IDENTITY COMPRESSION: a fundamental breakthrough in social identity, social information, and social polarization

The breakthrough to be pursued in ID-COMPRESSION is that social polarization is information compressibility, where attitudes provide redundant information about group membership.

ID-COMPRESSION proposes that a polarized social information system is a socially comprehensible one, where it is easy to categorize people into groups and identify social outliers. Since comprehensibility depends on regularities, this will consequently be a compressible social information system.

If successful, this radical theory of social normativity will explain how: (1) social identity becomes embedded in social information via social interaction; (2) information thereby becomes comprehensible in social identity terms; (3) comprehensibility of identity-laden social information is a form of information compressibility; (4) compressibility facilitates group processes, making positions comprehensible and socially meaningful; (5) the structure of the social information system provides conversion pathways, where (a) the probability of someone taking a new position depends on the ones they already hold, (b) taking a new position shifts the holder’s identity and makes a new range of positions accessible, (c) chains of transition probabilities form pathways through the identity-information space, and (d) the structured social information system is dynamically constituted by the positions expressed by the people within it. (6) Compressible social information systems are ripe for pernicious polarization, particularly in situations of intergroup threat, affective polarization, or zero-sum outcomes. (7) Social media interlocks with psychosocial processes in ways that can accelerate pernicious polarization.

This radical new understanding of social normativity will show how social identity dynamically interfaces with social information, allowing us to understand how important social issues (e.g. climate change; global health crises) become identity-charged and polarized.