ABSTRACT
Given the gargantuan amount of scholarship on participation and deliberation, this chapter seeks to give an initial primer on what the authors consider the main topics present in the literature. For many years, the effects of collective participation and deliberation have been studied with very limited cross-fertilization among the fields concerned. However, empathy and interpersonal trust are also important preconditions of high-quality deliberation; thus, the authors can't discard the possibility that the current generation of studies is overstating these effects due to a reverse-causation bias. An interesting experiment from Druckman and Nelson explored the ability of deliberation to create 'antibodies' that could defend participants from framing effects. More generally, scholarship on the effects of deliberation and participation on creativity, critical thinking skills, and other cognitive capacities is not sufficiently integrated with the literature in psychology and pedagogy that have studied the development of such capacities in detail.
