https://doi.org/10.31648/cetl.1886
In social psychology the group polarization refers to the tendency for groups to make decisions
that are more extreme than the initial inclinations of its members. This phenomenon constitutes
a potential obstacle to positive outcomes attributed to deliberative debates. A deliberative debate
is a particular kind of a group discussion tasked with fi nding group consensus on controversial
issues. The idea of deliberation originates from the writings of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Amy
Gutmann and Denis Thompson. Deliberative debate imposes numerous normative requirements
on the communication, relationships among the disputants and their approach to the issue under
discussion. These normative requirements make a big difference between deliberative debates and
the situations in which the phenomenon of polarization was observed. Thus, we presume that in
deliberative debates conditions the phenomenon of group polarization may be limited.
The paper investigates the following questions: would the normative conditions of deliberation
limit the occurrence of polarization in discussing groups? and What infl uence (if any) would the
polarization process have on the quality of group decision? In the light of the empirical data we concluded what follows: (1) In 50% of the analyzed cases
of group discussion the phenomenon of group polarization was observed despite the normative
conditions of deliberation. (2) The occurrence of group polarization in some cases coincided with
making the fi nal decisions which did not alter the initial preferences of the disputants (but did not
totally predestinated the fi nal outcome).
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