The Psychological Path Through Polarization
Deborah Layton wanted to strike back. Sent to Quaker School in England as a teen, she found her way to Berkeley, California as soon as she gained her independence. While visiting her brother one weekend in San Francisco, he introduced her to someone who was spreading radical ideas and building an impressive movement that she was attracted to. It was called the People’s Temple, and its leader was Jim Jones.
Deborah would become the Temple’s financial secretary and one of Jone’s most trusted aides. She protected Jones from the authorities and managed their contributions. She followed the group to Guayana, the only place Jones claimed they would be free from persecution.
Some 900 people would later commit mass suicide in one of the most infamous events in history. Deborah was not among them. She was one of the handful who foresaw the doom and escaped. Her brother did not. Such was his loyalty to the group that he posed as a defector to shoot the others for their betrayal. He is now serving a life sentence.
In her memoir, she would go on to say:
“People do not knowingly join ‘cults’. People join self-help groups, churches, political movements, college campus dinner socials, and the like, in an effort to be a part of something larger than themselves. It is mostly the innocent and naive who find themselves entrapped. In their openhearted endeavor to find meaning in their lives, they walk blindly into the promise of ultimate answers and a higher purpose. It is usually only gradually that a group turns into or reveals itself as a cult, becomes malignant, but by then it is often too late.”
Charlie Veitch wasn’t convinced. He was certain that the government was lying about what happened on 9/11. So certain that he became a leader of the 9/11 truther movement, publishing endless YouTube videos, appearing on Info Wars, and headlining truther conferences. It was enough to create a sustainable income for him.
That was until he was flown out to NYC as part of a BBC program, Conspiracy Road Trip. The show documented conspiracy theorists meeting with experts, witnesses, victims, etc to see if they might change their minds. Much to his surprise and the surprise of his fellow truthers — he did.
He was summarily punished for it. His former colleagues berated him, former fans stalked and threatened him and his family, and in one case, nearly got him fired from his job. He brought shame to the group and paid for it, simply for admitting he got something wrong.
In reflection, it was easy for him to admit that he was scared and angry in the wake of the attacks. As a mixed-race immigrant who had moved multiple times in his youth — his fellow truthers were the first group to welcome him with warmth and understanding, and ultimately elevate him to a position of respect he had never held. His need to feel smart and important obscured the truth. (Source)
It’s fascinating to listen to people who have left cults or conspiracy movements like these. It’s like a spell has lifted and they see with such clarity the reasons behind their behaviors and justifications at the time. They understand the vulnerabilities that were exploited. The need to belong to a group, to feel attached to something bigger than yourself, and the influence that group leaders have over others. It’s revealing to me, as well, that group loyalty mattered more than things like oh… truth or life itself.
Unfortunately, politics in our country have become increasingly cult-like and conspiracy theories are rampant. It’s easy to dismiss the most radical amongst us as being irrational, it’s also easy to use things like social media and politicians as scapegoats. I believe there’s more to the story.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” — E.O Wilson
The levels of political polarization that we’re seeing in the US are an existential threat — I wish that was hyperbole. I used to think that the real threats to the US were things like nuclear strikes or war with other industrial powers. Instead, we’ve watched our divisions become the most visible threats of all: barely six years ago, polling revealed that “60 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans would now balk at their child’s marrying a supporter of a different political party; (2016) to a majority of people saying that the other party is immoral and dishonest. A UC Davis poll of over 8000 Americans found that more than half expected a new civil war in the coming year. All of this is increasingly concerning given the all too visible rise in political violence.
Most Americans blame politicians and the media for exacerbating this polarization, and they have a point.
The primary business model for news media in our country is advertising revenue, which relies on clicks, which is fueled by virality. A study by psychologists Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman showed that the most viral stories are driven by physiological arousal — namely anger and anxiety — which encourages people to share online, fanning the flames. Since 2010, the rise in news headlines suggesting fear, anger, disgust, and sadness has seen a marked uptick. Simply put, it pays to push your buttons.
Likewise for social media. Their metrics are time-on-site and engagement (shares, comments, etc), which makes it easier to sell advertising against. Unsurprisingly, users spend more time scrolling and engaging when they come across content that angers or upsets them. They feel compelled to make their feelings known or let others know about these injustices.
The incentives for politicians aren’t much different. To win (re)election, they need to turn out voters. Turns out we aren’t very motivated to take action based on the potential for positive reward. What gets us going is the fear of loss, and what the other side might do to the place. Loss aversion is a well-studied phenomenon, we feel losses twice as acutely as we feel gains. Politicians have caught on. They do it because it works.
Increasingly, votes aren’t so much for one party, but against another.
While people are right to blame these institutions, they’re only half of the equation. For any of it to work, we have to respond to it. Nobody ever takes personal responsibility for polarization. However, this is how all change starts, with awareness of the problem, and the ability to do something about it. You take action, you influence others, who influence more people, and soon… you have change.
The goal of this post is to shine a light on the psychological mechanisms that contribute to polarization. Like Deborah and Charlie, I want to lift the veil of political angst so that we might see more clearly. The better we understand what is exploited, the better we can defend against it, and the better we can explain it to our peers. And it’s important that we do. I do believe the future of the American experiment depends on it.
This is Defense Against the Dark Arts, but for your brain and for our democracy.
Let’s dive in.
1 — You Can’t Blame ‘Em
Humans are social, and we are collaborative. We form groups and cooperate to achieve goals. It’s why we evolved language, and why you’re so good at picking up on emotional cues. It is the superpower that has allowed us to dominate the planet. Our greatest strength can also become a weakness when harnessed in the wrong way, and that’s foundational to what’s happening now. Group identity and loyalty are the drivers behind the polarization we see today. While most of us realize this, I want to go deeper.
First, a little neuroscience. It’s important to understand that it is your unconscious mind that is feeding you thoughts, emotions, and motivations. Have you ever chosen to feel hungry or lonely? No, that is your brain helping you survive, motivating you towards certain behaviors.
The way that humans survive (and thrive) is through groups. To be alone or outcast for the majority of our history was to die… unless you found another group. However, it’s not enough to simply belong to a group. Our brains are always asking ourselves, “What do I have to do to get along and get ahead?” It’s not enough to make the team, you want to play. It’s not enough to play, you want to be a contributor. It’s not enough to be a contributor, you want to be the team captain. That’s because captains are not easily kicked off the team, are respected by others, and get special treatment. Understand this, you don’t have a choice but to pursue group status. This instruction comes from below the level of your awareness.
Humans are remarkably prone to dividing into groups, and in turn, letting that guide our behavior. There’s the famous Robbers Cave Experiment. Twenty-two 11-year-old boys, unknown to each other, were taken to a summer camp and randomly divided into two teams where they competed in challenges like tug-of-war. It only took a week before the aggression between these arbitrary groups got so bad that the organizers had to step in and end the experiment.
Anecdotally, people will separate themselves into almost any group. Cat people vs dog people, black coffee drinkers vs cream & sugar fans, summer vs winter, pineapple on pizza vs non-psychopaths — you get it.
Consider as well that much of what makes someone a conservative or a liberal is due to personality traits that they were born with, and change little over their lives. Psychologists have settled on the “big five personality traits”, which are extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. It is fairly accurate to predict where someone will land based on where they score with these different traits. For example, those who score higher in “openness” are more liberal, and those who score higher in “conscientiousness” are more conservative. Going a little deeper, the literal brain structures of liberals and conservatives are different and are visible from a young age.
Additionally, there’s no shortage of emotional reasons why people feel compelled to identify with political groups. It feels important, the politicians we elect and the policies we enact determine so much of our lives and the future of our countries. It feels good to be part of a greater cause, something bigger than yourself, politics can feel like the battle between good and evil. It feels meaningful to be part of a group that believes in the same things as you. Evolutionarily speaking, being politically involved was a matter of life or death. Being on the wrong side of an argument could get you killed, but being on the right side could let you kill your hated rival.
What I’m arguing for here is a lack of total free will. It’s in our nature to find groups that share our beliefs, and then work to defend those groups to raise our standing in them — which makes us feel safe and important. Which groups appeal to us is largely down to the personalities that we are born with. All of this is out of our control.
Path: It’s hard to blame people for their actions when they have little choice. Realizing that it is our unconscious minds that drive us towards tribalism and that someone’s genetics are just as likely to guide their politics as anything, can give us empathy for others even when we disagree with them.
The problem arises when we attach ourselves too strongly to group identity. Our brains are trying to keep us alive by looking out for threats, and maintaining standing in a group. For our brains, the psychological self can be as important as the physical self. This was shown in a 2016 study where participants were placed in an MRI and challenged on political wedge issues like gun control or welfare. The amygdala activated, muscles tensed, and blood pressure and adrenaline rose as if they were in a physical fight. Remember, for most of human history to be kicked out of your tribe, or to see your tribe lose, meant death anyway. Threats to our tribe are interpreted as physical threats to ourselves. That’s why it’s so difficult for us to be “open-minded” or be critical of our groups.
In his book, Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein argues that the extreme polarization we see today is due to our adherence to group identities, and the stacking of those identities into “mega identities”. In previous eras, being a republican or democrat didn’t signal much about your identity, but that has changed. Now, other identities like gender, race, profession, and geography are fusing with political ones. The result is that it is nearly impossible to change someone’s mind or engage in a healthy debate once you’ve activated their identity. The threat awareness rises, and defensiveness kicks in.
Path: Keep your identity small, and hold your labels loosely. You can be a white man in the South who works as a mechanic, and still be a vegetarian because you care about the planet. You can be a college-educated woman in Manhattan working in tech, and still be against abortion because of your feelings about sanctity. Resist attaching your beliefs to your identity.
2 — Status & Signalling
Here, I will introduce two important social psychology concepts, “status” and “signaling”. Think of status as a kind of social currency that we exchange freely amongst our groups. Different groups have different rules for awarding status to others, but they follow a pattern. In general, the more helpful you are to the group’s goals and the better you represent the group's stated ideals, the more status you get. To continue the sports analogy, players that score the most get lots of status. Status gets you respect and access to resources. The best players get the most money, access to support and equipment, etc. It is evolutionarily advantageous to pursue status.
(To illustrate how pervasive this is, take the example of Tibetan monks. Surely, they amongst all people are the least status-seeking. But consider that the monks who most closely represent their ideals are elevated to a higher position that garners more respect. Status seeking is everywhere.)
“Signals” are pieces of information we share with others to help evaluate each other and navigate social situations. Some signals are consciously dishonest, like someone trying to signal their “wealth” by renting a Lamborghini for a day. Some are unconsciously honest, things like loud body language — a hearty laugh or a nervous look. And there’s everything in between. Because we live in a world full of signals and people trying to deceive us, the most valuable signals are honest, difficult-to-fake ones (we’ve all faked laughs, easy enough).
The best example of this is the peacock. The peacock’s feathers are impractical. They are heavy, keep the peacock from flying, and are expensive to maintain. But that is exactly the point. Female peacocks know that only healthy males with access to a good diet can produce and maintain large colorful feathers. It is, in economic terms, a “costly signal”. Costly signals tend to be honest. Why do rich people love to wear fancy watches? Because wearing one signals that you have excess wealth in a way that is difficult to fake. Having a muscular physique is also a costly (and thus honest) signal. It requires resources (time, nutritious diet), and is difficult to fake. It’s why the fitness industry is worth $32b.
What does all of this have to do with polarization? Quite a lot. Remember, we’re all trying to get along and get ahead in our groups. When we are in our political groups, how do we gain status? Like any other group, we show loyalty and usefulness towards its goals. But how can we be sure that people know we are loyal and useful?
Enter signaling. So, if you’re in the Trump group, and you want to gain status, you might do something like fly a giant Trump flag in your yard. This is a costly and honest signal. People know Trump is divisive and that flying his flag might tick off your neighbors — doing it anyway signals your loyalty honestly. (Liberals are not excused from this. We see you with your New Yorker canvas tote with the “I voted” sticker on it.) You’re communicating to the group, “I’m a true believer, and I’m contributing to our cause”
Social media is an easy scapegoat for the increase in polarization because it is easy to signal on social media. The problem is that it’s too easy. It costs you almost nothing to repost a meme of Biden and gas prices or Trump on a bad hair day. The result is that these low-effort communications fuel polarization by either activating people on the other side, or reminding people on your side that they’re not alone in their fringe beliefs.
Indeed, the low stakes are part of the problem. A harsh truth of political discourse is that almost none of it matters. The most politically impactful thing most of us do is vote every 2 years (and even that is only so impactful). Arguing about politics online has changed few people’s minds, but it does tend to make them dig their heels in more. This is due to reactance. People dislike being told what to do or how to think. Tell somebody that access to guns is wrong and that they’re wrong for supporting it and they will become a more stringent 2nd Amendment supporter.
Now, think about conversations on a spectrum from consequential to inconsequential. In consequential discussions, like say a deposition in court, your words matter a lot. You need to be precise and honest. In inconsequential discussions, the opposite is true: you can be fast and loose with your words.
This is why so much of our current political discourse fuels polarization. One person can say something inflammatory and untrue like, “Democrats accommodate a ring of powerful pedophiles to further their ends” or “All republicans are racists and homophobes” because the conversation does not matter. No policy is being decided, no one is getting hurt, and no one will use what you say in court. Its only usefulness is in signaling.
Path: Get better at communicating and evaluating messages online. Understand that most political discourse online is meaningless, engage only if you must. It only creates more polarization because people can say whatever they want without consequence, telling people what to think only makes them dig their heels in, and it’s mostly rage bait.
(You’ve likely heard people criticize liberals for “virtue signaling”. This is what they’re on about. Adding a filter to your profile picture to show that you support Ukraine is a vain attempt to signal how virtuous you are — without having to put anything at stake. To be clear, this isn’t happening all the time or everywhere. Some people quietly donate $100 to their preferred politician, and tell no one about it. Those people are not fueling polarization.)
If you want to know why politicians are punished for changing their minds when mental flexibility is a good thing, this is it. When political groups are involved, people aren’t awarded status for changing tack. Indeed, status is awarded for staying the course no matter what.
That’s because, for humans, beliefs are not so much about the truth, but about usefulness. Sometimes, they’re one and the same. For example, it’s true that you cannot fly and it’s useful to believe so, so you believe it strongly. However, other beliefs can be useful without being true. Our brains don’t care so much for the difference, they want you to survive and reproduce — whatever beliefs are useful towards those goals get adopted. Whether that’s believing that tigers hide in the brush (true and useful), or believing that the earth is 5000 years old (untrue but useful if you’re a creationist Christian), you adopt both all the same.
(For more on this idea, read my favorite blog post )
So when we’re active in our political groups and fulfilled in our political identities, we’re awarded for behaviors that exacerbate polarization. How do we get out of this trap?
In the 1600s the Royal Society of London was founded to “acquire knowledge through experimentation”. Wealthy European aristocrats competed with each other to see who could advance knowledge of the natural world, and who could prove each other wrong. Their motto was “Take no one’s word for it”.
Some of the exploits were incredible. A group of French naturalists painstakingly traveled to and across Ecuador to get a precise measurement of one degree of meridian to be the ones to finally answer, “What is the earth’s circumference?”. In an effort to measure the distance between the sun and the earth, an international group of scientists were sent to 100 locations across the planet so that they could take measurements of the passage of Venus across the face of the sun. This included sea journeys, mountain summits, traversing Siberia, navigating jungles, and more. Some got lost, some suffered injuries, and some had to turn around.
Why all of the effort? For these men, status was awarded to each other for discovering new facts, updating beliefs, and finding disproving evidence. It convinced them to spend years traveling the globe and risking their safety to be the ones to make a key discovery. The result was an explosion of knowledge and advancement that helped thrust humanity forward.
In his most recent book, Think Again, Adam Grant gives us a model for the different ways we think and engage with people in debate. That of the preacher, the prosecutor, or the politician. The preacher is what we become when we believe our beliefs are endangered, we start to deliver heartfelt lectures to defend and advocate our principles. We become a prosecutor when we see faults in other people’s thinking and work to prove them wrong. When we wish to be liked and seek approval from those around us, we turn into a politician.
As he argues — what if instead, we adopted the identity of scientists? What if we were curious about our beliefs and those of others? If we treated our ideas like hypotheses instead of facts, we sought to disprove ourselves, and we rewarded one another for doing so? What might our politics look like then?
The good news about status is that it’s flexible. It used to be a status symbol amongst wealthy suburbanites to drive the largest SUV, now it’s who has an electric car or not. It all depends on the games that we play, and the groups we inhabit. Far too many of us adopted political identities and play political games where we win by demonstrating to other people how stringent we are in our beliefs, and how willing we are to damage the other side.
Path: We need to reward each other for taking on nuanced beliefs, changing our minds, being critical of our parties and their leaders, and engaging in charitable interpretations of others’ beliefs. We do what is socially advantageous, let’s incentivize people to act more rationally. Publicly elevate those who exhibit the ideals of a scientist.
“But groups have always existed” I hear you say, “why are things so bad now?” All groups are not created equal. Some groups exist but are ineffectual like say, chess players in America. They are loosely tied together by a shared interest but nobody is going to war for chess. Political groups need to be active. The best way to activate a group is to convince it is under attack and/or at risk of losing something. People are notoriously loss-averse, even when it is irrational. It’s not as motivating to tell someone they can gain something by acting, as it is to tell them they can avoid losing something instead.
Politicians have figured this out, and it has become a central theme of recent political messaging. Take Trump and Brexit, two of the most surprising and consequential political movements of recent history. Make America Great Again, the idea of reclaiming what was lost. The rhetoric there is that we’re losing our country’s identity to liberals, immigrants, atheists, globalization, etc. It is true? Doesn’t matter, it’s motivating. The first tagline for the Brexit campaign was “Take Control”. It wasn’t very effective. Then, the leader Dominic Cummings added the word, “back” for “Take Back Control”. This triggered loss aversion in people’s minds and well… you know the rest.
Framing your group as under attack and losing is so potent for polarization because it punishes dissent and further rewards loyalty. Imagine being in an actual battle. Sitting in a foxhole with shrapnel flying by when your fellow soldier starts to question the army, the country, and the war and gets up to leave. If he isn’t killed then, he’s punished later for desertion or treason. Armies have understood this for centuries, you can’t allow dissent from the ranks. Now imagine the same soldier instead bravely leaping out to lead a countercharge, yelling, “For our families and our futures!”. He’s more likely to receive a medal than a lashing.
What this means for us, is that political groups have no space for nuance and disagreement. Dissent from the ranks is not allowed, nor is agreement with the others.
In the words of AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky:
“Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise, it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back — providing aid and comfort to the enemy.”
This is something that the political right has succeeded with over the last decade. They agree that they are under attack and losing, and are remarkable in their cohesion on most issues. They do not budge when argued against, and they do not break rank from the inside. Of course, this makes polarization more persistent.
Path: A key insight into human psychology is that we are primarily loss-averse. We are much more attuned to threats than we are to opportunities. Recognize when the messaging you consume is taking advantage of this and exaggerating what’s at stake, and who is doing the taking. Are you letting your buttons be pushed? Is the messaging keeping you from understanding the others better?
3 — Reasoning
So social cooperation sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, but there’s another aspect of our psychology that does just as much — reasoning. We are the only animals that can make complex plans, reflect on the past, and apply logic to problems.
Turns out that reasoning exists to create well… reasons. Cognitive neuroscientist Hugo Mercier’s research suggests that reason arose in the human brain not to inform our actions and beliefs, but to explain and defend them to others and ourselves.
This aligns with the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is famous for his “elephant and rider” metaphor. In his words, “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second”. Our brains are not so much the president (executive decision maker), as the press secretary (justifying our decisions). The rider, atop the elephant, is our rational conscious mind. It’s the elephant that does the moving, however. What’s usually happening is that the elephant moves, and the rider justifies (reasons) the movement afterward.
So when most people are confronted with the need to create a political opinion, they’re not starting from scratch and reasoning their way carefully to a nuanced take. No, the elephant leans towards the direction that will be most socially rewarding and consistent with our identities, and the rider justifies it. (Source: Chapters 1 and 3, “Righteous Minds”)
You only need to look at a recent topic like vaccines to illustrate the point. How many of us had a strong opinion about vaccine safety before 2021? Few, I’d bargain. Instead, the reasoning took the same pattern it always does. Once it became a salient issue, we asked ourselves: what do the leaders of our favored groups say? People who trusted Fauci and the FDA trusted the efficacy of the vaccine and urged others to get it. People who trusted Tucker Carlson or distrusted the government hesitated and urged other people to resist doing what the government told them. We all needed to take a stance, we aligned with our previous beliefs and found justification in familiar places. The new opinion fused with political identity and… voila — we had a new item in the culture war.
Most of us don’t have opinions on something until we’re asked. At that point, we throw together a mix of what we heard from others, what seems consistent with our prior beliefs, and what will earn us favor in the moment. The problem is that hodgepodge opinion now sticks.
There’s another mechanism at work here. Consistency and Cognitive Dissonance. It’s important for us to appear consistent in our actions and beliefs to others. Inconsistent people are seen as untrustworthy and ineligible for cooperation. We also feel psychological discomfort (dissonance) at holding inconsistent beliefs in our heads and will work to resolve the two, usually in the direction of what we believed before.
So if you publicly supported mask mandates it is difficult for you to not also support vaccine mandates. The unconscious desire to avoid conflicting beliefs and the conscious pull to appear consistent to others is too strong.
Path: You don’t have to have a strong opinion about everything, it’s okay to say “I don’t know” even if it may make you look stupid or disloyal to your group. Check yourself the next time you’re developing an opinion on something new. Is your thinking independent, or are you falling along the lines of your identity and past opinions?
Humans don’t really want to kill each other. There are reports of soldiers aiming above their enemy’s heads on purpose, and those who do kill pay for it in psychological pain afterward. We’d rather cooperate than kill. Throughout history, to win battles against other tribes, leaders had to create evil characterizations of their enemies to justify their harm. In the starkest terms, we’ve seen the dehumanization of Jews and other ethnic groups to justify their extermination. What’s happening is a collective effort to create justifications (reasons) to treat others without empathy.
In today’s environment, it takes the shape of extreme straw-manning. So, liberals aren’t people who want societal equality and government spending to achieve it, they’re “socialists who want to take your kid to drag shows”. Conservatives aren’t oriented toward tradition and personal liberties, but are “racists who want to take us back to the stone age”. When was the last time you heard a conservative figure say just, “Democrats”. No, it’s the “radical socialist left”. They’re straw-manning.
Take QAnon as an extreme example of this. In terms of injustices, the human trafficking of children is one that surely no one could disagree with. It violates the most sacred moral norms. That’s the point. By anchoring themselves with a morally righteous position, they can make anyone who disagrees with them a “pedophile enabler” and justify things like showing up to a pizza parlor with a rifle.
Path: Resist straw-manning the other side. Instead, steel-man their arguments. What are the strengths of their argument? What do they get right, or what do they see that I don’t?
Relatedly, moral outrage is an easy way to get attention and spread a message. Like yelling, “fire!”, the idea is that you’re alerting everyone else to danger before it spreads beyond fixing. It’s dangerously effective, these kinds of messages are the ones that are routinely shared most on social media (Kony 2012, anyone?). Thus, people online are rewarded for sharing polarizing messaging like, “They’re giving illegal immigrants free housing! We must stop this!” which pulls on people’s ideas about fairness — criminals being rewarded instead of punished.
Path: Be mindful of when you’re getting your buttons pushed. Before you share an article or decry the other side, think about the emotion behind the message, did the author or poster misrepresent something to get you riled up?
4 — Knowing Beliefs
So far, I’ve been talking about how learnings from social psychology, how people behave in groups, contribute to the polarization we see today. However, there are aspects of personal psychology that exacerbate the problem, too. Mainly, our irrational adhesion to our beliefs.
Quick, I want you to take a minute and write down how a toilet works in detail. Go on, I’ll give you some time…
(Are you doing it or are you scrolling?)
How did you do? You know, right? I mean you use one all of the time and they’ve been around for 400 years. Were you able to explain why there’s a u-bend in the plumbing, how the water refills, and how it knows when to stop? If not, you’re not alone. Most people think they know how something simple like a toilet works when they don’t. This is known as the “Illusion of explanatory depth” and it is pervasive.
Now, let’s take a topic that many feel strongly about, for our sake — abortion. Most people think the line should be drawn where the fetus may be expected to feel pain from the procedure. Regardless of your stance, how well do you understand the biological process of pregnancy to say with confidence when a fetus can experience pain? If the answer is, “not very well”, as I suspect it is, it makes sense to soften your stance.
In fact, it makes sense to soften all of your stances considering how little we personally know about the world. Epistemic humility is one of the few proven antidotes to polarization.
Beliefs are funny things. When we believe in something strongly, it can feel so real and so personal. We struggle with how other people can believe anything different, “if only they knew what I knew!”. This is a mental illusion as well. In the words of Morgan Housel, “Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” It is difficult to overstate just how impactful our personal experiences, that no one else shares, impacts our beliefs and our resistance to changing them.
There are two psychological effects at work here, fundamental attribution error and naive realism.
Fundamental Attribution Error
When we’re evaluating others, we are much more judgemental than we are with ourselves. When someone else is late to a meeting it’s because they’re lazy or forgetful. When we’re late to a meeting it’s because there was an accident or a loud neighbor kept us up. When someone else believes that vaccines aren’t safe and effective, it’s because they’re uneducated and stubborn. When we believe they are, it’s because we’ve made an informed opinion. In reality, both people are following a similar reasoning pattern.
The vaccine skeptic listened to people he trusted based on shared values, and the vaccine believer did the same. Be honest, did you do earnest vaccine research? Or did you trust that the FDA and the large BioTech companies wouldn’t mislead you? People whose personalities trend conservative are less trusting of big government and big business and instead trusted others with similar belief systems who told them to doubt the vaccine.
In truth, most of our “beliefs” are on a weaker footing than we like to admit. Don’t believe me? In studies, people do a poor job of recognizing their own beliefs when reworded and presented back to them after a couple of weeks or realizing that they have changed their mind in that time at all.
Naive Realism
Part of what fuels polarization is the inability to agree on “the facts”, which grinds so many debates to a dead-end. Again, “if only they knew what I knew!” It is easy to believe that we experience reality and that everyone experiences the same one. If that were the case, agreements wouldn’t be so hard to find. Yet we know it is not.
It feels like our eyes are windows through which unfiltered reality streams in. Instead, the colorful, rich world you experience is an illusion created entirely within your own mind. The real world is colorless because color does not exist. Yes, there are wavelengths of light that our minds associate with colors but again — that is created inside your mind. You see purple, a dog sees grey. Who is right?
The neuroscientist VS Ramachandran has a metaphor that I like. Remember, your brain is locked inside your skull, it doesn’t experience the world, only what the senses give it.
“Think of the brain like a general deep in a bunker. The brain, like the general, depends on scouts to send reports from the battlefield to update the model. The general never sees the world outside, only the simplified representation on the table. Whatever is on that model, at the moment, that’s what he uses to plan and make judgments. If his scouts don’t or can’t bring in updates, the model remains unchanged. And if the scouts have never brought in certain information about the outside world, it doesn’t appear on the model at all.”
I understand what people are saying when they bemoan, “It seems like people can’t even agree that the sky is blue and the grass is green” but this underlies the point. People who say that the sky is blue are right and wrong at the same time. Someone who was born blind would say, “what’s blue?” Perception is reality.
When we disagree strongly with someone over emotionally charged issues, we default to straw-manning them and their arguments. They believe what they do because of their lack of intelligence and moral failings. Instead, it helps to think about why someone believes something. What happened to them? What environment did they grow up in? What do they see that I don’t?
Part of the problem is the rise of technology and social media in our lives. We used to live in high-context mode. Our ancestors lived in settlements where everyone you knew and every piece of information you came in contact with came with a shared background. The traditions, myths, and understanding of the world were all closely shared.
Today, we come in contact with an insane amount of news and opinion from people we share little context with. This is not an inherently bad thing — it’s great to interact with people with other worldviews — but it takes mental effort to understand them. Our brains do not like to expend unnecessary effort, and instead, we can be quick to judge. Likewise, our brains are not equipped to be constantly exposed to news from around the world. I know staying informed feels like a virtuous goal. But as I mentioned in the intro to this piece, the news is more likely than not to make you angry, anxious, and feel negative about the world.
“Improvements happen too slow to notice, catastrophes happen too quickly to ignore” — Morgan Housel
Path: Take care to understand what about a person’s personality and past would lead them to believe differently than you. Neither of you came to your beliefs without the influence of your upbringing, and neither of you sees reality as it is. Give other people the benefit of the doubt.
Just like we don’t understand our own beliefs all that well, we especially don’t understand the beliefs of others. Studies show that people consistently overestimate the extremity of the other side’s beliefs.
Again, while it’s easy to blame news, social media, and political rhetoric for this, we have to look inside as well. It feels good to feel superior to people we disagree with, or think are morally lacking in some way. It’s comforting, and as we’ve talked about before — makes it easier to justify your actions and beliefs. It’s more fun to create an imaginary enemy with garbage opinions than it is to confront a complicated reality.
When you consume information, ask yourself this, “Does it taste like candy or vegetables?” News and social media, just like the food industry, are aiming to exploit your vulnerabilities for profit — regardless of the long-term harm to yourself or society. Eating candy feels good just like it feels good to have your beliefs confirmed and feel superior to others, but is ultimately harmful. Reading primary sources, and boring, factual news are the vegetables of your information diet.
We love to accuse others of all sorts of reasoning errors when we disagree with them. “They just think that because they heard Tucker Carlsen saying it”, “If they weren’t raised in a coastal city, they wouldn’t think that”, and “They just haven’t read enough on the subject”. Let’s all be honest, how often do you accuse yourself of the same reasoning errors? When was the last time you changed your opinion about something? It doesn’t feel as good to think critically about ourselves as it does others, but that’s exactly what we need to be doing. We need to check ourselves and our beliefs for the biases and tendencies that we all fall prey to.
Path: Resist the temptation to feel good about yourself and your beliefs by creating a strawman out of your opponents, and consuming information that confirms your beliefs. What do your opponents actually believe and why? What haven’t I considered? Pay attention to your information diet and curate it to avoid inflammatory rhetoric.
Conclusion
I used to be guilty of all of this.
I was a political junkie. I majored in political science and loved to argue with people. I worked in Congress and would get worked up at the latest developments from the other side of the aisle. I posted my political takes on Facebook and Twitter, and let people know when I didn’t agree with theirs. It made me feel smart to debate with people, and it felt important to be politically engaged.
In some ways, I’m still guilty of this. Like anyone else, I find a lot of pleasure in dunking on people like Lauren Boebert or MTG in group chats with my friends. I get angry when I come across an unhinged Tucker Carlson rant, or see a family wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” shirts.
Daniel Kahnemann, whose 40 years of work on irrationality won him a Nobel prize in economics and sold nearly 3 million copies of his book on the subject, was once asked by an interviewer if he thought he was more rational than other people. His answer was no. “It’s a question that I often get, and I tell people that my thinking has not improved in all the years that I’ve been doing this. I’m no better at making decisions than before”.
While I disagree with him (he’s definitely smarter than us), his point was that he is still human, and thus like all other humans he cannot completely eliminate the biases and heuristics that control so much of our thinking and behavior. This is my point, too.
If anything, we are oriented towards polarization. We seek groups to join and be successful with. Creating an enemy gives the group motivation and purpose, and making yourself the hero by contributing to the cause feels great. Our minds are quick to create justifications for our behavior towards our opponents, and it is so difficult for us to agree on things because we all literally see differently.
What I hope I’ve done over the last 7000 words is help you better understand yourself and others in a way that will lead to awareness and thus change over the psychological patterns that we are all prone to, but contribute to polarization.
Maybe you’re not guilty of them, maybe you think you’re not, maybe you are. Regardless, I hope you can take these lessons with you to make for a country that isn’t so angry but understanding.
Inspiration and influence for this piece come from Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson, Jonathan Haidt, Will Storr, Morgan Housel, David McRaney, and Gurwinder Bhogal. Thank you, and I hope I didn’t butcher your ideas too badly.
