Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

What separates political opportunism from intellectual growth?

Put more simply: reasoning is something we often do in groups, in order to serve group ends. This is not a wrinkle of human irrationality, but rather a rational response to the complexity and danger of the world around us.

Asch’s work, which showed the way a group can influence the opinions of an individual, has been the basis for a revolution in understanding not just how humans think, but how partisans think. Because what is a political party, after all, but a group?

One of the roles that political parties play is helping us navigate these decisions. 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.

They’re organized groups looking to increase their power.

Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth—purposes like increasing their standing in their community or ensuring they don’t find themselves exiled by the leaders of their tribe. If this hypothesis proved true, then a smarter, better-educated citizenry wouldn’t put an end to these disagreements. It would just mean the participants are better equipped to argue for their own side.

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.

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.

It turned out that on highly politicized issues, people’s actual definition of “expert” is “a credentialed person who agrees with me.”

Kahan calls this theory “identity-protective cognition”: “As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.” Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: “What we believe about the facts,” he writes, “tells us who we are.” And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

What’s worse is that it never feels cynical, it never reads as rationalization. It always, always feels like our honest search for the truth has led us to the answer that confirms our priors. The problem, of course, is that these people are also affecting, and in some cases controlling, the levers of government.

Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning.” Just as a press secretary is motivated to defend his or her boss’s positions, so, too, is our mind motivated to defend our group’s positions or the conclusion we need to reach for other reasons.

But it’s also worth focusing on the word “protective.” As Kahan’s term suggests, our reasoning is most vulnerable when our identities are most threatened. And for many, this is an era of profound threat.

There is nothing that makes us identify with our groups so strongly as the feeling that the power we took for granted may soon be lost or the injustices we’ve long borne may soon be rectified.

White political identity is conditional. It emerges in periods of threat and challenges—periods like this one.

A sense of racial identity can be based on in-group favoritism or out-group hostility. Both can be, and often are, present, but Jardina repeatedly finds that much of the strengthening of white political identity is a defense of white political privilege without an attendant rise in racist attitudes. To some, this will sound like a distinction without a difference, but it’s meaningful in how people experience their own politics and what kinds of appeals and messages they respond to.

They found that priming white college students to think about the concept of white privilege led them to express more racial resentment in subsequent surveys.

It takes a special kind of condescension to believe voters suffering economically are so distracted by the identity politics of the Right that they have overlooked the direct solutions to the economic problems offered by the Left.

dynamic is behind much of the panic about “identity politics.” When a single group dominates the political agenda, its grievances and demands are just coded as politics, and the vast majority of policy is designed in response to its concerns. But that changes when no one group can control the agenda but many groups can push items onto it; then the competition among identity-based groups becomes visible.

It’s only identity politics when there’s pressure to diversify appointments. And yet that process doesn’t reflect a strengthening of a particular identity group’s hold on politics but a weakening of it.

The cycle of unity giving way to conflict, of hope about the future activating fear about the present, is likely to continue.

The human mind is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference. It takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity, and once that happens, we naturally assume ourselves in competition with other groups. The deeper our commitment to our group becomes, the more determined we become to make sure our group wins. Making matters worse, winning is positional, not material; we often prefer outcomes that are worse for everyone so long as they maximize our group’s advantage over other groups.

That sorting has been ideological. Democrat now means liberal and Republican now means conservative in a way that wasn’t true in, say, 1955.

Groups that are rising in power want their needs reflected in politics and culture, groups that feel themselves losing power want to protect the status and privileges they’ve had, and this conflict is sorting itself neatly into two parties.

In particular, I want to show the feedback loop of polarization: institutions polarize to appeal to a more polarized public, which further polarizes the public, which forces the institutions to polarize further, and so on.

This is the context in which modern political journalism is produced and absorbed: an all-out war for the time of an audience that has more choices than at any point in history.

And as much as we might want to, it’s malpractice to try to understand the news without understanding the financial and audience forces that shape it.

elections feel like they decide whether our country belongs to us and whether we belong in it.

That is to say, it expresses itself in journalism and commentary that is more directly about the question of why your side should win and the other side should lose.

The answer, they say, is that the parties we perceive are quite different from the parties that exist.

And outrage is deeply connected to identity—we are outraged when members of other groups threaten our group and violate our values.

Social platforms are about curating and expressing a public-facing identity. They’re about saying I’m a person who cares about this, likes that, and loathes this other thing. They are about signaling the groups you belong to and, just as important, the groups you don’t belong to.

This is identity media in its purest form. When you share “38 Things Only Someone Who Was a Scout Would Know,” you’re saying you were a Scout, and you were a serious enough Scout to understand the signifiers and experiences that only Scouts had. To post that article on Facebook is to make a statement about who you are, who your group is, and, just as important, who is excluded.

there’s feedback and it’s shaping the content. You start to realize that this is for a particular type of person. Then the content starts representing identity more.”

As Peretti observed, interests become identities as they socialize you into a community.

Few realized, early on, that the way to win the war for attention was to harness the power of community to create identity, and the simplest way to do that, particularly in politics, was to focus on enemies.

But an identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion. An identity that binds you into a community you care about is costly and painful to abandon, and the mind will go to great lengths to avoid abandoning it. So the more media people see that encourages them to think of themselves as part of a group, and the more they publicly proclaim—through sharing and liking and following and subscribing—that they are part of a group, the deeper that identity roots and the more resistant the underlying views become to change.

In both cases, hearing contrary opinions drove partisans not just to a deeper certainty in the rightness of their cause, but more polarized policy positions—that

It turned out the polarization was coming from forcing people who were persuadable to watch political news, which they didn’t want to do. Once you gave them the choice to opt out, it was just preaching to the choir.

To the extent that political elites have cocooned themselves into more polarized informational worlds—and they have—they behave in more polarized ways, which in turn polarizes the system.

In theory, newsworthiness means something roughly like “important.” The most newsworthy story is the most important story.

But more than that, it was an object lesson in how social media’s preference for identitarian conflict focuses the media on identitarian conflicts, even when those collisions are almost comically obscure.

To put it simply, in a media driven by identity and passion, identitarian candidates who arouse the strongest passions have an advantage.

The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational. It is biased toward the political stories and figures who activate our identities, because it is biased toward and dependent on the fraction of the country with the most intense political identities. Oh, and funny thing. So, too, is everyone else in politics.

But a more polarized electorate changes the strategies candidates use to get elected.

But in offering policies, drawing contrasts, and choosing candidates meant to mobilize a polarized electorate, both parties are further polarizing that electorate. Clearer choices mean fewer undecided voters to persuade, which further reinforces the incentives to focus on base mobilization. Here, as elsewhere, polarization begets polarization; it’s a flywheel, not a switch.

Parties aren’t weak because the rules have changed. The rules have changed because parties are weak.

The lesson was clear: the more powerful the parties were, the less polarization the state legislatures showed.

Whatever the motivation, if you’re a candidate who wants to fund your campaign in a state where the party controls the money, your incentive is to convince your party that you can win, and that often means convincing it of your ideological and temperamental moderation.