I travel a lot, and talk to a lot of different people. I’ve noticed that while people certainly do have differing opinions, it’s not as extreme as what I see online. I’m starting to feel like all this hate and division is manufactured. Has anyone else noticed, that when you actually talk to real people things are far less divided than various media would have you believe?
But echo chambers and polarization can increase the standard deviation, bringing down the opinions in the middle. Now may topics might even be a bimodal distribution rather than a normal distribution.
@JohnDClay this is true, but unlikely depending on how the data is collected and organized.
Also if there’s sample bias such as only selecting women.
That said most of the time it’s the normal distribution for large, broad data sets.