over a dominant “rhetorical issue.” Then, if a message is indeed persuasive, a mem- ber can update their position in the direction advocated by the message. While persuasive messages concerning the rhetorical issue may be expressed in purely qual- itative language, rhetorical issue positions can be quantitatively related, however loosely, to numerical policy positions via some transformation which we refer to as the ”rhetorical function.” If the rhetorical function is nonlinear, then the distribution of rhetorical issue positions will be reshaped relative to the policy distribution. In particular, a symmetric policy distribution can be skewed into an asymmetric rhetor- ical one favoring either the moderate or extreme ends, thereby motivating the label of rhetorically-induced asymmetry. 1 A concave rhetorical function, in which the rhetorical issue position increases more slowly as the policy increases, will tend to induce groups to shift toward the extreme (a convex rhetorical function will lead to systematic shifts toward the reference, but such depolarization is not of concern here). Figure 1 illustrates the effect of concavity for a rhetorical function ρ ( x ) relating rhetorical issue ρ to policy x . The zero policy reference demarcates opposing sides of the policy. Note that the policy and rhetorical reference points are offset — a consequence of heuristic issue substitution to be dis- cussed below but not required for the basic RIA effect. We consider the F$_{1}$$_{,}$$_{2}$$_{,}$$_{3}$ triad located on the positive policy axis, indicating that they are on the same policy side. The spacing between its members is uniform along the policy axis as the moderate F$_{1}$ and the extremist F$_{3}$ are both equidistant from F$_{2}$ . If the consensus process involved a convergence to the policy mean, then the consensus policy should be the policy of the middle member x$_{2}$ . However, because the F group is arrayed on the shoulder of the curve, their rhetorical positions are not uniformly spaced: the intermediate member F$_{2}$ is rhetorically much closer to the extremist F$_{3}$ than to the moderate F$_{1}$ . Thus, a symmetric policy distribution is transformed into an asymmetric rhetorical 8