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What is changing is not our psychologies. What is changing is how closely our psychologies map onto our politics and onto a host of other life choices. As the differences between the parties clarify, the magnetic pull of their ideas and demographics becomes stronger to the psychologically aligned—as does their magnetic repulsion to the psychologically opposed.
People with what we call a fixed worldview are more fearful of potential dangers, and are likely to prefer clear and unwavering rules to help them navigate all the threats. This mind-set leads them to support social structures in which hierarchy and order prevail, the better to ensure people don’t stray too far from the straight and narrow. By contrast, people with what we call a fluid worldview are less likely to perceive the world as dangerous. By extension, they will endorse social structures that allow individuals to find their own way in life. They are more inclined to believe that a
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that opposition to the Vietnam War was evenly distributed across the two parties during the 1960s.
Now, though, these psychologies are the dividing line of American politics, at least among white voters
On the fluid side, 71 percent were Democrats and only 21 percent were Republicans. On the fixed side, 60 percent were Republicans and only 25 percent were Democrats.
is psychology doesn’t predict political opinions among people who don’t pay much attention to politics, but it’s a powerful predictor of political opinions among those who do. For the politically disengaged, “there is little dispositional sorting,” but among the highly engaged, the effects are huge: different levels of openness to experience can account for as much as 35 percentage point swings in party identification, overwhelming almost all other factors.
“In forming an opinion, the question for the unengaged citizen is: what will this policy do for me? Among the engaged, however, reactions to economic issues are better understood as expressively motivated signals of identity. The question for the engaged citizen is: what does support for this policy position say about me?”37 Psychological sorting, in other words, is a powerful driver of identity politics. If you care enough about politics to connect it to your core psychological outlook, then politics becomes part of your psychological self-expression.
When we participate in politics to solve a problem, we’re participating transactionally. But when we participate in politics to express who we are, that’s a signal that politics has become an identity. And that’s when our relationship to politics, and to each other, changes.
Discrimination varies in its targets and intensity across cultures, but it is surprisingly similar in its rationalizations.
It is worth dwelling on the radical conception of human nature Tajfel was advancing. People had long nurtured their prejudices, but they believed those prejudices reflected reality—we disliked those we disliked because we had reason to dislike them. This is the whole point of racial and ethnic stereotypes: the greed, criminality, venality, or idiocy we ascribe to others justifies our hatred or fear of them.
When told they were choosing between two members of their own group, they tended to choose the fairest option. But when it was between a member of their meaningless group and the other meaningless group, they opted to make sure their co-over- or co-underestimator, whose name they didn’t even know, got more, even if it meant everyone got less in total.
they preferred to give their group less so long as it meant the gap between what they got and what the out-group got was bigger.
time to put to rest the idea that group conflict was primarily motivated by zero-sum collisions over resources or power.
Far from the money being the prime motivator, “it is the winning that seems more important to them,” wrote Tajfel.
That’s how deep the experience of social anxiety runs: it literally wakes you up throughout the night, because your body knows it can’t rest as deeply when it can’t rely on others for protection.
Sports are such a powerful force in human society precisely because they harness primal instincts that pulse through our psyche.
the overwhelming driver was the strength of partisan identity. “Elections accentuate the team mentality of party identifiers, pushing them repeatedly to make ‘us-them’ comparisons between Democrats and Republicans that draw attention to what will be lost—status—if the election is not won,” write Miller and Conover. “This results in both rivalry and anger.”
the people actually driving elections—the people knocking on doors, working for campaigns, and turning out to vote—are driven more by group rivalry than by tax policy. Miller and Conover are crisp on this point: “When partisans endure meetings, plant yard signs, write checks, and spend endless hours volunteering, what is likely foremost in their minds is that they are furious with the opposing party and want intensely to avoid losing to it—not a specific issue agenda. They are fired up team members on a mission to defeat the other team.”
the most-engaged experience politics differently than everyone else.
It’s a mistake to imagine our bank accounts are the only reasonable drivers of political action. As we become more political, we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group identity. “It is not that citizens are unable to recognize their interests,” they write, “rather, it is that material concerns are often irrelevant to the individual’s goals when forming a policy opinion.”15
Politicians, of course, are not equally responsive to all their constituents. They are most concerned about the most engaged: the people who will vote for them, volunteer for them, donate to them. And the way to make more of that kind of voter isn’t just to focus on how great you are. It’s to focus on how bad the other side is. Nothing brings a group together like a common enemy. Remove the fury and fear of a real opponent, and watch the enthusiasm drain from your supporters.
This is no longer a single social identity. Partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity, with all the psychological and behavioral magnifications that implies.19
This is what has changed. Our political identities have become political mega-identities. The merging of the identities means when you activate one you often activate all, and each time they’re activated, they strengthen.
when the NFL came into contact with politics, it became part of politics. Rather than a shared loved of football pulling our political identities toward compromise, our political identities polarized our love of football.
Every species of conflict interferes with every other species in society at the same time, save only when their lines of cleavage coincide; in which case they reinforce one another.… A society, therefore, which is riven by a dozen oppositions along lines running in every direction, may actually be in less danger of being torn with violence or falling to pieces than one split along just one line.23
Interestingly, it turns out that there’s only a weak relationship between how much a person identifies as a conservative or liberal and how conservative or liberal their views actually are—to be exact, in both cases it’s about a .25 correlation. One reason policy is not the driver of political disagreement is most people don’t have very strong views about policy. It’s the rare hobbyist who thinks often about cybersecurity and who should lead the Federal Reserve. But all of us are experts on our own identities. Over and again, Mason finds that identity is far more powerful than issue positions
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That is to say, feeling closer to the other side in identity does more to calm dislike than feeling closer to the other side on policy.
The crisis emerges when partisan identities fall into alignment with other social identities, stoking our intolerance of each other to levels that are unsupported by our degrees of political disagreement.”25
then party affiliation wasn’t simply an expression of our disagreements; it was also becoming the cause of them.
Iyengar’s hypothesis is that partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages. “Political identity is fair game for hatred,” he says. “Racial identity is not. Gender identity is not.
You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can say whatever I want about them.”27
“The old theory was political parties came into existence to represent deep social cleavages,” Iyengar says. “But now party politics has taken on a life of its own—now it is the cleavage.”29 A life of its own. It reminds me of
This is, I think, the best way to understand the relationship between policy differences and identity conflict: they’re mutually reinforcing, not opposed.
But there had been a political change: Democrats had gone from opposing the mandate to supporting it. This shift—Democrats lining up behind the Republican-crafted mandate, and Republicans declaring it not just inappropriate policy but contrary to the wishes of the Founders—shocked Wyden.
There’s an easy explanation for this: cynicism. Hypocrisy. Lying. And when we see it happening in others—particularly in an out-group—that’s what we assume. But I’ve interviewed enough politicians, activists, and pundits who have changed their position alongside their party to know that it often feels sincere, at least to them.
But my mental processes always feel honest to me. After all, isn’t changing our minds in response to new information and arguments what we’re supposed to do? What separates political opportunism from intellectual growth? Turns out the answer is: not much. We understand reasoning to be an individual act. This is, in many cases, wrong. “The central flaw in the concept of reason that animated the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is that it is entirely individualistic,” writes philosopher Joseph Heath.12 But decades of research has proven that “reason is both decentralized and dispersed across
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descendants. Once you understand that, the ease with which individuals, even informed individuals, flip their positions to fit the group’s needs makes a lot more sense.
The results were remarkable: on critical trials, the participants gave the wrong answer 37 percent of the time. Given the choice between what their eyes were telling them and what the group was telling them, they went with the group. “I
In theory, we join parties because they share our values and our goals—values and goals that may have been passed on to us by the most important groups in our lives, such as our families and our communities—and we trust that their policy judgments will match the ones we would come up with if we had unlimited time to study the issues.
But parties, though based on a set of principles, aren’t disinterested teachers in search of truth. They’re organized groups looking to increase their power.
Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. Among those with weak math skills, subjects were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it bolstered their ideology. But partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.II18
I want to dwell on this for a minute, because it’s an insane finding: being better at math made partisans less likely to solve the problem correctly when solving the problem correctly meant betraying their political instincts. People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right.
among people who were already skeptical of climate change, scientific literacy made them more skeptical of climate change.19
More information can help us find the right answers. But if our search is motivated by aims other than accuracy, more information can mislead us—or, more precisely, help us mislead ourselves. There’s a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right.
At any given moment there are a lot of facts out there and a lot of smart people offering them to you in different configurations. “Even among unusually well-informed and politically engaged people, the political preferences and judgments that look and feel like the bases of partisanship and voting behavior are, in reality, often consequences of party and group loyalties,”
write Achen and Bartels in their book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. “In fact, the more information the voter has, often the better able she is to bolster her identities with rational-sounding reasons.”23
“Nothing any ordinary member of the public personally believes about the existence, causes, or likely consequences of global warming will affect the risk that climate change poses to her, or to anyone or anything she cares about,” Kahan writes. “However, if she forms the wrong position on climate change relative to the one [held by] people with whom she has a close affinity—and on whose high regard and support she depends on in myriad ways in her daily life—she could suffer extremely unpleasant consequences, from shunning to the loss of employment.”
The reality, he concludes, is that “the cost to her of making a mistake on the science is zero,” but “the cost of being out of synch with her peers potentially catastrophic,”
“What we believe about the facts,” he writes, “tells us who we are.”
they have no power to make or revise policy. They’re told what the policy is, and their job is to find evidence and arguments that will justify the policy to the public.28
