This post is a review of Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide. By Keith Payne. Viking. 272 pp. $29.
The election of 2024 serves as a reminder, if we need one, that Americans are deeply divided about politics, policies and the threat to democracy. In Good Reasonable People, Keith Payne (a Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and author of The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects The Way We Think, Live, and Die) draws on studies in his field and his own experiences growing up in a working-class, Christian family in rural Kentucky to provide an analysis of what political scientists, political strategists and politicians know but the rest of us don’t fully understand: the decisions most voters make about American politics reflect the “meaning and mission” of the group – ethnic, racial, religious and national – to which they feel most closely connected.
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To demonstrate that most of us do not have a coherent, consistent set of political principles or “issue opinions,” Payne cites a study in which participants completed surveys on a range of topics, such as whether the government should impose a tax on wealth or monitor citizens’ phone calls and social media sites to protect against terrorism. The experimenters then changed the answers on a few questions, returned the questionnaires and asked the participants to elaborate on their responses. Only 22% of them noticed the switches. And a majority defended answers they had not given with “rational-sounding explanations.”
This experiment, it seems to me, does not fully justify Payne’s conclusion that most Americans are “innocent of ideology,” especially in the wake of the doctrinal consolidation of the Republican and Democratic parties. Acknowledging that social media spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories, Payne effectively challenges assertions that belief in them is greater than it was in the 1970s. However, he does not address the role of social media in bringing extremists together and making it easier for them to organize and act.
Payne does make a compelling case that when an issue reinforces or threatens group identities and the political party to which members have pledged allegiance has taken a definitive position, “things play out differently.” Our “psychological immune system” kicks in, “we know the conclusion we want to reach, we generate the arguments, we believe those arguments,” and information that challenges them “rarely stands a chance.”
A clever experiment, Payne reveals, found that when Republicans were “the bad guys,” Democrats were more likely to embrace baseless conspiracy theories and vice versa. In fact, a comprehensive study using data about civilizations over several centuries found that the more group loyalty was valued, the more its members committed violence against other groups. Recently, Payne adds, when teenagers were assigned to two groups, based solely on their overestimation or underestimation of the number of dots in a picture or preferred a painting by Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky, and given no opportunity to come together, they rated the boys in their group as more likable than those in the outgroup.
Payne does not, alas, adequately explain how in our pluralistic society, Americans navigate loyalty to multiple groups when their political agendas conflict. Or why the length of time a county spent as a frontier continues to influence the political allegiance of the people living there now. Payne indicates that college students do not become more liberal over time; they hold these views when they arrive on campus. Without elaborating, however, he acknowledges that they do become more concerned about “group-based inequalities… the main driving forces behind political identities” and now vote predominantly for Democrats.
Payne realizes that there is no “clear way to break the fever of partisan hostility anytime soon.” Good Reasonable People concludes, however, with practical first steps designed to reduce the temperature. Payne recommends publicizing studies demonstrating that on important policies Republicans and Democrats actually agree more than they disagree. Far more than facts and evidence presented as in a debate, he points out, sharing an individual’s real-life experience with, say, gun violence, same-sex marriage, or abortion increases the likelihood that partisans will respect a view they do not endorse. Trust can also be enhanced when both sides believe they have been heard. And both sides can sometimes collaborate on an initiative that benefits their neighborhood.
Most important, Payne emphasizes, we must see ourselves and others as “the product of our history and circumstances,” doing our best to make our way in a complicated, sometimes harsh world. While at the same time understanding that we have a duty to participate in decisions about the future of our country using “words and ballots rather than blood and bullets.”
Source link : https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/this-is-america/202410/the-psychology-driving-our-partisan-politics
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Publish date : 2024-10-15 13:01:26
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