Imaginary Enemies

Issue 144: People dislike their political opponents for views most don't actually hold (and a Thanksgiving/Black Friday 20% discount on on paid subscriptions)

Introduction from Dom & Jay

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!

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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.

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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.

“Religious rituals are another important psychological factor. There’s really fascinating work showing that shared rhythmic movements bond humans together. Why do soldiers march together? The act of synchrony, in motion and sound, bonds the troops. The same is true of music, dancing, chanting, and the recitation of a common language, like a liturgy, that the congregation reads in unison.”

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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: