Building on my previous comment, I think it's more useful to say not that we caricaturize opposing viewpoints, but that we compress them using our own internal,

Building on my previous comment, I think it's more useful to say not that we caricaturize opposing viewpoints, but that we compress them using our own internal, lossy compression algorithms. And the original viewpoint is inaccessible to us; we only have access to the compressed representation that our minds generate.