Speaking of Psychology - How politics became so uncivilized (SOP43)

Episode Date: October 31, 2016

Political elections ought to bring out the good in people – aren’t they a chance to talk about plans and hopes for the future? But lately they have come to resemble brawls on a playground. When did it become OK to wave insulting signs at rallies or call candidates ugly names? Why are so many candidates focusing on the personal instead of policy? In this episode, Jonathan Haidt, PhD, talks about incivility in politics and how psychological research can help us understand each other a little better and return civility to politics. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many Americans feel they are embattled in a culture war that is not only dividing them, but stressing them out. An American Psychological Association survey showed that 52% of American adults report that the 2016 election is a significant source of stress. This type of stress could be largely related to people's differing views on what is fact and what is moral. In this episode, we speak with a psychologist about how scientific research into how people feel, think and behave can help us understand how we became so divided and how we can come back together. I'm Audrey Hamilton, and this is speaking of psychology. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. His research has focused on the moral foundations of politics and on ways to transcend the

culture wars by using recent discoveries in moral psychology to foster more civil forms of politics. He is the author of the Happiness Hypothesis and of the New York Times bestseller, The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Welcome, Dr. Hype. Thank you, Audrey. Pleasure to be here. Cefility in politics. That sounds like a pipe dream, especially in a presidential election year. What do you mean by a civil form of politics? People are very good at relating to each other in different ways. We're extremely good at adversarial forms, at attacking each other at being lawyers, at fighting. And we're also really good at cooperating and

working together or courting each other. So we can easily shift back and forth into different modes. I co-run a group called civilpolitics.org where we're trying to promote civil political talk. And here's what we say at the site. We say civility as we pursue it is the ability to disagree productively with others, respecting the their sincerity and decency. And that's the key, is the sincerity and decency thing. When you're talking with people and you're arguing or disagreeing with them, that's fine, that's great.

That's what politics is supposed to be. But when what you're saying is aimed at discrediting their sincerity or decency, not rebutting their arguments, but saying, yeah, you're just saying that because you're bribed by the Koch brothers or, you know, you're a fascist, you're a racist. Those aren't real arguments. Those are attempts to discredit the other. So that's the more adversarial confrontational zero sum, or you might even say negative some. The more I can hurt you, the better I am.

And that's what our politics has descended more into than it used to be. Well, it does seem like the divisiveness has reached a point where there's no turning back. I mean, you're saying that psychology and other social sciences can help us understand where we are, how we got here and how to change. Can you talk to us about that? Well, sure, because there's no such thing as no turning back. I mean, things are really, really bad. I think the days of the federalists and anti-federalists and, you know, the founding fathers, even Thomas Jefferson and others were making up pen names and so they could attack each other anonymously, you know, like being trolls on the Internet almost.

And the Civil War was, of course, much worse than things are today. So things do go in cycles. Now things are at a low point. They've not been this bad, I think, since the late 19th century. So there is turning back, but it's going to be tough. There are a lot of trends that are pushing us this way now. What role does the popularity of social media, you know, Facebook, 24-hour news channels, constantly putting up pundits to say this and you say that, you know,

what do they play in this divisiveness? Sam Abrams, who's a political scientist, he and I wrote an essay in the Washington Post last year in which we described the 10 major trends that have, made our politics so polarized and dysfunctional. The number one is the purification of the parties. So we didn't used to have a clear conservative party and a clear progressive party. There was a left and right wing of both parties

up until really until the 1970s. But once after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and that made the conservative Democrats, in the South especially, leave the Democratic Party, joined the Republican Party. In 1964. In 1964, that's right. So that starts these tectonic plates shifting, which gives us a purified, liberal, progressive party and a purified conservative party.

And so that really begins to take shape in the 1980s, and by the 90s, it's complete. All right, so you asked me about social media. Well, this is the backstory to it. Once you have these purified parties, and that happens at the same time as this media revolution, where you got cable TV and then the Internet, so that now the media that people, consume is is all confirmatory. Everybody can tune into things that support their worldview. So those two trends interact to give us this perfect storm where everyone is now totally convinced, not just that they're right, but that the other side is racist or fascist or funded by the coax or PC, whatever

it is. So yeah, it's real bad. I was talking with somebody at the APA convention about this the other day, and we kind of worked up the metaphor. It's like, you know, it's like if you go back, social media to me is like this technology that we're just not adapted for you. We're not used to yet. So it's like imagine if you go back 50,000 years and humans are just leaving Africa. And we have spear technology. We've had spears for about a half million years. We kind of know how to kill each other with spears, but we also know how to get along

when there's all these spears around. So we've been living with spears for half a million years. But suddenly some malevolent. other species from another planet drops loaded handguns all over the world so that you get this, the Speer Technology people, and they suddenly, everybody's got loaded handguns. Like, what? What are these things?

He pulled the trigger, the other guy's dead. Wow, this is great. There'd be a lot of killing. Eventually, we presume, they'd work out norms for how to live with handguns, but it would take a while. That's where we are with social media. We all really care about reputations,

and we suddenly have this technology that allows us to slander anyone else instantly to draw a mob. So what's happened is people are really, really afraid. I see this on college campuses. People are so afraid to stand up, stand out, say anything unless it's with the mob. If the mob is on their side, then they are so vocal and self-righteous. But what I'm finding is that even moderists are centrist, people are not political, are afraid to speak up and challenge the left. they'll get crucified.

Right. An Associated Press poll last year found that Republican voters want their congressional leaders to stick to conservative principles while Democrats favor compromise. And there are many more differences between the two parties. Your expertise is in moral psychology, which is kind of a broad term encompassing ethic, psychology, and philosophy. Can you talk about how psychology can help us explain these differences? Oh, sure.

It's been a major area of research for a lot of people. there are a lot of, well, if you want to understand left-right differences, some of it is true asymmetries. That is, people on the left psychologically are different from people on the right. And the most consistent differences are that people on the left are higher on openness to experience. They enjoy variety and diversity. And then also they're a little lower on conscientiousness. So you put this all together, and what you get is people on the left, are more interested in immigration, diversity, variety.

Research by Sam Gosling at UT Austin shows that if you look at the dorm rooms of people, he did this study at Berkeley, you go into people's dorm rooms when they're not there. They give you permission to go in. You just take photographs. You code things. And then you show those to other students to just rate, do you think this person is liberal or conservative? People can tell. Liberals are less organized.

They have more high style. They have fewer calendars. Conservatives are more organized, responsible. Their music and books are from a narrower range. So there are psychological differences. Neither one is good or bad, but it does help explain why they differ on issues of immigration, nationalism, patriotism, all those sorts of things.

So you start with those, and that means that people who are born with a certain personality, as they grow up, they're going to find right-wing or left-wing ideas more congenial. Our genes don't predestine us to be on one side, but they make one side or the other more likely. So there's a lot of interesting research on personality and politics. Then the next thing you have to bring in is group dynamics. So you get these two groups fighting it out, and your question was about issues of compromise. Well, yes, it's true that right now the word compromise is a dirty word for Republicans.

And there was some funny episodes, you know, five years ago. A lot of us remember when I forget which journalist was trying to get John Boehner to say the word compromise. And he wouldn't say it because he knows that if he in any way endorsed compromise, his people would consider him a traitor. So is it that the right is more closed-minded and against compromise? It depends a lot on which side feels more embattled, which side feels it's being crushed, which side? is more self-righteous. And so that can shift. That can go back and forth.

There is also the interesting difference that in studies of like trolley dilemmas of, you know, would you push a man off a bridge, one man to save the lives of five, there's some research showing that conservatives are more deontological. That means they go more with absolute rules and principles. Like, no, you don't kill someone. You don't push someone off a bridge. So it is possible that people in the right are. more principled in the sense of these are the rules. You don't break them. Whereas people on the

left are more like, well, you know, you've got to look at the outcomes, do all these tradeoffs. So in that case, I don't know for sure whether it's truly that the right is more opposed to compromise. You have to look at all these different factors. So how can we use psychology to reduce the intensity of these conflicts? I mean, like you say, we're always going to have them. There's always going to be some differences in conflict between, but how do we reduce the intensity of it. Yeah, well, this is where social psychology can be so helpful. Because one of the great, one of the great psychological aphorisms or quotations, there's a Bedouin proverb that says, me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin,

and me, my brother and cousin against the stranger. So we're tribal. We're tribal creatures. And it used to be in American politics, that they would say politics, ends at the water's edge. Sure, we can fight it out, you know, Democrat, Republican, but as soon as as there's a foreign policy issue, we stopped that and we're united. And that was the case when I was a kid. You heard that a lot. But beginning of the 90s, that stopped being the case. Now it's basically me and my brother against our cousin, and we don't care what else is happening. We just hate the cousin, and a matter who we're being attacked by, we're going to focus on fighting the cousin. So our partisanship is kind of stuck. But there's a lot you can do to move things around.

because in addition to being tribal, humans are also really cooperative and we're really good at trade. Our ancestors were really good at leaving their tribe and going out and finding other groups to exchange with. So there's a lot of hope. One of the most consistent findings in social psychology is that when you give groups a superordinate threat or goal, some project to work on together, they tend to drop the tribalism and work together. I was very fortunate to be involved with a group. I was able to moderate a group of poverty experts, some of the top experts on the right and left, on poverty.

And in our first few meetings, we worked for about a year in 2015. We worked for a year together. And our first few meetings was really clear. There was the left team and the right team. And the left team was really focused on economic causes of poverty and structural problems and racism. And the right was really focused on family breakdown and the need for order and discipline

and self-control and delay of gratification. And at first it was really clear, well, you know, actually both sides are actually right, and we just have to figure out a way that we can incorporate all of their insights into the final report. And what was most thrilling was that by the end of this year-long process, there wasn't a right team or a left team anymore. And one of our last meetings,

I gave the groups the option of caucusing separately because we had these final recommendations and, okay, do you guys need to talk separately to be sure you endorse these. And they all said, no, no, we don't, we don't, we don't, no, you know, let's talk about it all together. They really had a sense of, we've been working on this thing for a year, we've come so far, we have a great set of recommendations. So it can take some time. But if you foster relationships in a sense of common or shared group identity with a common goal or project, you can break down the tribalism. Switching gears a little bit to the field of psychology. What have you learned about the political leanings of psychologists themselves? and how does that affect the field's viewpoint on politically controversial topics? Oh my. Well,

so, you know, what's been happening to our country since the 90s or so is that it's almost like a gigantic electromagnet with a positive pole and a negative pole pulling us apart. And we're seeing whole, you know, we're seeing religious denominations splitting over this into the, you know, the more left-wing Episcopalians and the right-wing Episcopalians. And that's been happening in universities. Universities have leaned left for more than 100 years. And that's not really a problem in my view. We don't have to have 50-50 parity and everything. What we must have in the science is we must have the certainty that ideas will be critiqued. So if somebody says something that's, you know, very sort of left, we don't pleases the left. It's got to be the case that someone will

stand up and say, well, wait a second, you're making this assumption. You know, somebody has to be there to say that. And so until the 90s, there were some people around who are not on the left. But what's happened in psychology and in the social sciences more broadly, and it happened especially in the humanities, is they shifted from being on the left or leaning left, two or three to one, to leaning left, 10 to 1, 20 to 1, on some measures 30 or 40 to 1, which means that you will never find someone who's not on the left. Or rather, there are a few, but they don't dare speak up. Even the Centrists, what I find is that even in surveys, even people who say, I'm not on the right, I'm in the middle.

Are you willing to speak up and challenge things if they're politically controversial? No, no, it's just too dangerous. So the social sciences, I think, are breaking down, not entirely, but on politicized topics. If we're talking about race, gender, immigration, inequality, whatever the favorite topics are, I think the research coming out is just not, well, individual research projects can be very good, but the overall output is really tilted, and a lot of ideas are there because they're politically pleasing, not because they're empirically supported.

It's a huge problem. And that's why I started a group with some friends of mine called heterodox academy.org. I urge listeners to go check it out. We make the case that the academy needs more viewpoint diversity. Diversity is a good thing. But the most important kind of diversity is viewpoint diversity. You have to have people who actually think differently,

just to have people who are a different race or sex doesn't help your thinking unless they think differently. And we've been so focused on those demographic diversity things that it's actually made the viewpoint diversity issue even harder. Because when everyone's focused on race and gender diversity, then they're almost all on the left, and they see conservatives as the enemy, as they're racist and sexes. We don't want them here. And this is what's happened in psychology as in the other social sciences. All right, well, Dr. Haid, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate your time. It's been great. My pleasure, Audrey. Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on the topics we discussed, or if you would like to hear more episodes, please go to our website at speakingofpsychology.org. With the American Psychological Association Speaking of Psychology, I'm Audrey Hamilton.