Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized - The Washington ... - 0 views
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polarization in-group social animal political science
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One theme emerges in much of the research: Our politics tend be more emotional now. Policy preferences are increasingly likely to be entangled with a visceral dislike of the opposition. The newly embraced academic term for this is “affective polarization.”
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“It’s feelings based,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.” “It’s polarization that’s based on our feelings for each other, not based on extremely divergent policy preferences.”
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The tendency to form tightly knit groups has roots in evolution, according to experts in political psychology. Humans evolved in a challenging world of limited resources in which survival required cooperation — and identifying the rivals, the competitors for those resources.
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“The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred. Which is really sad,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Yale sociologist and author of “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.”
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No researcher argues that human nature is the sole, or even the primary, cause of today’s polarization. But savvy political operatives can exploit, leverage and encourage it. And those operatives are learning from their triumphs in divide-and-conquer politics.
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“We wouldn’t have civilizations if we didn’t create groups. We are designed to form groups, and the only way to define a group is there has to be someone who’s not in it,” Mason said.
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Experiments have revealed that “children as young as two will prefer other children randomly assigned to the same T-shirt color,”
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Mason and Christakis point to a famous-among-academics experiment from 1954. Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 22 Boy Scouts and separated them into two groups camping at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Only after a week did they learn that there was another group at the far end of the campground.
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What they did next fascinated the research team. Each group developed irrational contempt for the other. The boys in the other group were seen not just as rivals, but as fundamentally flawed human beings. Only when the two groups were asked to work together to solve a common problem did they warm up to one another.
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And because many more districts are now deeply red or blue, rather than a mix of constituencies, House members have fewer reasons to adopt moderate positions.
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“Homo sapiens is a social species; group affiliation is essential to our sense of self. Individuals instinctively think of themselves as representing broad socioeconomic and cultural categories rather than as distinctive packages of traits,”
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Here’s where psychology gives way to political science. The American political system may cultivate “out-group” hatred, as academics put it. One of the scarce resources in this country is political power at the highest levels of government. The country has no parliamentary system in which multiple parties form governing coalitions.
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Add to this fact the redistricting that ensures there are fewer truly competitive congressional races. The two parties have inexorably moved further apart ideologically, and leaders are more likely to be punished — “primaried” — if they reach across the aisle.
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Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford political psychologist who coined the term “affective polarization,” explained in a 2018 paper why people typically identify with a group.
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Human nature hasn’t changed, but technology has. The fragmentation of the media has made it easier to gather information in an echo chamber, Iyengar said. He calls this “sorting.” Not only do people cluster around specific beliefs or ideas, they physically cluster, moving to neighborhoods where residents are likely to look like them and think like them.
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Partisan clustering has increased even within households. In 1965, Iyengar said, only about 60 percent of married couples had the same party registration. Today, the figure is greater than 85 percent
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Asked in the summer of 2022 if they agree or disagree that members of the other party “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals,” about 30 percent in both parties agreed, Mason’s research shows.
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Research shows that affective polarization is intensifying across the political spectrum. Recent survey data revealed that more than half of Republicans and Democrats view the other party as “a threat,” and nearly as many agree with the description of the other party as “evil,” Mason said.
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A recent paper published in the journal Science argued that the three core ingredients of political sectarianism are “othering, aversion, and moralization.” Trump has mastered that recipe. He activates emotional responses in his followers by telling them that they are threatened.