Speaking of Psychology - The psychology behind our political divide, with Keith Payne, PhD

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

The U.S. feels more polarized than ever, and with election day around the corner, many of us are feeling the strain of political divisions among our friends, family members and loved ones. Keith Payne, PhD, author of “Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide,” discusses the psychology that underlies how most people think about politics, how U.S. history has led us to where we are, whether polarization is really worse than it used to be, and what, if anything, we can we do to bridge the divide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. If you listen to the news or to political pundits, you've probably heard that Americans are more politically polarized than ever before. We've sorted ourselves into opposing red and blue camps and we can't seem to see eye to eye on anything. With Election Day around the corner, many of us are feeling the strain of those divisions. When you're getting into an angry debate with a childhood friend on Facebook or biting your tongue in a family dinner to keep the peace, the political divide can feel unbridgeable.

Amid that strain, psychologists' research can offer some insight. It can help us understand where our political identities come from, why we think about politics the way we do, and why it's so hard to talk across the political divide. So what is the psychology that underlies how most people think about politics? How did American history and our own places in it lead each of us where we are? Is the political divide today really worse than it was years ago? Does social media cause political polarization or does it just reflect it?

And what can we do to bridge the divide and maintain connections with those we disagree with? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Keith Payne, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Payne is a social psychologist who studies inequality and political polarization. His work has been featured in the New York Times and the Atlantic and on NPR. He's author of the 2017 book, The Broken Ladder, How Inequality Effects the Way We Live, Think and Die.

His new book, coming out in October, is called Good, Reasonable People, The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide. Dr. Payne, thank you for joining me today. Well, thanks so much for having me. Your new book starts with a very personal note. It opens with stories about your childhood in Kentucky. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how it led to your interest in polarization? Yeah, so I grew up in a small town in western Kentucky, a town called Macyo that has about 400

people that is, I believe, as of the recent census count, still, 100% white and has very little diversity when I was growing up, overwhelmingly conservative, white, and Christian. And the kinds of dynamics that I saw growing up within my family, during especially starting around the 1990s, where some people started to pull away from the way that other people in my community tended to think, I thought that was just something that was happening. in my family, something that was happening in my little town. And it turned out over time, I started to realize that those were the same kinds of divides that were happening across the country as a whole. So people were sorting themselves more and more based on factors like

race and religion and education. And I started to see those cleavages happening within my own family. And as polarization became more and more intense and emotional and widespread over the last 20 or 30 years, I've been drawn to look more and more closely at the psychology of it and what's happening at a broader level. There's a quote in your new book that struck me, which is, there is no liberal mind or conservative mind. There are only human minds trying to make sense of the circumstances in which they find themselves. That idea goes against what I think many of us believe, which is that there are real differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of personality or other attributes. Can you explain what you meant by that and what the research is behind that statement?

There's definitely differences between liberals and conservatives or Democrats and Republicans in terms of what they think, the content of their beliefs and their attitudes. But in terms of the basic psychology behind how we make sense. of politics, how we make sense of our social worlds more broadly, we are all working with the same hardware, right? We've all got the same kinds of minds. And what we're doing is we're living in different circumstances, different social worlds, different geographies often. And what we're all doing is trying to make sense of that world from the perspective of the social groups and the contexts that we belong to. So there is a lot of research. about the relationship between personality and political differences, and there are some personality

differences between Democrats and Republicans on average. For example, Democrats or liberals tend to be higher in a trait called openness to experience. There are a few other personality traits that consistently correlate with political differences. But the thing to keep in mind is those differences are quite small. They're not zero. They're real. But it amounts to showing that Democrats are a few percentage points higher on a trait like openness to experience than Republicans. Republicans might be a few percentage points higher on traits like the need for structure or need to think about things in a clear structured way. But those few percentage points that separate liberals and conservatives on those personality dimensions don't go anywhere close

to explaining the giant gulfs we see between people based on their social groups, based on social identities, which are often tied to these demographic differences. Now, you make the point in the book that people think that political polarization is about policy disagreements and different philosophies. But really, as you were just saying, they're about identity. Can you elaborate on that more? When we talk about political ideology, what we're talking about is a coherent set of political principles or at least an interrelated set of values and issue stands. That's what we mean when I say to somebody has a liberal ideology or a conservative ideology.

But social scientists have known since at least the 1960s that if you look at the actual views of the American public, they don't. tend to fall along any consistent ideological lines when it comes to issues and political principles. So if you look at somebody's attitude toward one issue like tax cuts or tax increases and you look at their attitudes toward other issues like government spending or government budget cuts, you would think that logically those two things would be connected to each other. but they're actually very weakly correlated with each other when we look at real people's polling or survey data. And if you look at the same person's responses over time, if you ask them the exact same question about a policy issue or a political principle,

they often give you a very different response six months or a year later. So they don't even agree with themselves very well. And political scientists have estimated that if you think of an ideation, as a coherent and stable interconnected set of ideas, only about 15% of the American public has what would qualify as an ideology in that sense. The vast majority of us, about 85%, don't have what we would really consider an ideology. What we have instead is a social identity. We know who our people are. We might identify strongly with one political party or the other, and we might really dislike that the other

group, but those sentiments are tied much more closely to our social group identities than to anything about policy or political philosophy. And all of this would seem to add up to the fact that political polling is very imprecise, right? I mean, people will answer the same question differently on a different day of the week. Yeah, it could be that polling is imprecise, but I think probably more than that, at least polling, we know we can quantify how imprecise it is. We have a margin of error.

And so we can estimate how off we are likely to be. The thing is, I think when people are inconsistent over time, it's usually because they're giving us the best answer they have at time one. And then when we contact them a year later, they're giving us the best answer they have at time two. And those aren't always very stable. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that those of us who are more, reading and writing and talking about politics all the time,

assume that everybody else is a political junkie like us. So the so-called elites like journalists and academics and political leaders themselves, we eat and sleep and breed this stuff, and we assume that other people do as well. But that's just not true. It's not that central or meaningful in the daily lives of most people. And so imagine if you called people up and just assumed that they had detailed opinions about classical music or something that's esoteric to most ordinary people. And you ask them detailed questions about their preferences and attitudes in the area of classical music.

A lot of times people would give you an answer, but it might not mean anything. It might just be what they're thinking at the moment. And then if you called them up a year later and asked them a question again, they're probably not going to be. I have a consistent opinion on that because it's not something they spend their time thinking about. In your new book, you also talk about what you're calling the psychological immune system and how we use it to validate what we already believe. And you also talk about something called motivated reasoning. So can you talk about those two concepts, how they're different, how they're the same, and how we use them? Right. So motivated reasoning is the idea that whenever we're thinking

and reasoning. We're not just reasoning for the purpose of finding truth. That's one thing we're trying to do. We're trying to find true answers about the world. But another thing we're trying to do at the same time is to reassure ourselves that we're good and reasonable people. And that's where the name for the book comes from. So a lot of the thinking we do is aimed at reassuring ourselves that we're good members of our social group, that we're good and reasonable people. And the people in our groups that mean a lot to us are as well. So motivated reason, is one of the main mechanisms that we deploy in what I've called the or what psychologists have called the psychological immune system. The idea behind

the psychological immune system is that we have a suite of psychological processes, thought processes that we use to defend our sense of self as a good and reasonable member of our groups akin to the way that the biological immune system destroys biological threats to the body. So the psychological immune system is similar to other ideas in psychology like coping with stress or defense mechanisms from an older Freudian point of view. It's the ways that we go about coming up with interpretations of new information, rationalizations, and justifications for whatever we do or say or think to interpret all that in a way that adds up to this psychological bottom line that I'm a good and reasonable person. And is that different from confirmation bias? Because as I was reading the book, I was thinking, you know, there's definitely a relationship going on here that people find information. They accept it. They ingest it. They believe it because it comports with things that they were already thinking. Confirmation bias is one of the tools we use for sure. So confirmation bias is the tendency to look for or generate evidence that's consistent with ideas that we already believed are true. So that's definitely.

only one tool that we use as part of the psychological immune system, as part of this idea of motivated reasoning. But the psychological immune system is broader than that. Sometimes it can be confirmation bias that serves the goal of reassuring us that we're a good person. Sometimes it's changing our opinion and taking on the new opinion, maybe a social group that means a lot to us, if that's what makes us feel like a good member of that group. I was just wondering, again, as I was reading the book, whether you believe that it's actually possible to change other people's opinions? Well, I think it's possible for people's opinions to change.

That's not the same thing as saying it's possible to change other people's opinions. Psychologists talk about something called the cognitive response principle, which is the idea that any time you present information or an argument or a persuasive attempt to somebody to try to change what they believe, they never change in response to that external influence that you've tried to to exert. If they change, it's because they've generated cognitive responses, thoughts of their own that they then listen to and change based on their own inner thought processes. So, for example, if you try to change somebody's opinion and their internal monologue is, well, that's a crazy argument. That doesn't make any sense at all. Then your attempt is probably going to backfire

because you presented them with arguments for X and their thoughts are that X is false. So they're going to listen to their own thoughts. And in that case, they're not going to change their opinion. Maybe they're even more opposed to your argument than they were before. But if you're in a circumstance where you provide people with an argument or a persuasive attempt and their cognitive of response to that is positive, then they might change their opinion based on their own thought processes. So every time we try to change somebody else's opinion, we're just setting an occasion for them to generate their own arguments and listen to themselves. Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the carpet underneath looks brand new while the rest of it looks,

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divisions. How has that history contributed to the divisions we're seeing today? So when we look around us and try to make sense of the world, a lot depends on the arrangements and the systems and the group statuses that are in that environment around us. And those circumstances and those systems have been put into place by historical processes that started long before we were born. One of the factors that I look at in the book is the way that the United States Civil War and the Reconcelebring, period following the Civil War, set up systems and structures related to racial inequality, especially in the South, the resistance to racial equality during the reconstruction period. So you can look at census data on the number of people who were enslaved in each county

on the eve of the Civil War in 1860. And political scientists have found that that is a good point. predictor of white Americans' political leanings today. And the connection, in my view, is that those places that were more dependent on slavery in 1860, during the period following the Civil War, set up systems that were more unequal, more segregated by race, led to Jim Crow segregation for about 100 years. and those places are still more racially unequal today. And it's not just a broad north-south difference.

You can look county to county, and those places that had more slavery because the soil was more favorable to growing cotton versus the county next door that might have had a geography that didn't favor growing cotton. You can see county-to-county differences today in the politics of the white-and-black residents

in those counties. So what seems to be happening is that people don't on a general day-to-day basis go around thinking about what was happening in 1860. What they do is look around them today. And in places that have a lot of racial inequality, the average white American tends to interpret that as something not about history and systems that have led to disadvantages for black Americans. they tend to interpret that as something about current day motivations and behaviors of white and black Americans. So white Americans today who live in a place that used to have a lot of slavery tend to think that racial inequality is due to black Americans not working as hard. And that is highly correlated with Republican identity, whereas in those same areas, those same counties with lots of racial inequality today, black Americans, tend to interpret that same racial inequality as something about the history and the systems of

racial discrimination. And that is highly correlated with the democratic identity. So given how polarized everything was at that point in our history as we were talking about the Civil War and Reconstruction, are we more or less polarized today? Is there any way of knowing whether qualitatively or quantitatively, it's different? Well, I don't know if we compare it to the Civil War, I would say we're probably at the most polarized in some ways than we have been since the Civil War and the aftermath. But whether we're more polarized today than we were, say, 30 or 40 years ago, depends on whether we're talking about polarization in terms of issues.

versus polarization in terms of group identities and emotions. Because if you look at issue stands and policy preferences, Republicans and Democrats today aren't very far apart. On the other hand, if you look at how strongly people identify with their political groups and how much antagonism they feel toward the other side, that has really grown over the last 30 or 40 years. Do you think that social media and partisan news channels are driving some of this polarization, or are they just reflecting the divisions that exist anyway?

Well, one thing that social media and polarized news outlets do is magnified division that's there, make it easy to communicate and spread that polarization. But again, it depends on what exactly you mean by polarization here. So social media is very good at spreading outrage. And moral outrage in particular is something that makes a post more likely to go viral. So in that sense, social media is critical in the spread and possibly the growth of polarization. But if you look at other metrics that are often blamed on social media like the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories, there the evidence is not so clear. I think the jury is still out on the role of social media in spreading that misinformation.

There's an interesting set of studies that recently came out looking at how Americans' beliefs in misinformation and conspiracy theories has changed over the last 30 or 40 years going back well before social media existed. And it turns out that the rate of beliefs in conspiracy theories has been roughly constant over the last 40 years. It's just that some conspiracy theories have fallen out of fashion and other conspiracy theories. have taken their place. We have this sense that social media is the driver of all of this fake information being spread around. But I think if that was the case, you would see a sharp rise in the overall beliefs in conspiracy theories over the last 10 years or so. And that just doesn't seem to be the case. Let's talk for a minute about your previous book, which was about inequality and how inequality affects how people think and behave. What's the role of inequality

in driving polarization? One of the effects of inequality increasing over the last 30 years is that, you know, there have always been the rich and the poor, but the rich and the poor are so much further apart from each other today than they were 30 years ago, right? So the richest five or 10 or 1% have drastically more money and wealth than they did in the 70s or even the 80s. And the coming apart of the relatively rich and the relatively poor has a number of consequences. They're social and health related, but also political.

And the chief effect that I think we see in terms of American politics is that when people find themselves either on a higher rung or a bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, they tend to justify and rationalize why it is that. they're there, right? So we've done studies, for example, that if we give people feedback, that they have more money and wealth than other people they know. And we ask them why that might be. So this is not necessarily people who actually do have more money, but we're giving them randomized feedback in a study. The typical response is to say, well, I worked hard and I earned that money. If we take identical group of people and tell them you have less money or less wealth than people like you. Why do you think that is? They look at the exact same situation and say, well, it's because the system is unfair and I was disadvantaged by the following rigged system.

And so people who end up on the top or the bottom of the economic ladder don't tend to attribute it to the luck of the draw or accidents of history. They tend to think, I'm a good and reasonable person. So here's how I must have gotten here, right? And fill in those blanks with various justifications and rationalizations. So one of the consequences of that is that when people either feel richer than others or are actually richer than others, they tend to think they earned it and they tend to oppose, you know, redistributive policies and policies meant to help the poor because they think, well, I earned this through hard work and so can other people. Whereas when people occupy lower socioeconomic rungs, they tend to think, well, the system is broken

and it's creating disadvantages for me. So in that way, the rationalizations people come up with for their own economic status feed into what we believe about political groups and political policies. And as inequality arises and their richest 10% get further and further from the poorest 10% that just exacerbates those political differences that go along with income inequality. I thought it was really interesting that you talked to people with, in some cases, a lot of money and that they were still, they had a sense that they weren't really rich, they didn't really have quite enough, that there was this sense of dissatisfaction. And I'm wondering, does that conflict with the work of, say, Dan Gilbert, who found that if you make about $70-oddousand-a-dollar a year,

you don't get any happier than if you make a million dollars a year. So money makes a difference up to a certain point, like you said, in that research a few years ago, it was somewhere around 70,000. Maybe it would be a bit higher today. But yeah, there's this diminishing marginal return when you look at the relationship between money and happiness. And I think it's actually consistent with the idea that people adapt to where they are and start and keep comparing upward to those who have more.

So at some point, more money doesn't bring more happiness. And I think that's in part because once you've got, say, $200,000 a year and you're well above that threshold for increased happiness, you're comparing yourself not to people who make $60,000 anymore. Now you're comparing to people who make $500,000. And so there's this shifting upward comparison that happens as people make more money. And it's this fascinating, subjective, squishiness that comes along with the idea of having enough. It's a constantly moving target.

Going back to the issue of polarization, do you have any advice or thoughts based on the work that you've done on how people can bridge the gap? Well, it's a difficult question, and I won't pretend to have easy answers to difficult questions. But here's what I think the research suggests. if we understand polarization as having to do with our social identities, and we understand that what people on both sides of the aisle are doing is trying to make sense of what my status is in society and the social groups I belong to and reassuring ourselves that we're good and reasonable people

and good members of our groups, when we're tempted to get into an argument with your relative on Facebook or at the Thanksgiving dinner, et cetera, I think it helps to step away from just, trying to prove them wrong in terms of whatever argument they're making or whatever ideas they're sharing. And to ask the question, what are they trying to do here? How are they using politics or how are they using this argument to try to reassure themselves that they're a good and valuable person? And then take a step back and say, maybe I'm doing the same thing. How am I

using this argument to defend my sense that I'm a good and reasonable person? And it's not necessarily going to change either person's ideas about the political issue. But once you start interpreting that interaction as two people doing the best they can to reassure themselves that they're good and reasonable people, it's a very different conversation than if you're just focused narrowly on the political outrage of the moment. So last question, what's next for you on the research front? Are you, you have a new book percolating up there in your brain? No new book on the horizon yet. focused on this one at the moment. But I'm really interested in understanding how these larger scale historical forces, like the ones we were talking about, whether it's related to slavery and reconstruction, or later century, the Great Migration and other kinds of demographic and cultural and historical changes have set the stage for a lot of the psychological processes that we see going on now.

So that relationship between history and sometimes very ancient history and current-based psychology is what I'm really focused on right now. All right. Well, Dr. Payne, I want to thank you for joining me today. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thanks so much for having me. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman.

Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver. it in as little as 30 minutes, so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order.

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