The Stubbornness Gap: Why Some Polarized Societies Heal Slower Than Others

Why do some bitterly divided nations reconcile within years while others stay fractured for generations? Scientists may now have a mathematical explanation—and it all comes down to how stubbornly people hold their beliefs.

A team of researchers has developed a new way to study how polarized societies heal, using what they call the "social compass model." The model treats people's opinions like compass needles that can swing toward agreement when neighbors interact—but only if the push is strong enough.

The researchers, led by Corbit Sampson, built a mathematical framework to track how groups of people with wildly different views might gradually find common ground. Their work, published in June 2026 on the scientific preprint server arXiv, shows that two societies starting from nearly identical divisions can heal at dramatically different speeds—sometimes centuries apart.

The key insight is what the team calls "conviction distribution"—essentially, how firmly people hold their views. Even when the average stubbornness looks the same on paper, the underlying pattern matters enormously. If most people's views are moderately held with a few extremes, healing can happen relatively quickly. But if many people hold their beliefs with similar intensity, the group can get stuck in conflict almost indefinitely.

"The critical coupling for depolarization depends only on the first inverse moment of the conviction distribution, whereas the rate of depolarization depends on higher moments," the researchers wrote. In plain English: how hard it is to START healing depends on average stubbornness, but how FAST healing happens depends on subtle patterns in who's stubborn and who isn't.

The team used a mathematical technique called the Ott-Antonsen Ansatz to simplify their calculations—turning a complex system of millions of individual opinions into a manageable set of equations. This let them test thousands of scenarios and identify what actually drives the "stubbornness gap" between societies.

Crucially, the researchers also showed how their model could account for real-world community structures—neighborhoods, religious groups, or political factions that stick together. These divisions within divisions can slow healing even further.

The hope is that understanding these patterns could eventually help policymakers identify which divisions are likely to heal quickly and which might need extra effort to resolve. It's not a roadmap to unity, but it might be a compass.