the majority formed is emergent — arising during discussion rather than present from the start as in classical majority influence experiments — such emergent majorities have been found to be highly predictive of the outcomes of discrete choice experi- ments in what has been referred to as a “momentum effect” (Kerr 1992). Similarly, for quantitative judgments, the central position within a majority cluster of proxi- mate positions has been observed to be a better predictor than the central tendency of the whole group (Davis et al. 1997; Ohtsubo et al. 2002). The RPM model as described above immediately yields a prediction for the effect of disagreement level on group polarization. Specifically, we consider increasing the policy distance between the two outermost members while the mean stays fixed. This corresponds to keeping x$_{2}$ fixed while moving x$_{1}$ and x$_{3}$ by equal amounts toward and away from the policy reference respectively. The rhetorically-proximate majority still consists of F$_{2}$ and F$_{3}$ but they now converge at a more extreme policy since their halfway-point is more extreme. Thus, the RPM model predicts that group polarization will increase with disagreement level . The weak level of RIA experienced by the U group leads to the expectation of a much-reduced group polarization effect. Even if we strictly apply the RPM model regardless of how slim the rhetorical asymmetry is, the amount of polarization on average will still be small when uncertainty and random effects are taken into account. In Figure 1, the RPM position would be the average of the U$_{2}$ and U$_{3}$ policies, ¯ x$_{23}$ , which would represent a considerable shift toward the extreme compared with x$_{2}$ . However, uncertainty and noise could readily shift the rhetorically-proximate pair to ( U$_{1}$,U$_{2}$ ) so that the policy would be ¯ x$_{12}$ , representing a depolarization instead. Therefore, given the looseness with which policies correspond to rhetorical positions as well as stochastic effects in the discussion itself, the final policy over many groups will average out to nearly x$_{2}$ yielding little systematic polarization. In contrast, the 17