Jan 22, 2024 11:32 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 23, 2024 01:04 AM by C C.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2...ArV8M7TLj0
EXCERPT: . . . Social scientists have taken note of these hardening political divisions, pumping out academic articles and books that add data to what appears to be a steady rise in tribalism. [...] People are instinctively prone to group identification. “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.
Experiments have revealed that “children as young as two will prefer other children randomly assigned to the same T-shirt color,” Christakis writes. What’s most striking is that in the process of defining who is in and who is out of a group, enmity and derision can arise independently of any rational reason for it.
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.
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.
The warring Boy Scouts “have a lot more in common with today’s Democrats and Republicans than we would like to believe,” Mason writes in her book. “In this political environment, a candidate who picks up the banner of ‘us versus them’ and ‘winning versus losing’ is almost guaranteed to tap into a current of resentment and anger across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently divided neatly by party.”
Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford political psychologist who coined the term “affective polarization,” explained in a 2018 paper why people typically identify with a group. “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,” he wrote.
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.
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. 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.
How sorting feeds polarization. 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.... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: . . . Social scientists have taken note of these hardening political divisions, pumping out academic articles and books that add data to what appears to be a steady rise in tribalism. [...] People are instinctively prone to group identification. “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.
Experiments have revealed that “children as young as two will prefer other children randomly assigned to the same T-shirt color,” Christakis writes. What’s most striking is that in the process of defining who is in and who is out of a group, enmity and derision can arise independently of any rational reason for it.
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.
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.
The warring Boy Scouts “have a lot more in common with today’s Democrats and Republicans than we would like to believe,” Mason writes in her book. “In this political environment, a candidate who picks up the banner of ‘us versus them’ and ‘winning versus losing’ is almost guaranteed to tap into a current of resentment and anger across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently divided neatly by party.”
Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford political psychologist who coined the term “affective polarization,” explained in a 2018 paper why people typically identify with a group. “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,” he wrote.
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.
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. 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.
How sorting feeds polarization. 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.... (MORE - missing details)