Optimistic prospects for a democratic resurgence
drawing on some ideas from neuroscience and psychology
Sometimes holidays are very useful, giving you the space to think a little more expansively and differently about all that's been happening.
And there's been a lot happening! It often feels like too much - no wonder people check out - your cognitive resources need to be carefully managed, as there’s lots going in people’s lives long before considering politics and democracy and all that good stuff in any deep way.
There are lots of hot takes available on what awaits us in 2025 and beyond - and these hot takes often push a single pov, and very often with a degree of certainty that really is unwarranted - simply because predicting the future is hard.
But wanting to be the one that called it ahead of time seems to be a deep desire for many pundits - who, of course, ignore all the times they called it wrong!
The only thing we can be certain about is that the future hasn't happened yet, so we should really consider a range of differing scenarios, rather than pushing for a single one as the one most likely to occur. The downside for the pundit class means that you won’t be the one that ‘called it’
With all of that in mind, I'm going to do a series of optimistic, pessimistic, and base case takes on the coming decade, focused on prospects for a democratic resurgence, drawing on some ideas from neuroscience and psychology.
It's going to be speculative, of course, but I'll try and keep close to what seem like ‘real world’ 🌎 empirical possibilities and outcomes.
Caveat: I don’t necessarily believe the takes below or those in the succeeding pessimistic or base cases!
An optimistic take
Challenges such as cognitive overload, disinformation, and polarisation have shaken our democracies, but I suggest here that a new generation of social media and other tools, spreading education and literacy, and new social norms will transform these obstacles into opportunities for democratic renewal.
Topics
Cognitive bandwidth optimisation for civic engagement
Educational neuroscience for civic literacy
Social media evolves for good
Norms of digital mindfulness
Cognitive tools for the marginalised
Empathy training for bridging divides
Trust repair through transparency
Participatory democracy at scale
The resurgence of hope
Reanimating the ‘national conversation’
Next time will be a pessimistic take, and then a base case take - what might be most likely to happen.
Cognitive bandwidth optimisation for civic engagement
A simple truism is that our bandwidth is limited at any point in time - we necessarily are ‘cognitive misers’ - we will take shortcuts where and when we can. Lots of the stuff we must think about/have to think about is simply not pleasant. You have bills that must be paid; you have a jerk to deal with at work; you have some serious health issue - all of these things are immediate, urgent, and capture the course of your thought - necessarily.
I suggest that research in neuroscience and psychology will bring tools simplifying and contextualising complex policy issues, reducing cognitive overload for voters. These tools will also act as bullshit and lie detectors as well - sniffing out nonsense, and inoculating us against grifts and con-artists.
LLMs will provide personalised, bias-aware summaries of political debates and proposals, enabling more informed democratic participation, helping citizens navigate complex information landscapes.
These personalised AI assistants will in effect act as “external cognitive filters,” breaking down policy debates, flagging disinformation, and seeking out evidence-based perspectives. They will also help us cope with uncertainty, by assisting with scenario planning - taming our fears and anxieties about change (at least by a bit).
Educational neuroscience for civic literacy
Neuroscience-informed education will usher in a new age of civic and empirical literacy, with students around the world gaining the skills to think critically, resist manipulation, and perhaps even engage constructively in public life. We will have a greater focus on what actually facilitates learning in classrooms, and as our understanding of memory becomes better and more widespread, our societies will be able to learn from the past in order to travel better into the future.
As education and literacy spread, societies will become more resilient against authoritarian tendencies and disinformation, and find themselves favouring deliberative processes over directive ones.
Social media evolves for good
Insights from psychological research will inspire the design of new social media platforms to reduce polarisation and disinformation. Features like delayed sharing, personalised debiasing prompts, and real-time fact-checking, will promote healthier democratic discussion. Social media platforms, driven by public demand and regulatory pressure, will adopt ethical designs prioritising real-world empirical evidence and allow users to engage in constructive dialogue with each other (or even with avatars), helping them realistically calibrate their worries and anxieties.
Psychological research on trust and group dynamics will lead to community-driven fact-checking systems. These systems will leverage local networks and shared norms to verify information, increasing source credibility, while countering disinformation. Features like collaborative fact-checking, debiasing prompts, and algorithms promoting cogntively-diverse but empirically-based viewpoints will foster healthier democratic discussion.
Norms of digital mindfulness
New social norms emphasising “digital mindfulness” will emerge, encouraging individuals to limit their exposure to cognitively-draining content - we will come to realise that time spent shouting at each other in the digital cauldron is time badly spent. Practices like “social media sabbaths” will promote breaks from too much time online.
Education and digital literacy campaigns will give rise to a culture of “digital citizenship,” where citizens will embrace norms of scepticism, care, and responsibility in their online behavior, creating a healthier information ecosystem.
Public campaigns rooted in cognitive psychology will teach citizens how to identify and resist disinformation. These campaigns will focus on heuristics and biases that make individuals susceptible to false narratives. Over time, these campaigns will affect the design of new social media for the better.
Cognitive tools for the marginalised
Technological and psychological innovations will empower marginalised groups to participate more fully in democratic processes. Cognitive prosthetics will become more widespread to help individuals with cognitive impairments. These tools will be inclusive, bridging, rather than widening, cognitive divides (for more: AI for Cognitive Automation, Augmentation, and Prosthetics).
Empathy training for divide bridging
Neuroscience and psychology research will inform programmes to allow individuals to recognise and empathise with differing political perspectives. Such training could help depolarise societies, creating common ground for democratic dialogue, reducing polarisation, thereby enabling societies to find ways forward on critical issues.
Governments and organisations will develop participatory platforms designed with psychological principles to enhance engagement such as tools to reduce decision fatigue or which encourage deliberation. Citizen’s assemblies will be used to more effectively navigate and detoxify difficult decisions.
Trust repair through transparency
Governments and institutions will embrace greater transparency, in order to make decision-making processes clearer and more participatory. Citizens will feel more connected to their representatives, rebuilding trust that has eroded in recent decades.
Psychological research on trust will guide new transparency initiatives in governance, such as real-time disclosures of decision-making processes or public deliberation sessions. These efforts will counter disillusionment and strengthen democratic legitimacy.
Participatory democracy at scale
AI-driven platforms will enable large-scale participatory democracy, where citizens can engage with policy-making, while also training people to accept that in a democracy that ‘sometimes, you win some, and sometimes you lose some, but your turn comes around again’. These systems will be designed to reduce decision fatigue and cognitive bias, making collective decision-making fairer and more effective.
The resurgence of hope
With better tools, smarter systems, and a renewed commitment to shared values, democracies will prove their resilience. The coming decade will show that while the challenges are immense, human ingenuity, combined with the insights of neuroscience and psychology, can forge a brighter, fairer future.
Reanimating the ‘national conversation’
Conversation is central to human interaction, shaping our perceptions and memories. Through dialogue, we share experiences, construct collective memories, and build shared realities together - processes fundamental to forming the bonds that constitute a nation.
In ‘Talking Heads’, I discuss the national conversation:
Conversations between individuals can spread in a contagion-like process to other individuals, with knowledge, gossip and even misinformation spreading like a virus. Conversations can move between individuals, their content becoming widely talked about in society at large. They may even come to be what is sometimes referred to as the ‘national conversation’. This widespread conversation relies on shared understandings and shared memories of what is relevant or irrelevant.
The national conversation can be quickly reset: our policy and political attitudes are not set in ‘cognitive concrete’ - we update what we think by talking and observing others, and recalibrating what we think and do with reference to our social groups.
Do I believe any of this will happen? I don’t know.
Should it happen? Yes, no, maybe…
But while I can’t predict the future in any detail, it’s worth thinking through what it might hold.
Next time will be darker - focusing on a pessimistic case instead of an optimistic one.
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