Polarization

Whenever I mention that I study “political psychology”, it’s not long before someone says something along the lines of “I just can’t understand what they are thinking.” In this case “they”, can refer to anyone from someone’s family members to politicians on the national stage.

Not only do people in countries around the world feel intensely divided, but we feel like we can’t even understand to people we political disagree with.

And why is that? Why can’t we relate to any family, friends, acquaintances, or strangers who vote differently?

As a part of my PhD, I did an experiment where I had two hypothetical politicians make statements that expressed elements of their ideology and asked people to pick which candidates they would vote for. I found that certain statements were especially influential on which candidate people picked, but the thing is, the same statement could strongly attract some people and strongly repel others. It just depended on how strongly we held certain beliefs or values.

If a participant in my experiment had really intense egalitarian values then they strongly preferred candidates who expressed egalitarianism and vice versa for a candidates with anti-egalitarian values. I found the same thing for national identity and authoritarianism and even populist and nostalgic attitudes. What this means is that we’re having intensely different reactions to the exact same statements from our politicians, depending on our underlying ideological orientations.

This intense divergence of reactions is one of the things driving polarization, and I’d argue this divergence is fueled by our fundamentally group-oriented way of seeing social and political questions. The instincts that drive us to form groups and cooperate also compel us to compete and discriminate. When you combine this sense of group-ishness with technological changes in how we get information and communicate with each other, the forces of polarization start to become clearer.

You can read more about group-ishness here, and you can find my article about this experiment here.

Obviously, this is just one short dive into what’s driving polarization, and it’s probably prompted more questions than it answered. If your head is swimming with questions like “Has it always been like this? Can we de-polarize ourselves? Or is the tooth paste out of the tube?” then I highly recommend this book by Alison Goldsworthy, Laura Osborne, and Alexandra Chesterfield:

Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How To Bring Them Together