The Psychology of Politics
Since I have not taken Psychology, I didn’t write most of this so most of it is pulled from various sources which I source at the bottom the article. However, I believe to understand the challenges of Politics you must understand the psychology to why we think like we do.
Motivated Cognition / Motivated Reasoning
And there’s no clearer example than in a paper published way back in the 1950s. The Dartmouth versus Princeton football game of November 1951 was, by all accounts, brutal. One Princeton player broke his nose. One Dartmouth player broke his leg.
Princeton students blamed the Dartmouth team for instigating. The Dartmouth paper accused Princeton’s. In the contentious debates that ensued about “who started it,” psychologists at the two schools united to answer this question: Why did each school have such a different understanding of what happened?
In the weeks after the Princeton-Dartmouth game, the psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril ran a very simple test. Their findings would become the classic example of a concept called motivated reasoning: Our tendency to come to conclusions we’re already favored to believe.
The lesson is simple: “People are more likely to arrive at conclusions … that they want to arrive at,” the psychologist Ziva Kunda
When Gallup polled Americans the week before and the week after the presidential election, Democrats and Republicans flipped their perceptions of the economy. But nothing had actually changed about the economy. What changed was which team was winning.
One crucial thing to know about motivated reasoning is that you often don’t realize you’re doing it. We automatically have an easier time remembering information that fits our worldviews. We’re simply quicker to recognize information that confirms what we already know, which makes us blind to facts that discount it. This is common with violent acts, the Right often assumes it is either a Muslim, Anitfia or BLM. The left is quick to assume it is an alt-right Christian terrorist. When information is coming in early, it is very easy for each side to fall for fake news because they already assumed it and now they have an article that “proves” what they thought all along. This happened with Trump claiming the 3 million votes more that Clinton got were all illegal. Soon there were blogs claiming evidence for this and many people who wanted to believe Trump won the popular vote quickly accepted those blogs even though the local election commissions across the country and many in Red districts and states all said this is non-sense but the truth is ignored for the information that we are biased towards.
None of this psychology is to suggest that people who engage in motivated reasoning are stupid. No, they are just human. For example, a lot of evangelicals voted for Trump because of the simple fact he was the Republican presidential candidate, despite having reason to dismiss him after the Access Hollywood tape where he bragged about sexual assault leaked and has been married multiple times. Republican is the political team they play on. And that allowed them to find ways to justify their support.
Motivated reasoning can affect anyone, and liberals do it, too. Some are retweeting “rogue” federal Twitter accounts that have no verification that they’re indeed written by disgruntled federal staffers. At the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer asked Brooke Binkowski, the head of fact-checking website Snopes.com, if “fake news” targeted toward liberals is on the rise. “Of course yes!” she said.
Motivated Skepticism – the rise of fake news is on both sides because we are skeptical of something positive about our opponent
“We all think of ourselves as being these rational people. We hear evidence, and we process it,” said Peter Ditto, professor of social psychology at University of California at Irvine, when we spoke by phone this week. “What’s clear from decades of social psychological research is that people’s emotions get involved in their reasoning, their motivations, their intuitions. Those shape and bias the way we process information.”
“It’s not that people believe anything they want to believe. People still think and need rationale,” Ditto said. “But the things that we feel change what we count as evidence.”
“People tend to be a lot more skeptical of information they don’t want to believe than information they do want to believe,” he said. He suggested that most users of Facebook would be familiar with this. Someone with an opposing political position on an issue might share an image that you can immediately see is false or misleading — but you’re more motivated to be skeptical than the other person. “People tend to just sort of scoop up information they want to believe and uncritically analyze it,” Ditto said, “and then are much more skeptical and allocate their skepticism in a biased way.”
That compounds over time, so that people compile evidence that supports their view and critically dismiss that which doesn’t, so that the evidence on their side eventually seems overwhelming.
The candidates who prompt the most complaints and the most pushback on articles tend to be those with the most energized bases of support: Trump and Bernie Sanders
That overlap doesn’t surprise Ditto. “The more passionate people are, the more morally convinced they are about the issue, the more they care about that in various other ways, the more biased they’re likely to be,” he said.
But there’s no indication from his research that conservatives or liberals are more likely to use bias in selecting evidence. He’s been conducting meta-analysis on past studies looking at this issue. “Both sides show a clear bias,” he said, “They’re more likely to accept the same information as valid if it supports their political views than if it doesn’t, and the magnitude of that effect is exactly the same” between political sides.
Even whether or not close scrutiny should be applied also differs based on motivation. Trump’s story is “close enough to the truth” for his supporters,” Ditto said. Defenders of Carson’s life story offer a similar argument: “‘What [he’s] saying is basically true, so don’t quibble with me about the details,'” Ditto said. But many of those supporters “just wouldn’t accept that from the other side. Those same people that are saying ‘why quibble on these words’ have a history of going after President Obama’s words and picking them apart very carefully.” That is how you can end up with people thinking Obama is not a legit President because of Trump discrediting him while at the same time being upset that people don’t accept Trump’s legitimacy because he lost the popular vote.
Partisanship – being with a team
Political science has produced evidence since as early as the 1940s suggesting that partisanship is a powerful, stable force in an individual’s political beliefs. We can overlook or excuse a lot of flaws in candidates who share our party label. Individual factors still matter, though. Certain people are unpleasant enough – in their ideas, behavior or personality – to preclude our support, even if they’re on the “right” team but overall we overlook the log in out team player for the dust speck in the other team.
Cognitive Dissonance: Why Political Discussions Turn Nasty
There’s a reason there are rules about not talking politics and religion in mixed gatherings: These tend to be emotionally-laden subjects, where reason quickly cedes ground to verbal (or actual) fisticuffs.
One reason is a mix of cognitive dissonance and how we’ve set our political system up. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we feel when we hold two competing value-based assessments or behaviors. For instance, several of the Founding Fathers openly felt that slavery was morally wrong while continuing to own slaves: This is a cognitively dissonant behavior. In George Washington’s case, he apparently resolved it by freeing his own slaves upon his death. This act didn’t deprive him of any of the benefits of his own slave-owning, but it allowed him to believe that he was working to end the practice.
Voting citizens have long been combating cognitive dissonance during elections, though. We’re bound to disagree with our preferred candidates on some policies or issues, but we still justify voting for them. In fact, a 2015 study out of Stanford and Harvard universities found that though voters have varied and complex policy preferences, they change those preferences to align with their chosen party’s platform. That minimizes that icky feeling they might get because they’re supporting a party with conflicting values or positions.
This could explain some people’s zealous support of the U.S. president, despite their disapproval of his disparaging tweets or prejudiced statements. “The dilemma for voters is that they chose this candidate to be president with full knowledge and expectation that he behaved this way,” says Cooper about Trump’s controversial tweets. “The more he engages in it, the more dissonance they will have, and the more voters will reduce their dissonance by becoming even more positive about Trump.”
Take Trumps administration’s banning of immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries. Data suggests that citizens of these countries pose little terroristic threat to Americans, considering they committed no fatal terrorist attacks in the U.S. from 1975-2015. So, the risk these immigrants pose statistically is not great enough to threaten national security and warrant such a drastic measure. In this way, the ban indicates cognitive dissonance among its enactors and supporters: They are justifying a ban that aims to increase Americans’ safety, though there’s strong evidence it will not do so.
“When events make us experience existential threats that are in contradiction to expectations of happiness and well-being, we are driven to make changes in order to restore consistency to our world,” Cooper says. “Finding scapegoats to explain the precarious state of the world during hard times helps people’s mental equation.”
And then there’s the proliferation of fake news and presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway’s accusation of alternative facts. This kind of confirmation bias, or the tendency to only accept information that conforms with pre-existing attitudes, is tied to our drive to resolve psychological discrepancies. We search for information that is consistent with our beliefs and follow like-minded news sources to avoid cognitive dissonance.
In politics, and especially in our two-party system, this is far more difficult. We have a “whole package” mindset; some areas even have a “straight ticket” ballot option where we don’t even need to think about individual candidates. If you’re a Democrat, you can just vote for all the Democrats, up and down the ballot. Ditto, if you’re a Republican (or any other party on the ballot).
In a perspective that supporting a candidate means supporting all of the candidate’s positions, it’s very difficult. Cognitive dissonance comes into play, and one of the first ways of resolving cognitive dissonance for many people is to attack the source of that dissonance.
The source of that dissonance can be somebody else simply pointing it out. “You can’t be progressive if you support Hillary Clinton”: This is a threat to identity, and it’s not surprising that some people respond to such threats through anger.
Political views become our personal identity, we often describe ourselves as often a proud liberal or a proud patriot, a Christian, a Republican, a Progressive early in are “Who are You?” elevator speeches we give to people.
Psychologists theorize that’s because our partisan identities get mixed up with our personal identities. Which would mean that an attack on our strongly held beliefs is an attack on the self.
“The brain’s primary responsibility is to take care of the body, to protect the body,” Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, says. “The psychological self is the brain’s extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our [brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has for protecting the body.”
It’s like we have an immune system for uncomfortable thoughts.
Recently, Kaplan has found more evidence that we tend to take political attacks personally. In a study recently published in Scientific Reports, he and collaborators took 40 self-avowed liberals who reported having “deep convictions,” put them inside in a functional MRI scanner, and started challenging their beliefs. Then they watched which parts of the participants’ brains lit up.
Their conclusion: When the participants were challenged on strongly held beliefs, there was more activation in the parts of the brain that are thought to correspond with self-identity and negative emotions.
Different Moral Foundations make that amazing Facebook rant rock solid to you and your friends but fail at convincing your ideologically different opponents.
According to a psychological theory called “moral foundations,” it’s no surprise that these arguments fail spectacularly at changing minds.
Moral foundations is the idea that people have stable, gut-level morals that influence their worldview. The liberal moral foundations include equality, fairness, and protection of the vulnerable. Conservative moral foundations favor in-group loyalty, moral purity, and respect for authority.
These moral foundations are believed to be somewhat consistent over our lifetimes, and they may have a biological basis as well. (There’s some fascinating experimental work that shows that conservatives are more excited — as measured by perspiration — by negative or alarming images.)
Moral foundations explain why messages highlighting equality and fairness resonate with liberals and why more patriotic messages like “make America great again” get some conservative hearts pumping.
The thing is, we often don’t realize that people have moral foundations different than our own.
When we engage in political debates, we all tend to overrate the power of arguments we find personally convincing — and wrongly think the other side will be swayed.
On gun control, for instance, liberals are persuaded by stats like, “No other developed country in the world has nearly the same rate of gun violence as does America.” And they think other people will find this compelling, too.
Conservatives, meanwhile, often go to this formulation: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
What both sides fail to understand is that they’re arguing a point that their opponents may be inherently deaf to.
In a study, psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg had around 200 conservative and liberal study participants write essays to sway political opponents on the acceptance of gay marriage or to make English the official language of the United States.
Almost all the participants made the same mistake.
Only 9 percent of the liberals in the study made arguments that reflected conservative moral principles. Only 8 percent of the conservative made arguments that had a chance of swaying a liberal.
There’s a dynamic playing out in the current health care debate, and in health care debates of ages past. Liberals make their arguments for expanding coverage in terms of equality and fairness (i.e., everyone should have a right to health care), while conservatives make their case grounded in self-determination (i.e., the government shouldn’t tell me how to live) and fiscal security (i.e., paying for health care will bankrupt us all).
No wonder why it’s so hard to change another person’s mind
Dehumanizing groups of people lead to prejudices
Nour Kteily, a psychologist at Northwestern University, conducts research on one of the darkest, most ancient, and most disturbing mental programs encoded into our minds: dehumanization, the ability to see fellow men and women as less than human.
In Kteily’s studies, participants — typically groups of mostly white Americans — are shown this (scientifically inaccurate) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human. And then they are told to rate members of different groups — such as Muslims, Americans, and Swedes — on how evolved they are on a scale of 0 to 100.
Many people in these studies give members of other groups a perfect score, 100, fully human. But many others give others scores putting them closer to animals.
With the “Ascent of Man” tool, Kteily and collaborators Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill found that, on average, Americans rate other Americans as being highly evolved, with an average score in the 90s. But disturbingly, many also rated Muslims, Mexican immigrants, and Arabs as less evolved.
“We typically see scores that average 75, 76,” for Muslims, Kteily says. And about a quarter of study participants will rate Muslims on a score of 60 or below.
People who dehumanize are more likely to blame Muslims as a whole for the actions of a few perpetrators. They are more likely to support policies restricting the immigration of Arabs to the United States. People who dehumanize low-status or marginalized groups also score higher on a measure called “social dominance orientation,” meaning that they favor inequality among groups in society, with some groups dominating others.
And, in a study, blatant dehumanization of Muslims and Mexican immigrants was strongly correlated with Trump support — and the correlation was stronger for Trump than any of the other Republican candidates.
Fear – each side fears the intentions of the other side
One of those studies explored the question of what white people feel when they are reminded that minorities will eventually be the majority. And it found that they begin to feel less warm toward members of other races. A more recent experiment showed that reminding white people of this trend increased support for Trump.
What this doesn’t mean is that all white people harbor extreme racial animus. It means fear is an all-too-easy button for politicians to press. We fear unthinkingly. It directs our actions. And it nudges us to believe the person who says he will vanquish our fears.
“People who think of themselves as not prejudiced (and liberal) demonstrate these threat effects,” says Jennifer Richeson, a leading researcher on racial bias.
There’s also this fact to contend with: Negative, scary information is almost always more sticky and memorable than positive information. “Negative events capture attention and information processing more readily, elicit strong emotions more easily, and are more memorable,” psychologists Daniel Fessler, Anne Pisor, and Colin Holbrook, wrote in a recent study.
They showed participants 14 “plausible but false” statements, like “Kale contains thallium, a toxic heavy metal, that the plant absorbs from soil.” Some of the statements, like the one above, implied a warning (“don’t eat Kale!”), others were positive, like “Eating carrots results in significantly improved vision.”
Participants often found the threatening statements more credible than the non-threatening one, and this was especially true among more conservative participants (and especially true for social conservatives, as compared to fiscal conservative). This is not because conservatives are more gullible. It’s because they tend to be more vigilant.
Savvy politicians understand this, and craft messages that stoke that innate vigilance (whether concern is warranted or not). It’s hard to blame people for being afraid of threats. It’s just in our nature. But you can blame politicians who prey on it.
Other researchers have arrived at similar findings.
Last year, Willer and Feinberg published a paper that found that racial attitudes predicted support for the conservative Tea Party movement. In one study, they showed participants an artificially darkened portrait of President Barack Obama — to maximally remind participants he’s African American. “White participants shown the darkened photo were more likely to report they supported the Tea Party relative to a control condition,” the study reported.
Similarly, they found that reminding study participants about a coming minority-majority America made them more likely to support the Tea Party platform.
Heard Mentality – We learn from those around us and our families
In the 1960s, Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura showed how easy it is to teach kids to act violently — by showing them an adult acting violently.
In this famous experiment, Bandura showed young children — between 3 and 6 years old — a video of an adult wailing on an inflatable “bobo doll” (see in the video below). Other children in the study did not see an adult behaving aggressively to the doll.
And sure enough: The kids who saw the aggressive behavior were more aggressive themselves when playing with the doll later on.
It’s a simple experiment with a simple conclusion: As humans, even at an early age — we learn what’s socially acceptable by watching other people.
Is there Hope? What can we do to bring people together?
So my advice here is two-fold: First, let’s stop acting like “I support John Smith for Congressperson” is the same thing as “I think that every value held and every action committed by John Smith is acceptable.” Even if there were a thousand candidates, it would be impossible to find one that is utterly unimpeachable. If you know somebody to be supporting Trump because of his bigotry and his callous comments towards his perceived enemies, by all means, judge them harshly for that. If you know somebody to be supporting Clinton because of the work she did as First Lady of painting urban blacks as “Superpredators” and building the prison industrial complex, that’s definitely something to be judgmental over.
Second, let’s keep the power of cognitive dissonance in mind when talking politics with others. This election year even more than most, the two major party choices leave a lot to be desired. I see people putting a lot of emotional stock in either defending their choice to stick with Clinton or Trump, or in supporting a dark horse Third Party candidate. When information comes out that challenges that position, they’re likely to be hostile and argumentative. Be sensitive to that.
The more we know about why people hold to ideas, the more effective we’ll be at helping them to change.
So, what can we do to make sure we’re all communicating effectively when dissonance is so prevalent? The aforementioned study posits that close, empathetic relationships can change partisanship and policy positions. And Cooper emphasizes the value of understanding, cooperative conversation. “The key is to afford people the opportunity to entertain different points of view without seeing it as a discrepancy,” he says. “The point is that the more a political discourse resembles a frontal attack on a person’s attitudes or values, the more it will be dismissed and avoided. Showing consistency with other values that a person supports allows for greater acceptance and compromise.”
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/cognitive-dissonance-political-discussions-turn-nasty/