We met Ervin at our very first conference together as graduate students. He was a key speaker at a conference on “Why neighbors kill” in London, Ontario. We hopped on the train and were some of the only students from outside the area who attended the event. We both cornered Ervin and discussed the origins of intergroup violence and he was incredibly gracious and patient with two young, inquisitive graduate students.

This post was originally published on Psyche and authored by Michael Bond. If you like this essay, consider subscribing to Psyche/Aeon as well — few outlets do long-form psychology writing this well.

Many of us want to make the world a better place. It would be hard to find someone more invested in how to go about it than the Hungarian American psychologist Ervin Staub. He has spent his life examining a simple question with vast consequences: how to be good in bad times and encourage altruism in the face of evil. Unusually, he has studied the subject as an academic while also living it close at hand. As a boy in Hungary during the Second World War, he experienced greater extremes of depravity and heroism than most of us face in a lifetime. ‘Sadness and grief well up in me at unexpected moments, when I encounter reminders of the terrible things that were done to other people,’ he writes in his memoir. Yet he remains optimistic about people’s capacity for goodness. ‘I learned … that life does not have to be what the Nazis made it, that there is love in the world, as well as caring and the willingness for self-sacrifice.’

Spring 1944 was a fraught time for all Hungarian Jews, hundreds of thousands of whom were being transported to Auschwitz and other camps. The Nazis had arrived in Budapest – ‘the same Nazis who lined up people on the edge of the Danube, maybe three or four, shot a couple of them, tied them together and pushed all of them into the river,’ says Staub. His first clear memory, aged five or six, is waking in his home in Budapest and hearing noises in the room next door. ‘I have become pretty good at feeling my feelings, but I am not that good at feeling my feelings from that point in time,’ he says. Though he remembers clearly what happened next: ‘I went into the other room. Some people in the family were crying. I was looking at my uncle, who had a rucksack and this pink piece of paper, which was his call-up. And then we said goodbye to him, and that was the last time any of us saw him. Except one person.’

That person was Maria Gogan, a Christian woman who cared for Staub and his sister and three of his cousins throughout their childhood. He describes her as ‘a hero in every possible way’ and the inspiration for much of his work. She visited his uncle in the labour camp and smuggled him one of the letters of protection that the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg had devised to shield Hungarian Jews from the Nazis by granting them de facto Swedish citizenship. (Although it failed in his uncle’s case, Wallenberg’s ruse saved the lives of thousands of Jews, including several of Staub’s immediate family.) Maria helped the family, at great risk to herself, throughout the rest of the war. ‘She took me and my sister into hiding with a Christian family,’ explains Staub, ‘which I remember quite well, going there and going into the apartment.’ When some of the neighbours began to suspect that they were Jewish, Maria moved them to one of Wallenberg’s protected houses. Staub remembers it being packed with Jewish families. ‘People were lying on mattresses in the basement, which was how we started off. Maria started to make bread out of dough, push it in a baby carriage to a bakery, have it baked, pick it up and bring it back, not only for us but also for other people in the house. At some point she was stopped by Hungarian Nazis, and they made her stand with her hands to the wall for a very long time, saying we are going to kill you because you are helping Jews … The next day she was taking bread to the bakery again.’

Years later, when Staub was 18, Maria accompanied him to the Hungarian border during his escape to the West. He recalls that they said goodbye to each other while sitting in a haystack. ‘It was such a wonderful, loving goodbye.’ Since then, he has thought a great deal about her kindness and how she came to be that way. ‘Her mother died. Her father married the fairytale really bad stepmother. For any little thing that her stepmother thought she did wrong, she made her kneel on dried corn, which apparently is quite painful. So she had a very bad history there.’ But from an early age, Maria was hired out to families to care for their children, and with them she experienced something entirely different. ‘She loved the children and the children loved her. And I think that it enabled her to have what I later came to call altruism born of suffering. People who suffer often go on to become violent. But some have experiences that transform that suffering into wanting to protect and help others … [They undergo] an emotional transformation, the realisation that the world does not have to be like this person made it for me, that there are other people who are kind and caring … I think that was very apparent in her case. In all my life – and I spent a lot of time with her from birth to age 18 – and then during my visits, I never saw her do an unkind act, or say unkind things to another person. How many people can you say that about?’

Staub believes that the community he grew up in, in an environment fraught with risk, has shaped his entire life. ‘In the midst of all those horrors I was lucky … I was surrounded by people who loved me and cared for me and did everything they could to protect me.’ (Their dedication may explain his acknowledgement that he ‘was not particularly conscious of pain that I carried from my childhood’). More than anything, they ‘so powerfully expressed values in action’, giving him a touchstone to return to for the rest of his life. He credits Maria’s selflessness, Wallenberg’s heroism and the courage of his mother and aunt not only for his survival, but for his moral outlook, and even his decision to study altruism.

Was there ever a danger, in that extremely hostile setting, that he might have grown in another direction? ‘Possibly I could have chosen a different path,’ he says. He knows others who did, though their home lives were far less nurturing. He has a friend, another survivor of the Holocaust, whose parents sent him to a monastery during the war for his own safety, ‘a Jewish kid among Christian kids’. At the end of the war, no one came to pick him up until weeks afterwards. ‘He asked me at some point, what is the one sentence with which you would summarise your experience of the Holocaust. His sentence was something like, people can be very cruel and you have to do everything you can to defend yourself. My sentence was, even in the worst of times, people can be caring and helpful.’

Some of Staub’s enduring values, and the seeds of his life’s work, are plain to see in his first published papers. In the late 1960s, when he was assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University, the social psychology topic du jour was the counterintuitive finding that people are far less likely to help in an emergency when others are present, a phenomenon known as the bystander effect. Unlike most in his field, Staub was more interested in the people who helped than those who turned away. ‘I wanted to increase caring, helping and goodness so that the terrible things I experienced and increasingly encountered in my work (and saw in the world) would not happen,’ he explains.

In 1970, he built his own series of studies to find out how helping behaviour varied with age. He recruited 232 kindergarten and elementary school children and took them singly or in pairs to a room at the university where they were told they would be taking part in a drawing project. This was a ruse to distract them from the real objective, which was to see how they reacted when a researcher in the next-door room played a recording of a child crying (a scenario, he points out, uncannily reminiscent of his earliest childhood memory). Just as he suspected, the older the child, the more likely they were to investigate the sounds of distress – but this pattern held only until around the age of nine. After that, he found ‘a shocking decrease’ in the extent to which the children would help, back down to the level of kindergarten children. They made excuses such as: ‘If I went in there I might get yelled at’ or ‘I thought I should stay here.’ They’d learned to fear disapproval, he says, something the younger children were apparently immune to.

What Staub remembers most vividly about this set of studies is an incident during a later round in which 12-year-old children had been told they could go into the other room if they needed more drawing pencils. He was watching, through a one-way mirror, a girl who had been listening to the crying for a while and not doing anything. ‘I think, she’s not going to [act] because usually people act early,’ he recalls. But then ‘she jumps up, takes her drawing pencils, breaks the edge off both of them and runs into the other room. So she had to fulfil the conditions of the permission before she went in.’ Staub concluded it was important to teach children that ‘under certain circumstances, for example, when someone needs help, the usual behavioural restrictions do not apply.’ (In a later study, 82 per cent of the children who were given permission ended up helping.)

Despite the particular experience of his childhood, it was not obvious to Staub as a young psychologist that he would spend the greater part of his academic career trying to answer the question at the heart of these studies: why, or under which conditions, do some do good while others look away? In his memoir, Evil, Goodness, and Creating Active Bystandership (2026), he notes that, while at Harvard, he thought little about the connection between his research and his life. ‘For a number of years, I think I did my best to separate the work I was doing from my life experience, albeit unconsciously … Perhaps, also, I was not yet ready to engage emotionally with my early experience … My mode of engagement was, instead, intellectual, but it eventually opened me up emotionally.’ He was, he tells me, simply putting one foot in front of another. ‘I never planned out my way. I was doing what seemed meaningful and valuable.’

At the same time, he sought out people whose lives or work were directly relevant to his own. One of them was Perry London, a visiting professor at Stanford University who was the first to study rescuers – Christians who risked their lives to save Jews in occupied Europe. Staub was intrigued by London’s finding that rescuers shared at least three characteristics. They were adventurous, a correlate to courage. They were socially marginalised – a Catholic living among Protestants, for example – which made it easier for them to defy social norms. Most significantly, they had inherited from their parents a strong moral code that highlighted their responsibility towards others. ‘Perry’s study kind of pushed a switch in me,’ says Staub. ‘I thought, I can study this too.’

Staub’s experiments with children and adults at Harvard and later at the University of Massachusetts would make it clear to him that altruistic behaviour cannot directly be predicted from a person’s personality traits, a common misperception even today. Neither does he think it emerges spontaneously from the dynamics of a situation. Rather, he has found that it stems from the culture or family in which a person grew up – what they have seen others do, or the values those around them have lived by. ‘Even people who have grown up in a hostile environment can become caring and helpful,’ he insists. ‘But there has to be at least one person in their lives who can provide a contrast, and with whom they have a connection. So a child growing up in an abusive family with a father who tells him that he should respond to any challenge with force and aggression cannot grow up that way [caring and helpful]. Research shows that children who grow up in these circumstances will end up in prison for aggression. There have to be experiences that give them a glimmer at least of a different possibility.’

For all his commitment to altruism, Staub’s best-known, most successful and most widely reviewed work is his book The Roots of Evil (1989), an investigation into the psychological motivations and cultural conditions that lead to genocide and inter-group violence. The book arose from his decision, late in the day, to address his turbulent childhood under the Nazis, a subject that he had largely avoided. Up to that point, ‘it was as though my personal and professional lives were running on parallel tracks’. The two finally came together around 1980 when Staub started reading Lucy Dawidowicz’s analysis of the Holocaust, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975). ‘As I was reading it, I had the feeling that based on some of my work on altruism and helping behaviour … I have some beginning [of an] understanding of how such a horror could happen,’ he says. He saw that altruism and evil were interrelated. ‘In both cases there is an evolution.’ Just as children learn to be helpful by engaging in helpful acts, perpetrators of violence become accustomed to their harmful behaviour. ‘That is, learning by doing can change people in either positive or negative directions.’ In The Roots of Evil, he offers an alternative perspective to the popular idea that terrible acts are committed by terrible people.

Under extremely difficult life conditions certain motives dominate, Staub writes, among them ‘protecting the physical wellbeing of oneself and one’s family and preserving one’s psychological self, including self-concept and values.’ But it’s hard to accomplish all this by improving the material conditions of life. Instead, people may try to cope psychologically, often by ‘devaluing other groups, scapegoating … and adopting ideologies’ in ways that promote and do not inhibit harm.

While working on The Roots of Evil, Staub began to think for the first time about his father’s experience during the Holocaust. Like his uncle, his father was sent to a forced labour camp (unlike his uncle, he survived). Staub wondered what it was like for his father in the camp and during his eventual escape, events he’d never spoken about. He thought about the terror his father must have felt when Hungarian Nazis searched their house in Budapest while he hid behind a chair. ‘I rarely, if ever, cried about my life,’ he says. ‘But I did cry about my parents’ life. What a life.’

During 1989 – the year The Roots of Evil was published – Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Angola were embroiled in civil wars, South Africa remained under apartheid, and (on 4 June) the Chinese government massacred hundreds of student protesters in Tiananmen Square. It was also the year that communism collapsed in eastern Europe after more than three decades of repression. There was an urgent need to understand the dynamics of mass violence. Staub hoped that politicians and others would use his work to try to prevent the churn of brutality and, specifically, help societies ‘resist influences that turn us against each other’, as he puts it in The Roots of Evil. ‘Well, that didn’t happen,’ he recalls. ‘I felt that nobody was doing anything. I was deeply discouraged because I had the delusion that, having identified what leads to great violence, there will be actions in the world to prevent it. But violence continued.’ At that point, ‘I thought it might be … constructive if I began to take some kind of action myself.’ (Elsewhere, Staub has said of this decision: ‘In a world of suffering, for me, being actively engaged in trying to help was redemptive.’)

The opportunity came soon enough. In 1994, Hutu extremists in Rwanda instigated one of the most horrific campaigns of violence since the Holocaust, against the country’s Tutsi minority. Up to a million people were killed, many of them by their neighbours, in just 100 days. In the months that followed, Staub began to think about how he might contribute to the country’s recovery. He organised an international conference on the prevention of genocide, at which academics, community leaders and policymakers discussed the pathways to violence and examined evidence from a number of conflict zones such as Rwanda, Bosnia and Tibet (the Dalai Lama was the conference’s principal speaker). The event led to a commitment, backed by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, for Staub to travel to Rwanda to help promote healing, forgiveness and reconciliation among the traumatised population. Stepping off the plane in Kigali in January 1999, he had little conception how deep his involvement would be.

His partner in Rwanda was his partner in life: the clinical psychologist and trauma specialist Laurie Anne Pearlman. The two of them had met in the early 1990s at an academic conference on trauma and violence where he gave the opening address and she the closing one (they are known affectionately by friends as Mrs Trauma and Mr Violence). Over lunch at their house in Massachusetts, Pearlman tells me that after the conference she checked out Staub’s book The Roots of Evil to make sure he’d used the word ‘evil’ appropriately (as a description of an act rather than an individual). Reassured, she met him for a walk, and they began dating. Thirty-three years later, their easy teasing and tender mutual affection give the impression they still are. They share a great deal, including the desire to make a difference beyond their academic and therapeutic practices. Pearlman says that at the time she met Staub she was ‘sitting in these little rooms helping one person at a time. What the heck! While I’m sitting here for 50 minutes with this person how many people are newly traumatised? So I decided I needed to do something to help people on a larger scale.’

Staub’s decision to visit Rwanda, a country in the aftermath of genocide, was bound to be problematic. ‘I am a Holocaust survivor after all.’ The night before they travelled, he had nightmares, one of them a recurring dream relating to the time he escaped from Hungary. ‘I dreamed that I was running through a beautiful green forest and soldiers were chasing me,’ he recalls. ‘I’ve had this nightmare a small number of times.’ He was fortunate to be travelling with Pearlman, who specialises in vicarious trauma – the negative effects of treating other people’s distress. ‘There was one very valuable element for us and that is we were together,’ says Staub. ‘So we could talk about things, we could support each other. I think that was very valuable in terms of mitigating some of what we encountered.’

Nevertheless, the two of them found the experience heart-wrenching and agonising. Staub recalls being shocked at the contrast between the beauty of the landscape (‘green fields, rolling hills, lakes, and valleys’) and the horrors of what happened there.

‘Everybody we saw just seemed depressed, quiet, withdrawn, looking down, there was no feeling of joy, no feeling of community or connection,’ says Pearlman, even though four and a half years had passed since the genocide. Staub thought people looked frozen. ‘There were two or three people sitting here or there, not necessarily talking to each other, just sitting there. There was no kind of flow to life.’

They were witnessing the fallout of an extraordinary situation in which ethnic loyalties were elevated over family ties. Parents had killed their children and husbands their wives. Staub says he found this kind of behaviour ‘totally astonishing’ and ‘almost incomprehensible’. Yet their long experience as psychologists specialising in trauma and violence had given them a framework that helped them make sense of it. ‘We already knew about genocide and what happens,’ says Pearlman.

‘Of course, killing your next-door neighbour or your spouse with a machete is different from what went on in the camps in the Holocaust … I would say it expanded my framework but didn’t disrupt it because already both of us had come to understand the horrors of which people are capable.’

During the summer of 1999, they began sharing their insights into trauma and reconciliation with political leaders, community organisations, journalists and others. In workshops and training sessions, they addressed the subjects that all Rwandans seemed desperate to discuss: the origins of genocide, the psychological impact on survivors, the path to reconciliation, and how to prevent it happening again. Staub recalls that people were relieved to learn genocide is not an inevitable consequence of the human condition, that it is made more likely by a particular set of conditions: political chaos, a long history of conflict, group discrimination, a lingering sense of grievance, and a strongly hierarchical society.

‘Horrendous situations can lead to horrendous behaviours,’ he explains. ‘Because under those circumstances what are people to do? … Everything has collapsed, everything is terrible, people are killing me, killing everybody around me. So people can lose whatever moral compass they may have had … This wasn’t the will of God. People created it and it’s understandable how it came about. That was one of the important elements for us, to understand how it came about. Even the people who did some terrible things you wouldn’t necessarily think of as evil, you would think of as powerfully affected by circumstances. When a whole group of your fellow ethnics are doing these terrible things, it’s very difficult to deviate. If you deviate you might be killed. You are powerfully part of the group.’

The workshops exposed Staub and Pearlman to many stories of tragic loss suffered by Tutsis who survived. Staub remembers, in particular, a woman whose husband had been taken away by Hutu militia. She described to them how a member of the militia, a family acquaintance, sent a Hutu man to her house to protect her. ‘He arrived at the house with a Bible under his arm, stayed in one of the rooms, and when more killers came to the door, he faced them off and saved this woman,’ relates Staub. When the genocide ended, this man escaped from Rwanda, along with many other Hutus. Then a few years later, he came back to visit the woman he had protected. But instead of welcoming him, she decided she couldn’t trust him. ‘This woman said about the person who saved her life, he was a Hutu, I cannot protect myself from him, I can go to the authorities,’ laments Staub. ‘I mean this person saved your life! He stayed with you. He never harassed you.’ For Staub it was a reminder of how traumatic experiences can corrupt people’s capacity to have functional relationships and live normal lives. ‘Isn’t the damage that is done to people just totally flabbergasting?’

In 2004, the reach of their work in Rwanda expanded dramatically with the launch of an educational radio drama, Musekeweya (meaning ‘New Dawn’), which incorporated the key messages from their workshops into a soap opera about two fictional villages in conflict. An evaluation found that people who listened to the drama (a recent poll suggests that 76 per cent of the population tune in every week) were more likely to speak their minds, express controversial views and make decisions independently of authority; they were also likelier to empathise and reconcile with other groups of Rwandans, all of which, according to Staub, would make a return to violence less probable. In 2006, variations of Musekeweya began broadcasting in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; all three dramas continue to this day. All the evidence suggests that Staub and Pearlman have made a real difference. At the very least, they have helped increase the prospects for peace in what has been an extremely unsettled region. ‘As Laurie liked to say, we were just two little peanuts,’ says Staub. ‘It was true, we were just little peanuts. But we were active peanuts.’

One of the key messages of the Rwanda workshops – that people have power to intervene for the good of others (to become ‘active bystanders’) – has been conspicuous in almost all Staub’s real-world engagements, most notably the one that has come to define his legacy in the United States: training police officers in ‘ethical policing’. California’s police department asked for his help after a number of its officers were filmed beating Rodney King as he lay on the ground after a car chase in Los Angeles in March 1991. Staub developed a training programme that encouraged officers to step in whenever a colleague looked like they were becoming overly aggressive towards a civilian, an approach that directly challenged the traditional police culture of allegiance and unity.

While it is unclear whether California ever implemented his recommendations, the principle of active bystandership as a way to reduce brutality was taken up by activists pushing for police reform elsewhere. In 2014, a group of lawyers, civil rights activists and retired and serving police officers in New Orleans began adapting Staub’s recommendations for the city’s police department (the NOPD), which has a long and troubled history of violence towards the community it serves. The previous year, the NOPD had been placed under a federal supervision order, forcing it to introduce extensive reforms. One of the outcomes was that Staub’s active bystandership training – known as Ethical Policing is Courageous (EPIC) – became mandatory for all New Orleans police officers. EPIC has helped reduce the number of aggressive interventions by police in cases of public disorder and has played a critical role in improving police-community relations. As a result of this achievement, some 430 law-enforcement agencies across the US – including those in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Washington, DC, Boston, Denver and Philadelphia – have adopted their own active bystandership training programmes based on the framework established in New Orleans. Half a century after he started exploring the roots of altruism, Staub’s ideas are transforming the culture in one of the most contentious areas of public life.

Nonetheless, he is realistic about the difficulties of fostering altruism more broadly across society. A short distance from the psychology department at the University of Massachusetts, where Staub kept an office until he retired, a glass display-case houses a 12-foot concrete segment of the Berlin Wall, painted in situ by the French muralist Thierry Noir. This relic of the Iron Curtain is symbolic not only of the postwar oppression that defined much of Staub’s youth, but of the psychological impediments to empathy and reconciliation that he has spent much of his career trying to dismantle.

One of his frustrations is that walls – social, political, psychological – are as prevalent today as they have ever been. He is disappointed, to say the least, by the US president Donald Trump’s ‘destructive ideology’ and his derogation of migrants. ‘What ICE is doing in the US, how cruel they are in capturing and holding people, shows the power of destructive leadership,’ he says. He is appalled by Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s treatment of the Palestinians and his refusal to recognise a Palestinian state (on his Substack, he has described Netanyahu as ‘a cancer on both the Palestinians and Israelis’). His preferred antidote to authoritarianism is ‘constructive community engagement’ – though sometimes, he adds, ‘we do need to be heroes’. It is inevitably galling for him, knowing that decency and compassion are achievable, to have to watch the many powerful forces holding it back. ‘I regret that I cannot do more about what’s happening in the world, in America, in Israel … I wish I could do more. Where to enter, where to go? Even people who have much more prominent positions than I have in the world have trouble finding ways to act effectively.’

Staub has come to accept that he cannot save the world by himself. Still, he has indicated how it might be done. He has shown that prejudice is not inevitable, goodness is possible even in the midst of horror, and, in the right conditions, kindness can win. ‘I mean, this whole thing has a logic to it,’ says Staub. ‘People are influenced by their environment and by important people in their lives. Surely it makes sense.’ The central tenet of altruism – the feeling of responsibility for others’ welfare – is, he maintains, ‘a very important moral principle’ that we mostly learn from others, ideally early in life. The people who protected and nurtured him as a child are still his moral benchmark. When Maria Gogan was in her late 80s, Staub went back to Hungary again to see her. ‘We had dinner at a restaurant. [Her] hair was completely white, her head was shaking. I said to her, you know everything that I do in life is because of you. And to my total amazement she said, I know.’

Ervin Staub’s memoir, Evil, Goodness, and Creating Active Bystandership, is published by Köehler Books.

News and Updates

Jay will be having a live conversation on substack with Jacqueline Nesi on June 4th at 4pm EST on the big question: “Is a digital detox really worth it? What tech is doing to our relationships and mental health.” All newsletter subscribers are invited to attend live and join a Q&A session.

Jacki is a clinical psychologist and professor at Brown University who writes the popular newsletter TechnoSapiens. She studies how technology and social media impact mental health (especially for teens), and how parents can help their kids navigate it. Here is is an example of one of her recent posts:

Techno Sapiens

Are school phone bans working?

5 min read…

Read more

a month ago · 35 likes · 10 comments · Jacqueline Nesi, PhD

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Catch up on the last one…

Last week we summarized the top 5 debunked social psych studies.

The Power of Us

Debunking the Five Biggest Myths in Social Psychology

Most people’s memories of introductory psychology center on a handful of classic studies that have seeped into pop culture—experiments that seem to answer uncomfortable questions: Why do people conform? How can humans be so cruel? Why do groups make such obviously bad decisions? Why is it so easy to ignore someone in danger…

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17 days ago · 35 likes · 1 comment · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

Jan 8 — Woman Is Killed By Federal Agent: Local Officials Urge ICE To Leave Minnesota

Jan 9 — Dispute Heats Up On Investigation Of ICE Shooting: More Agents On Way

Jan 10 — Local Officials Demand Role In ICE Inquiry: Minnesota Is Wary Of Federal Conclusions

Jan 13 — FBI Searches For Activist Ties In ICE Shooting

Jan 14 — ‘Like A Military Operation’: Clashes Rise With Federal Agents In Minneapolis

Jan 15 — Local Outrage Propels Cities To Resist ICE

Jan 16 — Trump Sharpens Threat As Clashes With Agents Continue In Minnesota: Says Insurrection Act Could Be Invoked

As group dynamics researchers, we are sometimes accused of seeing identity everywhere and in everything. Fair enough. But when it comes to ongoing protests – whether those in Minneapolis (and spreading nationally) in response to the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent or in Iran driven largely by economic dissatisfaction with the regime – social identity is truly relevant around the world right now.

The same basic questions keep resurfacing: who gets to define “us”, who is pushed into “them”, and what happens when those definitions collide?

Focusing on the growing protests in the United States against ICE, we see identity dynamics playing out in three interlocking ways.

1 - Arguments Over the Identity of the Victim

The first move in many tragic, contentious, and tragically contentious episodes like the shooting of Renee Good is a fight over the victim’s identity, over whether the person at the center of the story counts as “one of us” and is therefore worthy of our moral concern.

That is why immediate attempts by ICE and the Trump administration to categorize Renee Good as an activist, a professional agitator, even a deranged lunatic, are not incidental but strategic. If the victim can be recast as an atypical citizen, then this event does not represent the killing of an ordinary American—and thus to ordinary citizens does not reflect something that could happen “to someone like me” or signals the victim is undeserving of their empathy.

This is one of the most basic identity moves in the playbook: narrowing the definition of the harmed ingroup so that the harm does not generalize to others.

2 - Identity Fault Lines

A second fault line has emerged between local and federal authorities. Following the shooting, Minneapolis leaders demanded that ICE leave immediately, framing the federal presence as “chaos” that makes the community less safe. Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension described being cut off from evidence and withdrew from the investigation, arguing it could not meet the investigative standard Minnesotans expect without full access. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office created an evidence portal and publicly solicited information to preserve materials while state officials were blocked from the federal investigation.

Meanwhile, the feds deployed 2,000 additional agents to the Twin Cities and President Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to send in military troops.

This is not just a dispute about jurisdiction, it’s a dispute about “who we are” and “who governs us”. Minneapolis was also the site of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and in the protests following that event, the community and local law enforcement were markedly not part of the same coalition. Yet, at least for now, there appears to be a degree of common cause between the citizens protesting in the frigid winter streets and the local cops, with both arrayed against an external force (this interview with Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey is worth a listen in this regard).

These tensions may not yet have fully hardened into a local community vs. occupying force dichotomy, but they are headed in that direction. To the degree that this happens, we predict that cooperation by either side will start to look like capitulation and skepticism like defiance.

3 - An Escalation Loop

The third identity dynamic is counter-intuitive to many: protests often grow less because of outrage triggered by an initial spark (Renee Good’s death, in this case), but because of the police response to the protests.

Aggressive protest enforcement doesn’t just manage a crowd, it can actively reorganize how people categorize themselves. In this case, as Minnesota residents experience a heavy federal presence, including masked agents, tear gas, arrests, and detentions, the situation for an ordinary citizen can quickly shift from “I’m an observer” to “I’m on the side of the protestors” to “I’d better get out there myself to defend my community".

This man-on-the-street interview recorded within the past few days captures how this social psychological dynamic unfolds:

Interviewer: Have you ever gone out to these sorts of things before?

Protestor: Never. Never. I’ve never protested in my life… I’m far enough away, but close enough, and I sit in my cushy house and look at shit and get mad… They’re just trying to fucking scare people and, you know, but but but why shoot people? You know what really pisses me off is the fact they detain people, cuff them, and then still beat the shit out of them. They tell you it’s only immigrants. It’s fucking anybody…

Interviewer: Sounds like you don’t fit the definition of the ah…

Protestor: I’m not fucking paid to be here like everybody fucking says… I gotta work in the goddamn morning just like everyone else. I’m just here trying to stand up for my community, dude. We’re all human beings here…

This person is by no means a longtime activist or an ideologue. He embodies movement across categories: from a mere observer in his living room to a morally-outraged community member to a full blown protester, taking to the streets.

Sweeping labels from federal authorities, who call protestors “agitators”, “insurrectionists”, or “domestic terrorists”, deepen the divisions and heighten the tensions. They can create an increasingly hostile crown by pushing an otherwise diverse set of people, folks there for different reasons, into a shared “us” opposed to a threatening “them”.

Making Sense of Protests

The Elaborated Social Identity Model of Crowd Behavior describes the identity dynamics that underlie the response to aggressive policing. Crowds that are initially loosely connected become unified when people who aren’t identified as protestors are made to feel like protestors because they are treated like them—gassed like protesters, arrested like protestors, talked about like protestors, etc. As that happens, their identities shift and a new social identity can emerge with new norms about what is justifiable, what is necessary, and what “one of us” should do.

A recent virtual reality experiment conducted by Julia Becker and colleagues demonstrates these dynamics in action. People who were part of a VR protest were stopped by police either dressed in their regular uniforms or decked out in riot gear (on the right in the image below).

The police in riot gear were perceived as less legitimate than those in their regular uniforms and increased peoples’ intentions to resist the police. Importantly, these effects were strongest among individuals who were less identified with the protest movement to begin with. Like the guy on the street in the interview above, aggressive policing triggered a reaction among those with the least initial involvement.

Another factor is that aggressive policing disrupts non-violent norms among protests. Normally, protests will proceed peaceful and extremists within the community will often be sanctioned socially by fellow protestors. They might be seen as ‘too radical’ or unlikely to help the cause. But once aggressive policing takes place, the radical elements in the crowd are more likely to receive support. This can lead to everything from property damage to violence against authorities.

Thus, police have a vested interest in de-escalating the situation. Indeed, this is why most police recruits are intentionally trained to minimize the conflict in these situations and keep themselves out of harms way. When things escalate, it puts everyone at risk.

The Escalation Loop

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Are you worried about sitting through your uncle’s annual rant about US politics? Or will your niece’s protest posts on TikTok be too much to stomach over dessert? Have conspiracy theories spoiled the whole thing?

You are not alone!

We have felt way the same way too (full confession: we have a family member who posts way too much misinformation on Instagram). Recent research has revealed that political polarization—and threats to democracy—have been corrosive to family gatherings and impacted how people spend their holiday dinners.

In 2018, researchers analyzed ~25 billion smartphone location data pings from ~10 million Americans and found that that politically diverse Thanksgiving dinners were “30 to 50 minutes shorter” than ones with politically aligned guests. In 2020, the study was replicated with a meta-analysis and found that across multiple studies, politically diverse dinners were on average about 24 minutes shorter.

The authors found that political diversity was associated with a less pleasant atmosphere and this explained why dinners were shorter (see figure from the study below). These politically-fraught dinners were up to 19% shorter than dinners with politically likeminded folks, which lasted an average of 257 minutes. So if you find yourself making excuses to leave the party before dessert is served, you are not alone.

But why does this happen and how can we reclaim our holidays?

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Asha’s course is a “citizen’s academy” for democracy designed to share articles, books, and engaging content. People from all backgrounds convene to learn about how adversaries are manipulating their perceptions and, in doing so, empowering them to respond in ways that strengthen our democratic social fabric. Here is a snippet of her class syllabus!

Jay had a great conversation with Asha and we are able to share this content with our paid subscribers if you want to check out the video below.

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The panel consisted of a psychologist (myself), a neuroscientist (Mina Cikara), and a political scientist (Matthew Levendusky), and was moderated by an expert in social conflict and prosocial behavior (Marlone Henderson). We took turns answering questions from the moderator and the audience as we grappled with the challenges of how to disagree in a diverse society.

Our conversation was covered by The Daily Texan (you can read a summary of the full conference here). We discussed how it has become difficult to have civil disagreements and possible solutions:

“A key aspect of our mission as teachers and researchers is to prepare students to be successful in life,” said UT liberal arts profe…

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Jay’s project had already been selected by officials at the MINERVA Research Initiative at the United States Department of Defense for a full proposal that would potentially fund his lab—and three of his collaborators at Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona— for the next five years. This funding competition, billed by the Pentagon as “Social science for a safer world,” was established in 2008, partially in response to lessons learned following the terror attacks on 9/11/2001 .

In the middle of…

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To get a better handle on how we might address this issue, Jay attended a conference last semester with several experts on climate change hailing from backgrounds in law and policy to business and media gathered at Vanderbilt Law School for the Bypassing Climate Polarization Conference (organized by Michael Vandenbergh). Jay was one of the few psychologists at the event and gave the keynote talk (Nate Luce wrote an excellent summary of his talk, along with the rest of the conference, which we share below).

One of the most interesting things about the conference is that …

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Kurt, the author behind the newsletter and a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina (and soon to be at The Ohio State University), draws on years of research to uncover how group identities and experiences shape moral perceptions and how this understanding can help bridge political divides. His ideas are provocative, yet hopeful. In our interview with Kurt, he provides an overview of the core ideas in Outraged and offers tools for navigating today’s polarized landscape with empathy and practical advice.

We have both known Kurt and followed his work closely for the past 15 years. He is one of the world’s leading moral psychologists (as well as one of the most entertaining) and regularly churns out some of the most provocative studies in the field. His work challenges Jon Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory and offers an alternative roadmap for thinking about morality, politics, and society. We urge you to pick up a copy of his book and read it with an open mind. Kurt also pulled off one of the most legendary April Fools Day pranks of all time when he was a PhD student at Harvard—be sure to ask him about it if you see him in person. You can learn more and order Outraged here. Keep up with Kurt on Linkedin, X/Twitter and Instagram.

What does your book teach us about social identity or group dynamics?

Outraged reveals that moral conflict is rooted in harm—what we see as harmful, who we think is most vulnerable, and how we believe harm can be avoided. Social identity plays a key role in shaping these perceptions. Our groups don’t just tell us who we are; they also guide how we make sense of the world, including what we view as a threat and who we feel compelled to protect.

For example, liberals and conservatives agree that harm should be prevented but differ on who is most vulnerable. Liberals tend to focus more on the environment, immigrants, or marginalized groups, while conservatives focus more on the unborn, business owners, or law enforcement. These differences aren’t because one side is immoral, but because our groups help define who we believe needs protection.

By understanding the ways our identities shape our moral intuitions about harm, we can begin to bridge divides. Instead of assuming malice from the other side, we can see their actions as attempts to protect what matters to them—just as we are trying to do. This shift in perspective is crucial for moving beyond outrage and finding common ground.

What is the most important idea readers will learn from your book?

The core idea in Outraged is simple: our moral judgments come from gut feelings about harm. We’re all wired to protect ourselves and the vulnerable, but conflicts arise when we disagree about who the “real” victims are and what’s causing harm.

Humans evolved as prey, not predators, which shaped our deep sensitivity to threats. This is why moral debates often feel so charged—we’re not debating logic, we’re reacting to perceived dangers. If you want to bridge divides, ask yourself—what harm do they see? That question opens the door to understanding.

Why did you write this book and how did writing it change you?

I wrote Outraged because so many people I talk to—friends, students, strangers—are desperate to understand the other side. They’re tired of our divisions and want to move past the shouting. My goal was to help people see that, at our core, we’re all driven by the same instinct: to protect ourselves and those we care about.

Writing the book also changed me. I dove deep into anthropology and learned that humans didn’t evolve as predators, but as prey. We spent millions of years avoiding lions and eagles, and that shaped a deep-seated fear of threats. It’s why we’re so quick to see harm—and to accuse others of causing it. This shift in perspective changed how I see political divides. Instead of seeing the other side as “predators” trying to destroy the world, I see them as scared, just like us, trying to protect what they think matters most. That realization is powerful.

What will readers find provocative or controversial about your book?

Readers might find two ideas in Outraged provocative.

First, the idea that understanding the other side isn’t betrayal. In today’s polarized world, many see empathy or connection with political opponents as giving in or conceding the fight. But understanding is critical—not only for the health of a pluralistic democracy but for our own mental health. The constant cycle of outrage drains us, while genuine understanding can open doors. And people have bridged deeper divides before. Many readers will know about Daryl Davis, a Black man who befriended Ku Klux Klan members, leading some to renounce their beliefs. If he can find common ground with those who hate him, surely we can have meaningful conversations with people who just vote differently.

Second, readers may be surprised by the argument that our moral mind is fundamentally harm-based. Many are familiar with Moral Foundations Theory, which claims that liberals and conservatives operate on fundamentally different moral values—care, fairness, authority, loyalty, purity. But my research shows that the "foundational" claim of MFT is wrong. If you dig beneath the buzzwords used by people on the left and right, all moral disagreements boil down to one thing: harm. Conservatives may be more likely to discuss "liberty" but liberals care deeply about the liberty of women's reproductive rights.

Studies also show that, no matter the value (or the specific scenario), people make moral judgments based on intuitive perceptions of harm. This perceived harm is broader than direct physical suffering, but it is genuinely perceived. When religious conservatives condemn gay rights because they seem harmful to them, they are using empty words, but expressing genuine convictions about what leads to suffering. Recognizing that shared focus on harm reshapes how we think about morality and gives us a real foundation for better understanding.

Do you have any practical advice for people who want to apply these ideas (e.g., three tips for the real world)?

To bridge divides, we often think facts are the key. But that’s wrong.

In our studies, we asked a representative sample of Americans what would make them respect a political opponent during a conversation. Their answer? Facts. They thought discussing raw data would keep everyone rational, and rational people are easier to respect. But when we gave people facts, they called them “fake facts.” Facts from the other side feel like propaganda, not bridges.

So how do we bridge divides? The best way is through stories—especially stories about harm. Sharing personal stories of suffering helps people on the other side see that you care about protecting the vulnerable, just like they do. These stories create understanding and open the door to better conversations.

But not everyone has stories of suffering. Even if you don’t have a poignant story of harm, you can still improve conversations with three steps: Connect, Invite, Validate, which spells CIV, the beginning of more CIVil conversations.

Connect. Ask real, curious questions about the other person’s experiences. Before you talk about politics, show that you’re genuinely interested in understanding them as a person.

Invite. Once you've seen each other's humanity, you can invite them to share their beliefs (not demand). Encourage them to help you understand what they think and why.

Validate. Thank them for opening up. You don’t have to agree with them, but acknowledging their willingness to share can help foster mutual respect.

It’s not easy to have conversations across divides, but it’s easier with these tips. Remember: strive for understanding, not "winning," because no one changes their mind in moral conversations.

News and Updates

This week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he will be moving away from third-party fact-checking on Facebook. Jay was interviewed in Nature about how this policy change will impact the platform. While there is clear evidence that fact-checking does work, Jay noted that it is less effective for polarized news:

Fact-checking is less effective when an issue is polarized, says Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University. “If you’re fact-checking something around Brexit in the UK or the election in United States, that’s where fact-checks don’t work very well,” he says. “In part that’s because people who are partisans don’t want to believe things that make their party look bad.”

But even when fact-checks don’t seem to change people’s minds on contentious issues, they can still be helpful. Moving away from fact-checking on the world’s largest social media platform is a major step backward.

Catch up on the last one…

Last week, to wrap up 2024, we looked back on some of our favorite movies, shows, books and music from the last year.

One prominent public figure came under fire for misconstruing the reactions of the general public. In reference to the assassination, Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, claimed that the “EVIL Revolutionary Left Cheers Murder” and celebrates attacks in an attempt to villainize liberals. What he failed to understand is the role of working class identity.

While the death of Brian Thompson horrified some and seems to have pleased others, reactions to his murder do not break down on politically partisan lines. Instead, they appear to be about class. UnitedHealth Group is one of the b…

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Jay was recently interviewed by VOX in an article titled, “America is incredibly polarized. It’s bad for our health.” The article noted that “a public that sees everything through a red-or-blue lens is more likely to distrust experts, dislike policies with clear health benefits, embrace policies with clear health risks, and make self-destructive choices.”

These dynamics aren’t exclusive to a single party: Nobody is immune from the tricks polarization plays on the brain. Trump’s appointments look poised to make things particularly bad on the right—with Republican states and districts rolling back vaccine schedules which will almost certainly lead to preventable disease…

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Since publishing our book and starting this newsletter, we have been welcomed by a wonderful community of kind and smart fellow authors. With the purpose of increasing the cross-fertilization of ideas and sharing some of their brilliance with our audience, we have decided to publish an occasional post by other thinkers and writers who we think are doing great work related to smart groups and effective identities.

This week, we are pleased to publish a guest post by Dr. Steve Stewart Williams, Professor of Psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. Steve is author of the book, “The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve”, as well as the very popular “The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter”. We encourage you to check out his book and sign up for his newsletter.

As Steve notes, “One of the major causes of political polarization is the fact that people dislike their political opponents for views most don’t actually hold - a tendency fueled in large part by politically biased media on both sides.” In this post, he describes one of the most fascinating papers he’s read in the last few years. Led by social psychologist Victoria Parker, it’s about the causes and consequences of political polarization. Enjoy!

The Growing Problem of Political Polarization

Political polarization is a real and growing problem. People don’t just disagree with the opposing political team; they often actively despise them. As one 2020 paper put it, “Out-party hate has emerged as a stronger force than in-party love.” Many people are horrified by the idea of living near to or working with someone with different political views than them - and doubly horrified by the idea that a daughter or son might marry such a person. And whereas discrimination on the basis of race and religion is receding, discrimination on the basis of political affiliation is getting increasingly common.

Long story short, it’s a mess.

But what lies behind the polarization? And why is it quite so intense? Those are the questions that motivated a recent preprint by Victoria Parker, Matthew Feinberg, Alexa Tullett, and Anne Wilson, titled “The Ties that Blind: Misperceptions of the Opponent Fringe and the Miscalibration of Political Contempt.”

The central thesis of the paper is that at the root of the problem is a simple misunderstanding: People on both sides of the political aisle vastly overestimate the prevalence of extreme views on the other side.

Conservatives, for instance, think that most lefties are lazy snowflakes who want to eliminate free speech and defund the police. Lefties, in contrast, think that most conservatives are racist rednecks who want to eliminate immigration and defund the schools. And while both sides roll their eyes at the caricatures of their own side, they find it hard to recognize their own eye-rolling caricatures of the other.

The phenomenon is known as false polarization: polarization based not on genuine differences in the modal views of each side but on misperceived differences. According to Parker and colleagues, false polarization is amplified by partisan media, and has various harmful knock-on effects - effects potentially damaging to the democratic process.

The Studies

With that as backdrop, Parker and colleagues set out to test four main hypotheses.

1. People on both sides of the political aisle will overestimate how common extreme views are on the other side, but not how common moderate views are.

2. Overestimating the other side’s extreme views will be associated with dislike of the other side, which in turn will be associated with avoidance of the other side.

3. People will be reluctant to challenge extreme views on their own side.

4. Greater consumption of politically biased media - Fox News on the right, for instance, and MSNBC on the left - will be associated with greater overestimation of extreme views on the other side.

To test these hypotheses, Parker et al. ran five studies, three of which were preregistered. In each, they asked U.S. participants how much they agreed with the moderate and extreme views associated with their own side, and then how common they thought the other side’s moderate and extreme views were for them. Here are some of the views they included in their studies.

• Moderate Conservative Views: Reduced taxation; fewer regulations; the right to own a gun; having a strong military.

• Extreme Conservative Views: Racist attitudes; defunding schools; outlawing abortion even in cases of rape or incest; fewer repercussions for police officers who shoot Black people.

• Moderate Leftist Views: Universal healthcare; having a social safety net; protecting the environment; equal rights for LGBTQ people.

• Extreme Leftist Views: Intolerance of free speech on campus; prohibiting politically incorrect language; quotas that prioritize ethnicity over merit; defunding the police.

Finally, Parker and colleagues asked participants how much they liked people on the other side, how willing they were to interact with them, how willing they were to voice their opinions on the extreme and moderate views on their own side, and how much partisan media they typically consumed.

The total sample size across the five studies was just under 5,000 participants.

Six Key Findings

1. Both Sides Exaggerate the Other Side’s Agreement with Extreme Views

In all five studies, a majority of participants on both sides agreed with the moderate views associated with their side but disagreed with the extreme ones.

The question is, though, is that how each side saw the other?

Yes and no. As predicted, people were fairly accurate in estimating the prevalence of moderate views on the other side - indeed, if anything, they underestimated their prevalence.

In contrast, however - also as predicted - people vastly overestimated the prevalence of the extreme views. For every extreme view, people guessed that a majority of their political opponents agreed with it, when in fact a majority disagreed.

For example, lefties guessed that most conservatives wholeheartedly agreed with racist views, when less than a quarter of them agreed even a little. Conservatives, for their part, guessed that most lefties wholeheartedly agreed with banning free speech, when only a third did even slightly.

In short, participants showed false polarization for the other side’s extreme views but not for their moderate views. This pattern was replicated in all five studies.

Note that the tendency to overestimate the extremity of other people’s views is common, and that it doesn’t just apply to outgroups. My colleagues and I found an example of this in a series of studies conducted in the West and Southeast Asia. As the graph below shows, people greatly overestimated how biased both sexes are in favor of their own sex in their reactions to (fictional) sex differences that put either females or males in a better light. And the curious thing is that both sexes overestimated own-sex bias in their own sex as well as the other!

2. Exaggerating Extreme Views Leads to Disliking

The next major finding was that the more that people overestimated how prevalent extreme views were on the other side, the more they disliked the other side. As with false polarization for extreme views, this finding was replicated in all five studies.

Importantly, the dislike of political opponents was much more tightly linked to their perceived extreme views than their moderate ones. Thus, conservatives disliked lefties largely because of their (false) belief that most lefties want to abolish the police, rather than because of their (accurate) belief that most want stricter environmental protections. Likewise, lefties disliked conservatives largely because of their (false) belief that most conservatives hold racist views, rather than because of their (accurate) belief that most want a strong military.

3. Disliking Leads to Avoidance

It gets worse. The more that people disliked out-party members, the less willing they were to engage with them in any way: to share a taxi with them, to discuss politics with them, to date them, or even to shake their hands.

The basic pattern is shown in the graph below. As you can see, the more common that people think extreme views are on the other side, the less they like the other side - and the less they like the other side, the less inclined they are to engage with them.

This unwillingness to engage with the other side is more of a problem than it might initially appear. By walling themselves off from their political opponents, people foreclose any opportunity to have their false beliefs about them set right. As Parker et al. put it, “Being unwilling to have even a conversation with a political rival is a sure-fire way to ensure misconceptions remain uncorrected.” The practice locks people into their muddled views about the other side, and limits any retreat from polarization.

4. Both Sides Are Reluctant To Criticize Their Own Side’s Extreme Views

Parker and colleagues’ fourth major finding was that people were reluctant to challenge extreme views on their own side. More precisely, they were more willing to express their agreement with the moderate views on their side than their disagreement with the extreme views.

Most lefties, for example, were more willing to express their (favorable) opinions about universal healthcare or a living wage than their (unfavorable) opinions about restricting free speech or abolishing the police.

Similarly, most conservatives were more willing to express their (favorable) opinions about tax cuts and gun rights than their (unfavorable) opinions about reducing penalties for police officers who shoot Black people.

Parker and colleagues suggest several reasons for people’s reluctance to tackle their own side’s extreme views. One is that people misperceive how common these views are among their co-partisans, and thus fear rejection or ejection from the tribe if they speak out. Another is that people may not want to appear disloyal to their political allies. And a third is that people’s hatred and fear of the other side may galvanize their desire to present a united front.

Whatever the reason, though, people’s reluctance to tackle the extreme views on their own side is another factor locking both sides into a false perception of the other. If, for instance, extremists on the left call for the complete abolition of the police, and no one on their side criticizes this position, conservatives may get the impression that the extremists aren’t actually extreme at all, and that the abolition of the police is a popular goal on the left. Likewise, if extremists on the right spout racist views, and no one on their side calls them out for it, lefties may get the impression that racist views are par for the course on the right.

5. Partisan Media Fuels the Fire

Where did the caricatures of each side come from in the first place? Parker and colleagues propose that an important contributor is partisan media: outlets like Fox News and Breitbart on the right, and MSNBC and HuffPost/Vox on the left. Consistent with this assessment, the more that participants consumed such media, the more they overestimated the prevalence of extreme views on the other side… and for that matter, on their own.

Of course, it could just be that people who already overestimate the extremity of the other side are more drawn to media that projects the same view. However, there are plausible theoretical reasons to think that it goes the other way as well - and to think that media is more polarizing now than it used to be.

First, people’s media diet these days is very much a DIY affair. Once upon a time, there were only a handful of networks that competed for the eyes and ears of the nation. This created an incentive to produce centrist or balanced content. No more. The proliferation of media in the Age of the Internet means that many outlets now cater for just one political faction. And that means that people can effectively choose their own news diets, thereby reinforcing their preexisting prejudices.

A second reason is that, in our brave new online world, media outlets are competing frantically with each other for clicks and advertising dollars. One effective way to do this is to stoke people’s anger and fear. This has given rise to what sociologists call the “outrage industry.”

An important component of this industry is presenting their viewers’ political opponents in a highly negative light. Thus, conservative media sometimes portrays lefties as radical ideologues who hate their nation and want to outlaw the expression of conservative views, whereas left-leaning media sometimes portrays conservatives as racist, misogynistic reactionaries.

More often than not, both sides are able to back up such sentiments with real stories and actual footage of people who fit these descriptions. The problem, though, is that these people are presented as typical members of each side, when in fact, they’re anything but. Both sides are “nutpicking” the other side’s extremists, while bemoaning the same tendency in the other.

6. Political Polarization Leads to Greater Acceptance of Unethical Tactics

The sixth and final finding was that when participants contemplated the other side’s alleged use of underhanded tactics, they became more accepting of the use of such tactics by their own side.

This is a particularly troubling finding. As soon as one side starts suspecting that the other is using underhanded tactics - whether or not they’re actually right - they’ll likely start feeling that their own side has no choice but to do the same. Noticing this, the other side will feel that they now need to turn up the volume on their own use of underhanded tactics, which will then lead the first side to turn up the volume on theirs… and so on. It’s easy to see how increasing polarization could suck both sides into a vicious cycle of increasingly anti-democratic behavior.

Is There Any Hope?

In many ways, the Parker study paints a bleak picture. Partisans on both sides invest considerable time and energy into hating each other for views that most don’t actually hold. Because they hate each other, they’re unwilling to interact with each other, and because they’re unwilling to interact with each other, their views are immune to correction. Worse than that, when people start thinking - rightly or wrongly - that the other side is using dirty tactics, they become more willing to turn a blind eye when their own side does the same. It’s not a great situation.

At the same time, however, there are several reasons for hope.

The first is that people don’t generally dislike their political opponents for their moderate views; they dislike them for their (perceived) extreme ones. This is important, argue Parker and colleagues,

because moderate policy issues (health care, tax policy, minimum wage, etc.) reflect much of the real policy debate between parties, and these issues are likely to be consequential for a great many lives. Given that these issues did not seem to provoke much hostility on their own, it could offer hope that bipartisan negotiation would be possible, especially since both sides are sympathetic to many of these moderate issues.

Second, when it comes to their moderate views, leftists and conservatives have a lot more in common than they usually think. Most conservatives, for instance, support LGBTQ rights, and most leftists support a strong military. The main barrier to cross-party collaboration is the fact that most people aren’t aware of this - a phenomenon that Parker and colleagues call false minimization of cross-party agreement. This lack of awareness, however, needn’t be a permanent affliction. It’s potentially fixable.

Third, given that most of the animosity between political opponents is based on false beliefs about them, there’s an obvious cure for the animosity: correct the false beliefs. This might sound like a naïve hope, but plenty of research suggests that it’s possible. For example, one massive 26-nation study found that people on both sides of the political aisle greatly overestimate how much the other side dislikes them, exacerbating mutual hostility. The good news, though, is that simply informing people about this can reduce the effect. The same presumably applies to false polarization.

By itself, such interventions are unlikely to be sufficient. Still, one way or another we need to figure out how to back away from the edge of the cliff, because the situation at present is unsustainable. I’ll give the last word on this point to Parker and colleagues, who wrap up their paper with the following warning:

Neither side of the political divide will be willing to compromise on important social and economic issues if they imagine vast and irreconcilable differences between one another. Animosity and outrage may be satisfying, but they risk misdirecting partisan conflict toward relatively rare problems and away from more genuine, but potentially tractable, policy disagreements. If partisans become so angry at opponents that they ignore and oppose them on principle, they may shoot themselves in the foot and fail to detect opportunities for substantial agreement – like on economic policy, criminal justice reform, and climate change.

News and Updates

Here is part two of an interview that Dom did with Science for the Church. We talked about why religious groups can be particularly powerful sources of identity and the role church leaders can play in reducing societal division.

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Catch up on the last one…

Politically diverse Thanksgiving dinners were “30 to 50 minutes shorter” than ones with politically aligned guests. With the holidays on the horizon, we offer six tips for navigating politically polarized holiday gatherings:

You are not alone!

We have felt way the same way too (full confession: we have at least one family member who posts way too much misinformation on Instagram). Recent research has revealed that political identification—and polarization—has been corrosive to family gatherings and impacted how people spend their holiday dinners.

In 2018, researchers analyzed ~25 billion smartphone location data pings from ~10 million Americans and found that that politically diverse Thanksgiving dinners were “30 to 50 minutes shorter” than ones with politically aligned guests. In 2020, the study was replicated with a meta-analysis and found that a…

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In our conversation, we debate the complexities of handling free speech issues on college campuses, especially in light of recent protests and the actions of university leaders. We examine the consequences of various university leadership and policy decisions, such as bringing police onto campuses during protests, and explore how these decisions have exacerbated conflict.

We tried to focus on principles that universities should consider—not only for the next year, but for many years ahead. It’s clear that their current models were not well designed to deal with the Gaza protests and many universities are changing. One trend seems to be that universities are adopted the Chicago Principles, establishing norms of “engaged disagreement”, as well as embracing institutional neutrality.

We weigh in on these issues from a social identity perspective (e.g., how campuses can foster free speech, a vibrant education, and healthy dissent without being hijacked by extremists). Specifically, we discuss several key points:

• The Role of Universities in Handling Free Speech:
  We explore the historical context of universities as spaces for dissent and debate and the modern challenges of managing diverse opinions while maintaining safety and inclusivity.

• Trust and Communication Strategies:
  We emphasize the importance of building trust between students and university faculty and administration, and we offer concrete suggestions for university leaders to engage more directly and transparently with student groups.

• Balancing Free Speech and Protecting Vulnerable Groups:
  We discuss the features of different free speech models, including the Chicago principles and an alternative model from Professor Eli Finkel (“Can universities take the fear out of debate in our hostile climate?”)

• Positive Examples and Alternative Approaches:
  We also discuss examples of successful university responses to protests, such as building relationships through open dialogue and healthy reactions to student activism.

• Future Directions for University Policies:
  We end with recommendations for universities to amend their free speech policies, promote healthy discourse, and better serve their diverse communities.

You can listen to the podcast using the embedded audio file above, or on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Let us know what you think in the comments—our thoughts are still evolving on this issue and we welcome constructive dissent.

News and Updates

What makes us pick one party over another? What role does social identity play in national politics? Why do we view the other side as the problem? Jay does an interview on Debating Without Hate for Starts with Us.

Catch up on the last one…

Last week we shared some inspirational words from a middle school graduation speech by Ben Mook that moved us. We felt like it was promising life advice for youth around the world—share it with someone you love who would benefit.

We have been fortune to have incredible speakers at our own graduation ceremonies—from the human rights activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu to legendary primatologist Jane Goodall. These moral and intellectual giants made us think more deeply about our role in the world.

This year, Jay was at his son Jack’s middle school graduation ceremony in New York City when he saw something different. Jack’s teacher Ben Mook delivered an incredible speech for the next generation about how to live a rich and fulfilling life while navigating many of the issues we discuss in our newsletter. Whether you are a teenager, a parent, or simply a citizen trying to make sense of the world, we strongly urge …

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Despite general agreement, however, there is evidence that partisan and ideological identities are a consistent barrier to the adoption of climate change mitigation policies, and this gap is especially large in countries where fossil fuel reliance is the highest. For example, US Republicans are six times more likely to dismiss the role that humans play in climate change than Democrats. And this partisan divide has only gotten larger over time.

How are we ever going to solve this problem without a sense of shared reality?

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The trait, national narcissism, is described as “the belief in the greatness of one’s nation, and that one’s nation is exceptional compared to others”. The study examined an internationally diverse population of over 50,000 people in 56 countries and found that as individuals become more nationally narcissistic, they are more likely to believe in and share conspiracy theories about COVID-19.

Previous research had found that belief in conspiracy theories tends to be related to a person’s desire t…

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You are not alone!

We have felt that too, and research has revealed that political identification may impact how people spend their Thanksgiving dinners. Here’s a post from our newsletter archive that dives into the issue and five tips for how to survive.

In 2018, researchers analyzed ~25 billion smartphone location data pings from ~10 million Americans and found that that politically diverse Thanksgiving dinners were “30 to 50 minutes shorter” than ones with politically aligned guests. In 2020, the study was replicated with a meta-analysis and found that across multiple studies, politically diverse dinners were on average about 24 minutes shorter.

The authors found that political diversity was associated with a less pleasant atmosphere and this explained why dinners were shorter (see figure from the study below). These politically-fraught dinners were 12–19% shorter than dinners with likeminded folks, which lasted an average of 257 minutes. So if you find yourself making excuses to leave the party before dessert is served, you are not alone.

It appears that families and friends, either sick of arguing about politics or struggling to avoid the topic altogether, may have simply minimized their time together. This is likely a consequence of the fact that Americans are more polarized than any time in at least the past four decades and disagreements now take the tone of good vs. evil—making conversations feel more like sectarian conflict than a spirited policy debate.

If you are dreading a food-fight over politics this year, we might have a recipe for avoiding disaster. Last year, we published an article in The Guardian explaining why people are polarized and what might be done about it. While we are unlikely to resolve issues of campaign finance reform or the role of the media—including social media— over dinner, we might have the tools to navigate at least one meal with that tetchy uncle or aunt.

To help make it easier, here are five tips from The Power of Us:

1. Remember that we all contain multitudes. As we have said repeatedly, people contain multiple identities and politics is merely one dimension of who we are. To avoid having your dinner filtered entirely through the prism of politics, try to make these other identities salient. Remind your dinner companions of other identities you hold in common—perhaps as family members, football fans, or members of your local community.

2. Express collective gratitude. Thanksgiving is quite literally a time to express gratitude. So make time for it. The expression of gratitude can provide a salve for any gathering because it blocks toxic, negative emotions and inspires people to be more generous, kind, and helpful. Gratitude is a social glue that can improve the climate at home or in the workplace.

3. Expose false polarization. If all efforts to avoid them fail and politics arise, it can help to explain false polarization. Despite real and widespread polarization, people also tend to massively overestimate how much they are divided by political issues. Indeed, hyper-partisans (like that annoying uncle or cousin) eating an unbalanced media diet are the most likely to have false perceptions. When asked to estimate how many Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year, for example, Democrats guessed 38%. In reality it is 2%. Conversely, while about 6% of Democrats self-identify as members of the LGBT community, Republicans believed it was 32%.

4. Focus on issues and find common ground. The negativity that people feel towards political opponents is known to scientists as affective polarization. It is an emotional and identity-driven feeling of “us” versus “them”. Yet research finds that people often have many areas of agreement when it comes to actual policy. So try to move past emotional or symbolic matters and focus on real policy issues, like rising inequality, health care for people with pre-existing conditions, or the minimum wage. These are critical issues—and ones that could increase the quality of life for many people. You might find you have more in common that you expected.

5. If all else fails, appreciate the food! American Thanksgiving is one of the largest collective culinary celebrations in the world. As we wrote in a previous newsletter and in a column for New York Magazine, food is often a core symbol of social identity and eating together is one of the most fundamental ways humans foster social connection. In the words of Anthony Bourdain: “Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.”

   

   Thanksgiving dinner won’t solve climate change, economic inequality, or threats to democracy, but it is nevertheless an opportunity to connect with the people we care about—and, for that reason, important for our mental and physical well being. And for relatives who have slipped deep into the rabbit holes of conspiracy, this might be their best chance to hear a different perspective from people they care about, people who have otherwise been stereotyped and parodied in their social media newsfeeds.

News and Updates

Jay was quoted in a New York Times article about subway etiquette and social norms in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jay helps answer the article’s title and main question: “Does Anyone Know How to Behave on the Subway Anymore?”

“It’s probably the place in New York where you’re pressed up against humanity more than any other place,” said Jay. Read more about what Jay had to say about the unwritten social norms of the subway in the article.

Catch up on the last one…

Last week, we introduced The Center for Conflict and Cooperation at NYU. To learn more about the Center, read our latest newsletter where you can find out what we’re working on and potential collaboration opportunities!

The NYT used a new Online Polarization Dictionary that Jay created with Almog Simchon and Billy Brady (which Jay shared with the NYT). Polarizing language refers to language that tends to emphasize differences and create division, often by framing an issue in terms of "us" versus "them".

The dictionary was based on a paper Jay published with Billy and several other colleagues. They found that every time people used a moral-emotional word (e.g., “hate”) in a Twitter message about political issues (e.g., climate change, same sex rights, gun control) it was 20% more likely to be shared by others. This type of language was linked to online virality.

However, the same language was also linked to online polarization. When people used this moral-emotional lan…

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Jay explained that fandom promotes group identity and can therefore help us feel more connected. But it can also make us antagonistic towards people who are fans of a rival entity. Because it can arouse such strong feelings, fandom is useful even to organizations and marketing.

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