Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide - Hardcover

Payne, Keith

 
9780593491942: Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593491947 ISBN 13: 9780593491942
Verlag: Viking, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A leading social scientist explains the psychology of our current social divide and how understanding it can help reduce the conflicts it causes

There has been much written about the impact of polarization on elections, political parties, and policy outcomes. But Keith Payne’s goal is more personal: to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. This book is about how ordinary people think about politics, why talking about it is so hard, and how we can begin to mend the personal bonds that are fraying for so many of us.

Drawing upon his own research and his experience growing up in a working class, conservative Christian family in small town Kentucky, Payne argues that there is a near-universal human tendency to believe that people who are different from us are irrational or foolish. The fundamental source of our division is our need to flexibly rationalize ideas in order to see ourselves as good people. 

Understanding the psychology behind our political divide provides clues about how we can reduce the damage it is causing. It won’t allow us to undo our polarization overnight, but it can give us the tools to stop going around in circles in frustrating arguments. It can help us make better choices about how we engage in political debates, how policy makers and social media companies deal with misinformation, and how we deal with each other on social media. It can help us separate, if we choose to, our political principles from our personal relationships so that we can nurture both.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Keith Payne is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an international leader in the psychology of economic and racial inequality, he has published more than a hundred articles and book chapters. His research has been recognized with awards from the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the International Social Cognition Network. His book The Broken Ladder was recommended by President Obama as one of the best books of 2018, and his research has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and NPR’s Hidden Brain. He has also written for general audiences in Scientific American and Psychology Today.

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A lot of writing has analyzed what polarization means for electoral horse races. Because the country is evenly divided, news stories and essays tend to focus on events and ideas that might tip a close election. That means they focus on factors like inflation, gas prices, how well the economy is doing, candidate messaging, and how much candidates have spent on political advertising. The intense news coverage creates the false impression that those are factors that drive politics for most people. In reality, those factors might only shift ten or twenty thousand votes. They are important for election outcomes, but in a country that is divided nearly fifty‑fifty, every tiny factor that influences 1 or 2 percent of the votes matters for election outcomes. Elections are obviously important, but the factors that swing close elections are not the factors that explain why the vast majority of people vote the way they do or believe the things they believe. This book is about why we are evenly divided in the first place, and that has little to do with how the economy is doing or political ads.

Plenty of essays and books have delved into the differences between progressivism and liberalism. Or neoconservatism and traditional conservatism. Or why traditional conservatism is really classical liberalism. All of the isms turn political and social life into a complex web of ideologies that might be important for academics and journalists but don’t mean much for the average person. Abstract ideas like socialism, racism, or fascism have become a primary way scholars go about understanding politics, and I think that’s a shame. The problem is that isms take interesting things that human beings do and turn them into abstractions with fuzzy boundaries. Then, when we want to talk about people doing interesting things, we have to argue that this particular thing is an instance of the general abstraction. Is this policy a case of socialism? Is that decision an instance of racism?

Throughout the book, I try to avoid using abstract isms. My goal is more personal. I want to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. Whenever I encounter an ism, I want to take it apart and ask what people are actually doing, why they do it, and what it means to them. This book is not about politicians or political strategists or party organizations. It is about ordinary people making sense of their world in the best way they know how.

Sometimes it is shocking how differently people make sense of the same world. It has become more and more apparent for many of us in recent years that other people we thought we knew don’t just disagree with us; they see the world in a deeply different way than we do. The question is: Why? In this book I try to answer that question by understanding how people think about politics, the deeper meanings and identities behind our political worldviews,and why talking about it is so hard.

Most psychological accounts of the differences between liberals and conservatives focus on personality traits. They produce explanations in the form of “Liberals are like this, but conservatives are like that.” One popular theory argues that liberals, but not conservatives, are high on a personality trait called openness to experience.People who are open to experience like to try new and different things. They like to travel, to eat strange new foods from cultures around the world, and to listen to kinds of music they’ve never heard before. They like to do all the things that people low in openness to experience call weird. People who are low on the trait have more conventional tastes. They like traditional food, art, and entertainment. They like to do things they consider normal. It is easy to see how being open to experience fits our stereotyped mental images of cosmopolitan, epicurean liberals, while being less open fits our images of buttoned‑up conservatives. According to this theory, the liberal mind is a playful mind, and the conservative mind is a cautious mind.

One version of the openness theory argues that these personality differences are rooted in biological differences in sensitivity to threats. Studies show, for example, that conservatives are more revolted than liberals by the sight or smell of disgusting things. They also may have a stronger biological fear response to threats. Everyone shows an involuntary startle response when a sudden loud noise rings out, but conservatives jump a little higher than liberals do. Emotions like disgust and fear have evolved to protect us from threats. Disgust motivates us to avoid rotten food, excrement, and other things that might carry infectious disease. Fear prompts us to avoid physical threats to our safety. But we rely on emotions to manage not only physical threats but also social ones. This emotion‑based theory says that the reason liberals are more open to new experiences is because they are less emotionally sensitive to threats.Or stated differently, people who have highly sensitive emotional reactions to threats will be attracted to conservative ideas as a way to manage threats.

Another popular theory argues that liberals are flexible thinkers while conservatives are cognitively rigid. Studies show that conservatives score higher on a trait called need for structure, and another called need for closure. The idea is that conservatives want neat and simple answers, whereas liberals are comfortable with the messy gray areas of life. Other studies have found that liberals perform better on cognitive tests that require changing your frame of thinking. Conservatives perform better on cognitive tests that require sticking to a script and doing the same thing over and over. These findings are often interpreted as being flattering to liberals (freethinkers!) and unflattering to conservatives (dogmatic!), but they can just as easily be interpreted as saying that conservatives stick to principles and think decisively, whereas liberals are wishy‑washy. According to this theory, the liberal mind is limber, but the conservative mind is unbending.

The most popular theory for explaining ideological differences is the Moral Foundations Theory, which argues that liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different moral values. Both conservatives and liberals care about avoiding harm and being fair, but that is about all they share. Conservatives care much more than liberals about other values, such as loyalty to one’s group, moral purity (that is, protecting the sacred), and authority (that is, respect and obedience to social hierarchies). These foundations are described as modules, like little switches in the mind that turn on or off to trigger different mental reactions

These theories all capture something real about the psychology behind politics. Lots of research shows that liberals really do score a few percentage points higher on openness to experience than conservatives. People’s political orientation is correlated with their thinking styles and emotional reactions. And conservatives do report valuing purity, authority, and loyalty somewhat more than liberals do (about 1 point more on a 6‑point scale). But ultimately, I believe these theories are not very helpful in explaining why we see the world differently, for two reasons.

First, the differences are tiny. Personality traits, thinking styles, and values can explain only a few percentage points of the differences between partisans. They are just not large enough to explain the giant gulf separating us.

Second, and even more fundamental, these theories don’t tell us what we really want to know. They describe some of the differences between partisans, but as we will see in the chapters ahead, they are limited in their ability to explain how and why our political divides...

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Verlag
Viking
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593491947
ISBN 13 
9780593491942
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
VIKING
https://www.penguin.com/overview-vikingbooks/

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