ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that cognitive complexity may enable communicative action and promote deliberative democracy. It suggests the contemporary media environment might work to increase or decrease the complexity of people's cognitions. The chapter therefore takes up this subject as well as the implications for 'communicative action', thought by Habermas to be the discursive foundation of the public sphere. The term cognitive complexity is based on the theory of constructivism. Constructivism rests on the epistemological premise that reality is comprised of individually and socially created symbolic structures. However, because construct systems are malleable, cognitive complexity as it relates to communicative action is contingent not only on individual-level psychology and selectivity, but on media representations and social networks. There are at least three types of cognitive complexity that seem particularly relevant to the possibility of communicative action and the maintenance of a civil and deliberative public sphere: Cognitive complexity as it relates to: political information, communication or deliberation, and social identity.
