be able to test the propositions proposed in this study.

This study investigates how game design, which divides players into static teams, can reinforce group polarisation. The authors study this phenomenon from the perspective of social identity in the context of team-based location-based games, with a focus on game slang.

The authors performed an exploratory data analysis on an original dataset of n = 242,852 messages from five communication channels to find differences in game slang adoption between three teams in the location-based augmented reality game Pokémon GO. A divisive word “jym” (i.e. a Finnish slang derivative of the word “gym”) was discovered, and players' attitudes towards the word were further probed with a survey (n = 185). Finally, selected participants (n = 25) were interviewed in person to discover any underlying reasons for the observed polarised attitudes.

The players' teams were correlated with attitudes towards “jym”. Face-to-face interviews revealed association of the word to a particular player subgroup and it being used with improper grammar as reasons for the observed negative attitudes. Conflict over (virtual) territorial resources reinforced the polarisation.

Game design with static teams and inter-team conflict influences players' social and linguistic identity, which subsequently may result in divisive stratification among otherwise cooperative or friendly player-base.

The presented multi-method study connecting linguistic and social stratification is a novel approach to gaining insight on human social interactions, polarisation and group behaviour in the context of location-based games.

Negativity towards a brand is typically conceived as a significant problem for brand managers. This paper aims to show that negativity towards a brand can represent an opportunity for companies when brand polarization occurs. To this end, the paper offers a new conception of the brand polarization phenomenon and reports exploratory findings on the benefits of consumers’ negativity towards brands in the context of brand polarization.

To develop a conception of brand polarization, the paper builds on research on polarizing brands and extends it by integrating insights from systematic literature reviews in three bodies of literature: scholarship on brand rivalry and, separately, polarization in political science and social psychology. Using qualitative data from 22 semi-structured interviews, the paper explores possible advantages of brand polarization.

This paper defines the brand polarization phenomenon and identifies multiple perspectives on brand polarization. Specifically, the findings highlight three distinct parties that can benefit from brand polarization: the polarizing brand as an independent entity; the brand team behind the polarizing brand; and the passionate consumers involved with the polarizing brand. The data reveal specific advantages of brand polarization associated with the three parties involved.

Managers of brands with a polarizing nature could benefit from having identified a group of lovers and a group of haters, as this could allow them to improve their focus when developing and implementing the brands’ strategies.

This exploratory study is the first explicitly focusing on the brand polarization phenomenon and approaches negativity towards brands as a potential opportunity.

This chapter aims at providing insight into how social mixing plays out in the Transvaal neighborhood in Amsterdam — a neighborhood which has gone through various rounds of urban renewal — in the context of nationwide polarization between native-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch.

This chapter is based on research with a neighborhood focus — daily interactions, urban renewal, and use of public space — which took place during 2007–2010. Methods used include participant observation, semistructured interviews, and focus groups.

The physical renewal implies renovating and pulling down social housing, and building new social or owner-occupier housing. This study provides insight into how residents of different ethnic and income backgrounds live together in the neighborhood, also taking into account the impact of social polarization at the national level.

By knowing how people with different ethnic and class backgrounds live together in Transvaal neighborhood, it contributes to the formulation of evidence-based policies for the improvement of social cohesion, livability, safety of the neighborhood, and social capital of local residents.

This study looks at social mix in the context of national-level social polarization between native-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch. This creates a new viewpoint seen against how the general literature on renewal and social mixing tends to do two things: firstly it usually explicitly or implicitly is also a tenure mix strategy, and secondly the policy focus of the social mix is usually around class issues, that is, the mixing of poor social housing tenants with richer owners.

The effects of board composition on performance have long been discussed in management research using fractionalization measures. In this study, we propose an alternative measurement approach based on board polarization.

Using an exploratory analysis and applying the polarization measure to German Deutscher Aktienindex (DAX)-, Midcap-DAX (MDAX)- and Small Cap-Index (SDAX)-listed companies, this paper applies the polarization index to examine the relationship between board diversity and performance.

The results show that the polarization concept is well suited to measure principal-agent problems between the members of the management and supervisory boards. We reveal that board polarization is negatively associated with firm performance, as measured by return on investment (ROI).

This exploratory study shows that the measurement of board polarization can be linked to performance differences between companies, which offers promising starting points for further research.

This paper takes as its starting point the apparent chaotic nature of a great deal of social life in the final years of the twentieth century. The breakdown of many nation states in Eastern Europe, uncontrolled urban growth and the expanding number of homeless refugees all suggest reasons why “chaos theory” has been attractive to social scientists. Providing its metaphoric nature is realized it may be helpful in providing an organizing principle for research. The concept of social polarization on the other hand, while addressing a number of the same issues, has the advantage perhaps of being more empirically grounded.

The purpose of this paper is to review the recent studies on opinion polarization and disagreement.

In this work, recent advances in opinion polarization and disagreement and pay attention to how they are evaluated and controlled are reviewed.

In literature, three metrics: polarization, disagreement and polarization-disagreement index are usually adopted and there is a tradeoff between polarization and disagreement. Different strategies have been proposed in literature which can significantly control opinion polarization and disagreement based on these metrics.

This review is of crucial importance to summarize works on opinion polarization and disagreement and to the better understanding and control of them.