For decades, democracy repeated a reassuring slogan: If we talk more, we will understand each other better. More communication, more participation, more exchange of opinions would be the natural antidote to conflict. The problem is that this idea no longer describes the world we live in. And a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows this with disturbing clarity.
In the article “Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies,” Stefan Thurner and his co-authors show that at a certain point More social interaction leads to more polarization, not less. It is neither an ideological provocation nor a cultural criticism: it is the result of one Network model It describes how opinions are formed and consolidated in highly networked societies.
The mechanism is simple and disturbing. As people interact more frequently—particularly in dense, homogeneous networks—they do not moderate their positions but rather adapt them to the group with which they already identify. Intermediate positions are undermined and public space is organized into opposing poles. The conversation is no longer advice, but rather a confirmation of identity.
This discovery brings an entire historical cycle into crisis. In the 20th century, mainstream media were seen as instruments of social integration. At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, the Internet and then social networks inherited this promise: more voices, more contact, more horizontality. The PNAS study introduces an uncomfortable boundary: there is no linear relationship between communication and democracy.
Too much interaction can be just as problematic as the absence of it. When everything is constantly in circulation, without mediation or clear rules, communication does not build a common world but fragments it. In this framework, polarization is not necessarily the result of extreme leaders, fake news, or conscious manipulation. It can arise simply because of how our social relationships are organized.
This forces us to rethink a deeply held idea: that the democratic problem can be solved through more debate and more exposition. The article suggests otherwise. Sometimes more communication speeds up the breakup. More exchange does not guarantee more understanding; can hardly guarantee a stronger tribal orientation.
The work offers no prescriptions, but leaves a clear warning: emerging from polarization does not mean shouting louder or adding more voices to the noise. It’s about rethinking the architecture of interactions, protecting intermediate positions and accepting that not all friction is productive.
In this context, a now uncomfortable idea makes sense again: the need for a democratic middle, not as an equidistance between extremes or as an empty moderation, but as an active space of depolarization. A center capable of maintaining differences without transforming them into absolute antagonisms; to preserve gray areas where binary logic requires permanent partisanship.
In an increasingly polarized world – and in an Argentina that has been experiencing a dynamic of structural confrontation for years – this center would not be a focal point, but rather an essential democratic function: the creation of conditions of interaction that allow us to discuss again without every discussion leading to a war of identities.
Perhaps the greatest risk to democracy today is not the lack of dialogue, but the lack of spaces that enable it without destroying what we have in common.
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