Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have Liliana Mason on the podcast. Mason
Speaker 1: is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University
Speaker 1: of Maryland College Park, an author of Uncivil Agreement, How
Speaker 1: Politics Became Our Identity with the University of Chicago Press.
Speaker 1: She received her pH d in political psychology from Stonybrook
Speaker 1: University and her BA in politics from Princeton University. Her
Speaker 1: research on partisan identity, Parsan bias, social an American social
Speaker 1: polarization has been published in journals such as American Political
Speaker 1: Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly,
Speaker 1: and Political Behavior, and featured in media outlets including The
Speaker 1: New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio.
Speaker 1: Doctor Mason, what an honor it is? To chat with
Speaker 1: you today. Thank you so much for having me. When
Speaker 1: you were writing this book, did you ever imagine just
Speaker 1: how relevant it would be to June thirteenth, twenty twenty. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I actually started writing this book in two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine because it was my dissertation, and so I
Speaker 1: kind of came up with the idea of this when
Speaker 1: we were sort of still in the Hope change, early
Speaker 1: Obama time, and we still had plenty of you know,
Speaker 1: clearly partisan animosity. But I and I was trying to
Speaker 1: explain that, but I didn't I certainly didn't know how
Speaker 1: bad it would get in the future. Yeah, are you
Speaker 1: talk in the book? I thought it was really interesting
Speaker 1: you talked about hope leaders and fear leaders. I hadn't
Speaker 1: seen that distinction in the literature. That's a real distinction
Speaker 1: that people have noted throughout the course of human leadership.
Speaker 1: I mean, not really. This is more thinking about the emotion,
Speaker 1: work on a sort of emotions and behavior, and then
Speaker 1: thinking about sort of how leaders can manipulate the emotions
Speaker 1: of the electorate in order to sort of get the
Speaker 1: outcome that they want. And you know, Obama is a
Speaker 1: great example of someone who's leading with hope and enthusiasm,
Speaker 1: whereas Trump is a better example of someone who leads
Speaker 1: with more sort of anger anxiety than those types of emotions.
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting your book really talks about these
Speaker 1: different perspectives and just trying to understand where different people
Speaker 1: are coming from. And you made a statement like, well,
Speaker 1: things are so bad, you know, I imagine there's Trump
Speaker 1: supporters listening to this podcast that don't see it as bad.
Speaker 1: They see the other side as bad, And I'm just wondering,
Speaker 1: how can we get out of this quagmire where we
Speaker 1: talk to each other? Yeah. I used to make a
Speaker 1: joke when I would go give talks about the book.
Speaker 1: You know, people would say, how do we get out
Speaker 1: of this? And I would I would joke, you know,
Speaker 1: if aliens were doing Earth, then maybe we would all
Speaker 1: come together as you know, human beings, and we would
Speaker 1: have this superordinate identity at least as Americans right to
Speaker 1: the defeat this outside clearly outside force that have common
Speaker 1: common goal. But uh, you know, I think the closest
Speaker 1: that you can come to that actually happening in reality
Speaker 1: is sort of COVID, right, Yeah, And what we've seen
Speaker 1: is that the way we have responded to it has
Speaker 1: been to poeticize it, and that makes it very difficult
Speaker 1: to even react or make make, you know, productive changes,
Speaker 1: And that actually is a great demonstration of how I
Speaker 1: think really dangerous polarization can be. If every thing is politicized,
Speaker 1: then the point of every decision is for your party
Speaker 1: to win, not for people to you know, everyone in
Speaker 1: the country to do well and survive. Yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a do we ever? Can you ever think I
Speaker 1: can try to think of any point that I've been
Speaker 1: alive where the predominant focus I've saw in politics was
Speaker 1: on common wealthlifting common humanity. I mean, that should be
Speaker 1: the goal, but I can't remember it ever existing. Can you?
Speaker 1: I think the closest that we've come to that was
Speaker 1: actually criticized this is in nineteen fifty, the American Political
Speaker 1: Science Association editors wrote a letter for their annual meeting,
Speaker 1: which they always do, but in nineteen fifty, the letter said,
Speaker 1: we need the parties to be more distinguishable. They're too
Speaker 1: close to each other. Voters don't have clearer information because
Speaker 1: the two parties basically look the same, and so there's
Speaker 1: you know, we need more polarization to give voters a
Speaker 1: better cueue about which side they should vote for it.
Speaker 1: They just have there's no there's no difference right now.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't that that both parties were sort of
Speaker 1: working for the common good, but actually they were so
Speaker 1: similar to each other at that point in time that
Speaker 1: there wasn't a lot of information for voters about which
Speaker 1: party was best for them, and kind of either one
Speaker 1: would have been fine, particularly for white voters at that
Speaker 1: period of time. That's interesting, Yeah, that wasn't in my
Speaker 1: lifetime or yours. Well, what a time. What a time?
Speaker 1: And you make some important distinctions I think might help
Speaker 1: people frame various issues today and see it in a
Speaker 1: lot clearer. One interesting distinction you make is between social
Speaker 1: polarization and policy polarization. Was there there was a time
Speaker 1: when they were more aligned? Is that right than we
Speaker 1: see today? So really, what it is is that as
Speaker 1: political sort of as political scientists, we have thought about
Speaker 1: polarization as a divide between policy preferences. And so, for instance,
Speaker 1: when people measure polarization within Congress, they look at how
Speaker 1: everyone voted on various bills and see, you know, how
Speaker 1: far are Republicans from Democrats on average in each of
Speaker 1: these bills? That they vote for. So the assumption has
Speaker 1: always been that the that the way to measure polarization
Speaker 1: is to look at issue preferences and policy preferences. The
Speaker 1: problem is that a lot of a lot of Americans
Speaker 1: have very conflicting issue in policy preferences. The average American
Speaker 1: is generally to the left of center in their policy
Speaker 1: preferences across a range of issues. But also, you know,
Speaker 1: more Americans call themselves conservatives than call themselves liberals. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of confusion in terms of what Americans
Speaker 1: understand about ideology and policy and what the government does.
Speaker 1: And so the you know, as I was starting this project,
Speaker 1: what I was thinking was, you know, we know things
Speaker 1: about inner group conflicts that can predict outcomes where groups
Speaker 1: really hate each other, and that has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with what a government does. It has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with the you know, with the policy preferences of the
Speaker 1: people in the groups. A lot of the time, it's
Speaker 1: just very basic you know, human human psychology reasons for
Speaker 1: having inner group conflict, and that that hadn't really been
Speaker 1: applied to political party at that point, with like one exception,
Speaker 1: and and so this that to me, it was hard
Speaker 1: to make the argument right, Because political scientists don't want
Speaker 1: to think that democracy is a bunch of people making
Speaker 1: kind of team oriented just like lashing out type choices
Speaker 1: in their votes. They want to think that that that
Speaker 1: voters are are thoughtful and rational and making, you know,
Speaker 1: the choice that is the best for the most people.
Speaker 1: That's what democracy, democracy is supposed to be. But it
Speaker 1: really turns out it's not. It's not that way, And
Speaker 1: so you can set if you separate these two concepts,
Speaker 1: it becomes a lot easier to understand with what's going
Speaker 1: on in America. Well, it's not a surprise to me
Speaker 1: as someone who's studied narcissism and self esteem and what
Speaker 1: happens when our ego is threatened in some way or
Speaker 1: identity and an identity's ego so to speak, is threatened.
Speaker 1: It seems like everyone's threatening everyone's identity ego right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, well this goes back even just to you know,
Speaker 1: the minimal group paradigm experiments of social identity theory from
Speaker 1: tajbel in the nineteen seventy all that stuff. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's, first of all, it's extremely reproducible, and it's
Speaker 1: also really it demonstrates a very simple idea, which is
Speaker 1: basically that even in the weakest group identity, right, someone
Speaker 1: just told you that you're in a group and you
Speaker 1: don't know any of other group members and you're never
Speaker 1: going to meet them. Even in that scenario, people still
Speaker 1: prove if they have to allocate money to people, people
Speaker 1: still privilege their own group's victory over the greater good scenario,
Speaker 1: even in that week week identity. So we should expect
Speaker 1: it to continue to happen as identities grow stronger and stronger.
Speaker 1: But that is a real challenge for democracy. If everyone
Speaker 1: who feels a social attachment to a party prefers partisan victory,
Speaker 1: even at a loss to their own party, you know, overall,
Speaker 1: but if they're you know, they they get less, but
Speaker 1: they get more than the other side. If they prefer
Speaker 1: that to the sort of overall greater good of the nation,
Speaker 1: that's not going to work out for democracy. That's there's
Speaker 1: not the nation. Yeah, yeah, there's some real threats to
Speaker 1: democracy right now. There's there's no way of sugarcoating that,
Speaker 1: right No. I maybe would have sugar coated it like
Speaker 1: seven years ago, but I feel like there's just no
Speaker 1: way chagcooting that right now. I think we were sugarcoating
Speaker 1: it seven years. I think I was even sugarcoating it
Speaker 1: in the conclusion, the concluding chapter of my book, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to find a way for there to be a
Speaker 1: happy ending where everything's okay, and it's just it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to be fixable. I think my only optimism right
Speaker 1: now is the is sort of the the reckoning with
Speaker 1: racial justice that we're having at this point, This, to me,
Speaker 1: is the only possible path forward for democracy to function.
Speaker 1: The only possible way is for us as a nation
Speaker 1: to sort of rip off the band aid of you know,
Speaker 1: this legacy of white supremacy. Because what's happened the parties
Speaker 1: have become divided along the lines of does racism exist?
Speaker 1: And that is sort of the new sort of deepest
Speaker 1: cleavage between the parties is does systemic racism exist in America?
Speaker 1: And has it been in existing, you know, forever? And
Speaker 1: effectively our parties have divided on this idea. So if
Speaker 1: we don't have sort of hash out this question, it's
Speaker 1: going to be hard for us to cooperate or really
Speaker 1: talk honestly through any other problem. I agree, and this
Speaker 1: is something I found really elucidating in your book is
Speaker 1: talking about how different petical parties have become more socially
Speaker 1: homogeneous in these different clusters that we now see together
Speaker 1: where you have like multiple identities cluster together, which give
Speaker 1: power to an identity, you know, to particular identity. If
Speaker 1: you have you know, three four different religion, race, gender,
Speaker 1: and you see these things all cluster together under party lines,
Speaker 1: you can have a very powerful force for good or
Speaker 1: bad on both sides. But can you tell me actually
Speaker 1: how we're seeing that social homogeny right now? So the
Speaker 1: data basically show for a long time we've been seeing
Speaker 1: the Republican Party becoming sort of more white and more evangelical,
Speaker 1: in particular recently in recent years, I would say, not
Speaker 1: even like before Trump increasingly becoming rural, whereas Democrats are
Speaker 1: more urban, and then suburban people are in the middle somewhere.
Speaker 1: The and place based identity can be a real, actual
Speaker 1: strong identity if it's if it's being threatened. The gender
Speaker 1: gap is increasing, so women tend to be Democrats more
Speaker 1: than men, and and then Democrats are this this really
Speaker 1: large coalition of non white, non evangelical sort of everyone
Speaker 1: else right where it's the people people who live in
Speaker 1: really diverse areas. That's where the Democrats tend to be
Speaker 1: and so the as those. So really what we have is,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of this both a rural urban divide,
Speaker 1: we have an education based increasingly in education based divide.
Speaker 1: In twenty sixteen was the very first time that class
Speaker 1: was not a dividing factor between the parties, like they
Speaker 1: were equally equally working class versus middle class. And that's
Speaker 1: partially because we used to have education and income are
Speaker 1: obviously correlated, but we used to have both of those
Speaker 1: pointing in the same direction. We're more highly educated people
Speaker 1: and more wealthy people were Republican, and twenty sixteen that
Speaker 1: changed so that more highly educated people were Democrats and
Speaker 1: more highly income people were still Republicans. So the total
Speaker 1: effect of class is sort of canceled out in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: and we don't know if that's just going to stay
Speaker 1: there or if it's going to like cross so that
Speaker 1: we end up with these different sort of different coalitions. Now, look,
Speaker 1: that's really interesting, Like I really I kind of want
Speaker 1: to zoom in on that a second, because you're seeing
Speaker 1: almost like correct me if I'm just talking absolute nonsense,
Speaker 1: but it almost seems like we're seeing on the Trump
Speaker 1: party lines a lot of low income white people feeling aggrieved.
Speaker 1: And on the Democrat lines, you have a lot of
Speaker 1: African Americans, low income, maybe same income line, but African
Speaker 1: American identity, African American, you know, feeling aggrieved. So, yes,
Speaker 1: you're right, it doesn't seem like it's it's strictly about
Speaker 1: the class or the economics, but it does feel more
Speaker 1: and more racial. Yeah, I'm not talking nonsense, right, No,
Speaker 1: not at all. Okay, Yeah, I mean this is the
Speaker 1: age old problem of American you know, especially black white
Speaker 1: relations in American history and society is that, you know,
Speaker 1: poor white people have always been incentivized to discriminate against
Speaker 1: poor black people so that they don't all gather together
Speaker 1: and rise up against the wealthy. Right, Like, it's well
Speaker 1: why don't they get together? And there's more power in
Speaker 1: working together than divided. Right. Well, So the so this
Speaker 1: actually goes back to the status thing that we're talking about. Right,
Speaker 1: if you want, your people are willing to sacrifice as
Speaker 1: long as their group is better than the other group. Right.
Speaker 1: And so the scenario what WB device calls it the
Speaker 1: wages of whiteness, where where essentially poor white workers were
Speaker 1: given social status instead of a wage, instead of instead
Speaker 1: of actual money, so that they had they felt themselves
Speaker 1: to be morally in biologically superior, like entitled, entitled. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but even in like reality, like they were actually like
Speaker 1: given better you know, schools, and they were given better
Speaker 1: access to you know, grocery stores and neighborhoods and and
Speaker 1: so the the even if they're making the same amount
Speaker 1: of money, they have this social status that particularly if
Speaker 1: they're not making a lot of money, they're very desperate
Speaker 1: to defend. Right, If you lose that status, then you
Speaker 1: lose everything, and that's the only thing making you feel
Speaker 1: like you're you know, not at the bottom of the
Speaker 1: latter in society. And so that that divide. As long
Speaker 1: as as long as we have poor white people feeling
Speaker 1: that they have this status advantage over poor black people,
Speaker 1: then there will not ever be a cooperation between them
Speaker 1: to improve everyone's economic outcomes. Such a shame. It feels
Speaker 1: like they should bond more with each other, like you
Speaker 1: all have a lot in common, Like couldn't we have
Speaker 1: a leader that kind of inspires them all to you know,
Speaker 1: kind of see each other and each other that's possible.
Speaker 1: It certainly, right leaders certainly can divide people. So it
Speaker 1: could be possible that we could have a leader that
Speaker 1: found a way to kind of cross that barrier. The
Speaker 1: problem is, but I really think the problem is deeply
Speaker 1: psychological though, because we value that's why you're on the
Speaker 1: psychology contact. We value our status more than we value money,
Speaker 1: and because it's such a coarse part of our self
Speaker 1: esteem and that we are ready to defend at all costs.
Speaker 1: You you can't live a life without feeling that you
Speaker 1: have some esteem right in some way in your life.
Speaker 1: And so people are you know, there's a lot there's
Speaker 1: a there's a book called Dying of Whiteness that measured
Speaker 1: health outcomes for white people in areas where you know,
Speaker 1: largely that were led by you know, sort of Republican,
Speaker 1: very you know, very conservative, you know, small government type
Speaker 1: of leaders and lots of those types of voters, and
Speaker 1: they were losing years off of their lives because of
Speaker 1: the decisions they were making, largely because they don't want
Speaker 1: black people to get those things. Right, if you give people,
Speaker 1: if you give everyone healthcare, then black people get health
Speaker 1: care just as much as white people get health care.
Speaker 1: And then where's that status they don't have any more,
Speaker 1: then they're not different from the black people. To me,
Speaker 1: why that sounds a bit illogical is that black people
Speaker 1: are people. The thing is like, we're all people, and
Speaker 1: you have people who who are white, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to help other poor white people. I want
Speaker 1: to help them, but I don't want to help black
Speaker 1: poor people. But you're all people and you're all poor.
Speaker 1: So it just it kind of bogs in my mind
Speaker 1: that way of thinking. We kind of made a deal
Speaker 1: to decide that black people were not people as soon
Speaker 1: as Slavy yell, that's what it is, right, And so
Speaker 1: you you had to have a whole lot of motivated
Speaker 1: reasoning and work, psychological work that people had to do
Speaker 1: to convince themselves that black people were not people for
Speaker 1: hundreds of years. And it hasn't been hundreds of years
Speaker 1: since since death and so you know, it was four
Speaker 1: hundred years of slavery. We haven't even approached half that
Speaker 1: time since sand of slavery, and certainly not some sand
Speaker 1: of Jim Crow. So so we spent a lot of time,
Speaker 1: you know, really embedding the idea that black people were
Speaker 1: not people in the minds of white Americans and it's
Speaker 1: that takes time to change. And it's also just a
Speaker 1: very simple cue, right, Like it's it's not hard to tell.
Speaker 1: It's not like a Catholic and a Protestant, you know,
Speaker 1: hating each other on site because the maybe there are
Speaker 1: some visual cues in the way people people look, but
Speaker 1: in general, the ways, you know, the sort of that
Speaker 1: type of religious divide is different than a black white divide,
Speaker 1: which is very visible. And in fact, the political scientist
Speaker 1: Michael Tesler has written a lot about this, how the
Speaker 1: Obama presidency is was sort of the impetus for a
Speaker 1: lot the sort of remaining for white Democrats to leave
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party just because they weren't paying attention to politics.
Speaker 1: They weren't you know, watching politics on TV, they weren't
Speaker 1: reading about politics. But the simple cue of you know,
Speaker 1: what the president looked like told them that they didn't
Speaker 1: belong in that party. And so it was nothing Obama
Speaker 1: said or did. It was just the simple fact of
Speaker 1: his face being on the front of the newspaper that
Speaker 1: they walked by it on my way to work. That's
Speaker 1: that's literally it like the color of a skin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very easy to see. And so for people who
Speaker 1: otherwise are not paying attention to anything. It's a very
Speaker 1: It's the simplest maybe except for gender. It's the simplest
Speaker 1: cue maybe more than gender. Actually. You know, when I
Speaker 1: was reading your book, you talked about George Washington's frightful deputism,
Speaker 1: and I was just so taken back by if he
Speaker 1: was alive today, he would say he would be frightful.
Speaker 1: Don't you think I think you'd be furious? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: can you can you explain our listeners could just remind
Speaker 1: them what the what frightful? Uh? In Washington's farewell address,
Speaker 1: he specifically warned Americans not to foreign political parties that
Speaker 1: they grew very attached to, because if they did that,
Speaker 1: then first of all, they wouldn't care about America as
Speaker 1: a whole anymore. It provides an opportunity for foreign interests,
Speaker 1: he specifically said, for foreign interests to divide us against
Speaker 1: each other. It provides an opportunity for people who want
Speaker 1: to meddle with the success of American democracy to have
Speaker 1: a very natural, you know, place to try to start
Speaker 1: dividing Americans and damaging American democracy. And the the specifically weren't
Speaker 1: against this and saying that, you know, if we have
Speaker 1: these partisan identities that you know, it will take on
Speaker 1: a life of its own, it will become frightful. And
Speaker 1: and then the following election they created two parties, and
Speaker 1: then and then the rest is history. The Constitution didn't
Speaker 1: plan for parties. They assumed that the that the largest
Speaker 1: fights that we would be having would be between big
Speaker 1: states and small states. That's the way the Constitution was built,
Speaker 1: to make sure that we could balance between big states
Speaker 1: and small states. And it just didn't think about parties
Speaker 1: at all. And so a lot of our problems assumed
Speaker 1: that rational people would make the best choice. The reason
Speaker 1: we have the electoral College, for instance, is that the
Speaker 1: founders didn't trust the electorate to make the best choices.
Speaker 1: Some you know, there may be a demagogue who comes
Speaker 1: along sometime and and you know, convinces go to support him,
Speaker 1: even if it doesn't mean he's not the necessarily the
Speaker 1: best candidate for America. And in that case, the electoral
Speaker 1: College was supposed to change the will of America. That
Speaker 1: was the reason that they're there. They're supposed to overturn
Speaker 1: the popular vote, the entire purpose of it. And so,
Speaker 1: but what they didn't see coming was that partisanship would
Speaker 1: make it so that no one is going to change
Speaker 1: their vote in the electoral college, even if they think
Speaker 1: the candidate is a bad candidate, because they need that victory.
Speaker 1: Were people in Washington's day in politics were they? Were
Speaker 1: they more thoughtful and reasonable and cordial? What was different? Well,
Speaker 1: the first thing to note is that in that period
Speaker 1: of time, it was only white land owning men who
Speaker 1: are allowed to vote. Okay, so in that sense, yes, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: So the people that were most worried about making bad
Speaker 1: choices were white land owning men who maybe were uneducated
Speaker 1: or unsophisticated in some way, and that's who's that's who's vote.
Speaker 1: The electoral college were overturned, so that in the to
Speaker 1: begin with, that was a very small electorate. And then
Speaker 1: you know, I think during Washington's time there were there
Speaker 1: were a lot of Enlightenment ideas, right, they were trying
Speaker 1: to create a new type of government, and so there
Speaker 1: was a there were you know, sort of lofty ideals
Speaker 1: being thrown around, but by people who own slaves and
Speaker 1: and understood that you know, all are not created equal
Speaker 1: as long as you think of you know, black human
Speaker 1: beings as not human beings. So so there was a
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's a deep paradox at the core
Speaker 1: of American democracy that we've never really dealt with. But
Speaker 1: I but you know, I think that they had these
Speaker 1: They had good they had lofty ideas. They just they
Speaker 1: didn't really live them out. And I'm not sure anyone
Speaker 1: really has fully lived them out since then. You talk
Speaker 1: now about how there's a lot of emotion driven action.
Speaker 1: Why are we so emotional and why do emotions matter?
Speaker 1: Praiser theory first, So that basically says, if you're feeling
Speaker 1: threatened and you know the source of your threat, you
Speaker 1: know where the threat is coming from, then you feel angry,
Speaker 1: and anger is an approach emotion, so we should expect
Speaker 1: you to then go into action. If you feel threatened
Speaker 1: and you don't know where the threat is coming from,
Speaker 1: you don't understand the source of your threat, that will
Speaker 1: lead to anxiety, and anxiety is is a withdrawal emotion.
Speaker 1: Is so instead of approaching, you move away and think
Speaker 1: about what to do. And so the idea is that
Speaker 1: anger should drive people into action and anxiety should actually
Speaker 1: pull them back from action. So one really easy way
Speaker 1: for a leader, for instance, to make people angry rather
Speaker 1: than anxious, is to say, hey, I know you're all
Speaker 1: feeling really threatened and sort of uncertain in these in
Speaker 1: these crazy times, I'm going to tell you who to blame,
Speaker 1: whether it's true or not. And as soon as I
Speaker 1: tell you who to blame, then you can become angry,
Speaker 1: and then you can go participate in politics and become
Speaker 1: and take action. And to some degree, that's what Trump
Speaker 1: did with the kind of Trump base. He took a
Speaker 1: bunch of people who are feeling just sort of illities
Speaker 1: with the way society was going, with the way they
Speaker 1: felt they were being treated by the you know, kind
Speaker 1: of like liberal elites, with you know, the liberalization of
Speaker 1: our sort of moral society, and also bad economic times
Speaker 1: and you know, economic challenges and the following out of
Speaker 1: rural America or all of these things are mixed together
Speaker 1: created a sense of something's not right. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people didn't know what to where to place
Speaker 1: that that of discomfort and threat. And so to have
Speaker 1: a leader come along and say it's the immigrants. You
Speaker 1: should be building a wall to stop them from coming in,
Speaker 1: and then you'll feel better, and so now you know
Speaker 1: who to attack, you know, who's the bad guy? It's
Speaker 1: the immigrants. So then everyone feels instead of anxious and uncertain,
Speaker 1: they feel very certain and ready to go. And it's
Speaker 1: and he mobilized people who weren't previously voting by kind
Speaker 1: of converting these these sort of uncertain people into very certain,
Speaker 1: very angry, and very motivated people. I think probably the
Speaker 1: you know, the the major question is what's going to
Speaker 1: happen this next election now that people have seen the truth,
Speaker 1: and that I think America will really be tested in
Speaker 1: a big way with this next election. It's yeah, so
Speaker 1: this is the this is the This is a very
Speaker 1: first of all, very uncertain question answer to the question.
Speaker 1: And also it is a very risky time I think
Speaker 1: that we have. It's a time that there's an opportunity
Speaker 1: for a lot of really big changes, but we don't
Speaker 1: know which way those changes are going to go. So
Speaker 1: the actually the project that I'm working on now with
Speaker 1: Nathan Calmo at lsu is A is a second book
Speaker 1: on sort of what part isn't how far can partisan
Speaker 1: ship go to not just make people dislike each other,
Speaker 1: but you know, even dehumanize and all the way up
Speaker 1: to you know, approve of violence against people on the
Speaker 1: other side and people in the other party. So we're
Speaker 1: looking we're also looking at what happens when an election
Speaker 1: is delegitimized, when the outcome of an election is not
Speaker 1: considered legitimate by large portions of people. And so far,
Speaker 1: what we've found is that there's sort of you know
Speaker 1: this sort of there like five to fifteen percent of Americans.
Speaker 1: And we've done like seven eight surveys at this point
Speaker 1: measuring these same things. Generally five or fifteen percent of
Speaker 1: partisans who are willing to advocate for political violence against
Speaker 1: the other party, including against regular people in the electorate,
Speaker 1: not just party leaders. And that number kind of stays
Speaker 1: in that general realm. Now, if you think about you
Speaker 1: know what is let's say, ten percent of partisans in America,
Speaker 1: we have millions and millions and millions of those people.
Speaker 1: But the main thing that we found is that they
Speaker 1: they can be brought down from that attitude. So elite
Speaker 1: rhetoric really really matters. So whatever leaders are saying, they
Speaker 1: can make people approve of violence less by saying something pacifying,
Speaker 1: and they can make people feel more approving of violence
Speaker 1: by saying something approving of violence. So something to pay
Speaker 1: a lot of attention to right now is what are
Speaker 1: our political leaders saying in terms of encouraging violence, encouraging
Speaker 1: the types of action that that might that might be
Speaker 1: you know, extremely damaging down the road and turned after
Speaker 1: the election, I thought it was really interesting how you
Speaker 1: talked about activism. You have a quote you say, activism
Speaker 1: may have increased over the last few decades, but this
Speaker 1: is not necessarily a responsible, outcome based participation. Do you
Speaker 1: have any crisms of current activism efforts? No, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think it's more of an overall. In political science
Speaker 1: as a field, we tend to think about political action
Speaker 1: as a completely one hundred percent normative good because we
Speaker 1: assume that people are acting rationally, and so the more
Speaker 1: people that are participating in politics, the better the electric
Speaker 1: represents the whole country, and so we have a better
Speaker 1: and stronger democracy. So we have more people voting, that's
Speaker 1: more buy in, that's more representation. That's just good, purely
Speaker 1: good for the American public. But like I said before
Speaker 1: with the anger issue, sometimes people participate in politics not
Speaker 1: because they've really fought through policy preferences and what they
Speaker 1: want the government to do, but instead because somebody just
Speaker 1: told them who to blame for all their problems, and
Speaker 1: so they just get up and run. And in that scenario,
Speaker 1: that's not normatively good participation, right, that's not necessarily representing
Speaker 1: a well reasoned policy agenda for the future of the
Speaker 1: federal government. It's instead it's really sort of just wild participation.
Speaker 1: There's a it's very hard, you know, you can't just
Speaker 1: like draw simple lines to distinguish between those two things.
Speaker 1: But but I was I really wanted to make the
Speaker 1: point that it's possible to have activism that isn't normatively good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a sort of you know, that's a disputed claim,
Speaker 1: but that's my I wonder if this relates at all
Speaker 1: to another point you made, which I thought was wonderful
Speaker 1: because it's just not pointed out that often. And that's
Speaker 1: that just because you have an in group doesn't mean
Speaker 1: you have to hate your outgroup. You know, there can
Speaker 1: be there can be healthy activism in a sense you
Speaker 1: have great pride for your in group. You want to
Speaker 1: fight for rights for your in group, but that's what
Speaker 1: you're fighting for, not specifically to eradicate an outgroup. So
Speaker 1: that somehow seems related to maybe different types of activism efforts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, and that was a really important sort of
Speaker 1: part of the theory that was advanced by Marilyn Brewer
Speaker 1: in the late nineties early two thousands, which is that
Speaker 1: in group, love is one part of an identity and
Speaker 1: is another part, and they don't always go together. The
Speaker 1: sort of the first instinct of social identity is to
Speaker 1: affiliate and to feel close to the people in your
Speaker 1: group and to hope that they are better than the
Speaker 1: other people, right, but not necessarily to hate the other people.
Speaker 1: And the hatred comes when there is either a conflict
Speaker 1: over resources between the groups or if there has already
Speaker 1: become a complete lack of trust between the groups. Because
Speaker 1: then in that scenario, and this I think really is
Speaker 1: reflected in the COVID response, you know, everyone says like,
Speaker 1: let's have this superordinate threat, and then everyone you know,
Speaker 1: like a threat to all of America, and then Democrats
Speaker 1: and Republicans will work together well, But if Democrats and
Speaker 1: Republicans don't trust one another, they don't they don't trust
Speaker 1: each other to address the threat in the right way,
Speaker 1: and they are fearful that the other side will will
Speaker 1: address the threat in the wrong way and actually harm
Speaker 1: them and so in that scenario with a lack of trust,
Speaker 1: a superordinate threat can actually make to make the innergroup
Speaker 1: conflict worse. Well that's what we've seen. I mean, it's yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, but like this is what we see in
Speaker 1: terms of responses to the you know, to the sort
Speaker 1: of the virus recommendations, Doctor Mason. Why are humans so
Speaker 1: horrible to each other? So I don't think we're horrible.
Speaker 1: I know, I'm kind of being cheeky because I'm a
Speaker 1: humanistic psychologist. I'm ultimately optimistic about humanity. We're kind of
Speaker 1: a young species still, and and you know, it actually
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense for us to form bonds
Speaker 1: with other people and to and to create boundaries around
Speaker 1: where that group ends and another group begins. Right, the
Speaker 1: only way for us to have society is to understand,
Speaker 1: you know, who you are as a part of that society,
Speaker 1: and who is who is like you in that society.
Speaker 1: And if you think back to sort of you know,
Speaker 1: like evolutionary psychology, you know, in the like village days,
Speaker 1: there are you know, real boundaries between between groups of people,
Speaker 1: geographical boundaries between groups of people, and it was it's
Speaker 1: important to know that you have loyalty to your group,
Speaker 1: and you're willing to and you're willing to defend your group.
Speaker 1: And that's that. You know, families are like that, and
Speaker 1: and any any you know, group of people that share
Speaker 1: something that they want to either want to maintain or
Speaker 1: that they feel as being threatened, they will behave that way.
Speaker 1: And that can be an honorable thing. Or you can
Speaker 1: use it to destroy people, and you can use it
Speaker 1: to intentionally, as George Washington warrant, you can use it
Speaker 1: to intentionally turn people against each other, to harm an
Speaker 1: entire nation. And I think, you know, we see that
Speaker 1: in election meddling. For an election meddling, it doesn't take
Speaker 1: a whole lot to make Americans hate each other by
Speaker 1: you know, by putting some bots out there. We already
Speaker 1: hate each other. So you just have to poke at
Speaker 1: that and and and so it it's can it's a
Speaker 1: tool for good and for evil. And some people are
Speaker 1: you know, on an international level, would prefer that we
Speaker 1: don't exist, and we feel it, and that makes us
Speaker 1: behave really badly towards each other as American. But you know,
Speaker 1: there's a point I just want to return to, which
Speaker 1: is the crux of your entire book, and and and
Speaker 1: I think it's encapsulated by this quote. American partisans can
Speaker 1: grow increasingly socially distant from one another, even if their
Speaker 1: policy disagreement are not profound. This gets it the you know,
Speaker 1: let's zoom in on on basically, this is the crux
Speaker 1: of your work. So isn't isn't there something a glimmer
Speaker 1: of hope in that will if we actually started shifting
Speaker 1: our focus to the things that we agree on, we
Speaker 1: may realize, Wow, there's actually more here than than than
Speaker 1: meets the eye. If we immediately start to hate someone,
Speaker 1: I'm not as optimistic about that one, because I actually,
Speaker 1: you know, so I'm going beyond the book. I replicated
Speaker 1: this with the twenty sixteen election data, and still the
Speaker 1: average American is slightly to the left. If you average
Speaker 1: you know, the issue positions across like six really contentious issues.
Speaker 1: If you look at you know, how well Americans put
Speaker 1: their issues on like you know, so if Democrats are
Speaker 1: on the liberal side of an issue or Republicans are
Speaker 1: on the conservative side of an issue, how correct are
Speaker 1: people you know at holding the right issue positions? Generally,
Speaker 1: neither Democrats or Republicans are very good at at sort
Speaker 1: of holding the correct issue positions for their party or
Speaker 1: even just being on the right side of the of
Speaker 1: the middle. And so the twenty sixteen electorate was one
Speaker 1: that actually there was plenty of room for people to
Speaker 1: collaborate on. It was there's so much overlap in what
Speaker 1: Americans actually think. And you know, America's not Twitter, right,
Speaker 1: like the average American who is asked questions about what
Speaker 1: they want government to do is or what they think
Speaker 1: society should do. There's there's a huge amount of room
Speaker 1: for compromise in policy alone. But then you ask those
Speaker 1: same people how they felt, so asking Republicans how they
Speaker 1: felt about Democrats and vice versa, they hate each other.
Speaker 1: Even in the same survey, the same people in the
Speaker 1: same survey, they really hate the other political party. The
Speaker 1: people in the other political party, well, the other political party,
Speaker 1: and they also really love their own. Wow. So even
Speaker 1: in a single you know, set of respondents that has
Speaker 1: tons of issue based overlap, they still really don't like
Speaker 1: the people on the other side. And that's you know,
Speaker 1: the policy agreement won't work until the until the social
Speaker 1: divide is addressed. I think it's just too rational. Well, doctors,
Speaker 1: I'm going to keep trying to get it here. You
Speaker 1: do mention in the psychological literature some things we know
Speaker 1: that might help with intergroup reconciliation. Let's for the remainder
Speaker 1: of this podcast just briefly touch on some of these things.
Speaker 1: So maybe we have some people listening in a position
Speaker 1: of policy or can make a change and they can
Speaker 1: adopt some of these principles. So one is contact theory.
Speaker 1: You say, while exposure to opposing political ideas and individuals
Speaker 1: can moderate intolerance and polarization, this exposure is growing far
Speaker 1: less frequent. How can we increased exposure across party lines?
Speaker 1: For one of the original studies on this was during
Speaker 1: the Korean War, the United States Armed forces were desegregated,
Speaker 1: but it was done so battalion by battalion in almost
Speaker 1: random order. It was just wherever they needed more troops,
Speaker 1: they would desegregate that battalion. So it was sort of
Speaker 1: like a natural experiment, and sociologists interviewed all of these
Speaker 1: soldiers in both the desegregated and the still segregated battalions,
Speaker 1: and what they found was that the white soldiers in
Speaker 1: the regated battalions were much more racially tolerant than the
Speaker 1: white soldiers in the still segregated battalions. So that was
Speaker 1: a that was a great example of you know, it's
Speaker 1: just contact, but it's it's not only contact. It's contact
Speaker 1: in a scenario in which they are in the two
Speaker 1: groups are not competing over resources, they're they're not even
Speaker 1: competing over hierarchy because those you know, the military hierarchy
Speaker 1: assignments are relatively strict, and so they just are what
Speaker 1: they are. And also they're all working towards a common
Speaker 1: goal Nichols as you talk about, right, which really only
Speaker 1: work if you have those other two things. So so
Speaker 1: the you know, one of the sort of like moonshot
Speaker 1: ideas that I think about is like a national service
Speaker 1: program where we intentionally move people to other parts of
Speaker 1: the country they wouldn't otherwise go and expose them to people,
Speaker 1: you know, like do mandatory gap year after high school
Speaker 1: and and move kids into a place where they wouldn't
Speaker 1: otherwise be exposed to these people, and you know, and
Speaker 1: then that would give it would give some sort of
Speaker 1: either tuition benefit or you know, it would become an honor.
Speaker 1: So you put on your CV or your resume and
Speaker 1: it'd be easier to get hired and then freshman year
Speaker 1: in college. Ideally you could have some kind of like
Speaker 1: required debrief course where every freshman goes into the debrief
Speaker 1: and talks about what happened over the last year and
Speaker 1: how these sort of social relationships work, so that they
Speaker 1: can understand exactly what happened to them and be more aware,
Speaker 1: kind of more mindful about the way they think about
Speaker 1: other people and the way they judge other people in general.
Speaker 1: That I think would be the most ideal way to
Speaker 1: educate sort of the next generation of Americans. You know,
Speaker 1: you're seeing some hopeful snapshots of protests on the news
Speaker 1: where you see like the police and the protesters doing
Speaker 1: the boogie dance together. You know, you see these these
Speaker 1: flickers of moments. I don't know what positive that is
Speaker 1: going to be, but they warm my heart when I
Speaker 1: see such things, you know, or you see you know,
Speaker 1: just people who they're supposed to hate it. You know,
Speaker 1: they're told they're supposed to hate each other, and that
Speaker 1: they just put it down for a second and decide
Speaker 1: we're just not going to hate each other for a second,
Speaker 1: you know, Like I just I see these glimmers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, the thing one of the things that
Speaker 1: gives me the most hope is that is the is
Speaker 1: the diversity of the protesters. I've noticed that too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you know, people compare this in nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: all the time. It's very different from nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: because these protests are very, very diverse. And this Spike
Speaker 1: Lee said when he was interviewed recently. Yeah, he's like,
Speaker 1: it's amazing the difference. It's huge. And honestly, what it's
Speaker 1: bringing up is not just police reform, but a call
Speaker 1: for Americans, white Americans in particular, to understand that black
Speaker 1: Americans have been living under a different type of state
Speaker 1: than white Americans have been living under. And what we've
Speaker 1: seen recently in recent even just recent decade that's sorry,
Speaker 1: recent years before the protester starting in you know, twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: is that white Democrats have been have been becoming a
Speaker 1: lot more aware of systemic racism, systemic racism over the
Speaker 1: sort of Trump presidency where I mean, and it's massive,
Speaker 1: it's something like you know, people who agree that the
Speaker 1: government needs to do more to help blacks in American society.
Speaker 1: That goes from forty something percent of white Democrats to
Speaker 1: eighty something percent of white Democrats by twenty nineteen. So
Speaker 1: there's really big changes happening among white Democrats, in particular
Speaker 1: about awareness of what's happening to Black Americans in our society.
Speaker 1: And you know the fact that we're seeing Confederate statues
Speaker 1: come down now, right, that's not about police, that's about
Speaker 1: saying the Civil War never really ended, or at least
Speaker 1: the Confederacy was never fully defeated because all of these
Speaker 1: laws were put in place to truly hold back Black Americans.
Speaker 1: And I really, I really do think that part of
Speaker 1: the reason we can say this now is that there
Speaker 1: is an this is never have before. There's an entire
Speaker 1: political party that believes that systemic racism exists. The Democratic Party,
Speaker 1: like the white people and everybody else in the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party basically believe that systemic racism exists. And we have
Speaker 1: never had an entire political party that believes that before.
Speaker 1: We've always had sort of white supremacists scattered through both
Speaker 1: the Republican and Democratic parties, and there wasn't a big difference,
Speaker 1: and that's part of the reason they could get along
Speaker 1: and like it compromises. Right in the nineteen eighties, Democrats
Speaker 1: and Republicans could make compromises because they all agreed that like, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll do this, but only for white people. And so
Speaker 1: this sort of suppression of the knowledge of systemic racism
Speaker 1: allowed a lot of cooperation in Congress. But that doesn't help,
Speaker 1: that doesn't help us as a you know, in the
Speaker 1: society as a whole. And so I really think that
Speaker 1: large part of this is that because the parties have
Speaker 1: changed socially, the sort of the social demographic makeup of
Speaker 1: the parties has changed so much in recent decades that
Speaker 1: is allowing a lot more political power than has ever
Speaker 1: been applied to the idea that systemic racism exists, it's
Speaker 1: bad and it should be ended. It would be really
Speaker 1: nice if everyone could get a you know, rally around
Speaker 1: facts and not just ideologies, and and that we agreed,
Speaker 1: you know this, we agree this is a factually a problem.
Speaker 1: We don't agree that there's a problem. That we could
Speaker 1: somehow come towards some sort of agreement some of these things.
Speaker 1: But because there's there's widely different opinions on the extent
Speaker 1: of the systemic racism, and I don't think, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a definitive answer. I just read a really fascinating
Speaker 1: article by some and I really respect John mcwarter, who
Speaker 1: is an African American, I believe conservative talking about just
Speaker 1: saying they're really isn't good data that the police force
Speaker 1: is racist. There's a real there's a problem. But we
Speaker 1: could all rally around the problem of police corrupt regardless
Speaker 1: of your race. You know, there's a lot of white
Speaker 1: people killed by a police and there's not so some
Speaker 1: reasonable people and I would not say John mcwater is racist,
Speaker 1: you know, just for presenting a different viewpoint. You know,
Speaker 1: how do we listen to different viewpoints and try to
Speaker 1: try to agree on facts. So I think it's really
Speaker 1: important for us to keep in mind the difference between
Speaker 1: a person being racist and a society disadvantaging systematically disadvantaging
Speaker 1: a group of people. Right, It's not that one person
Speaker 1: is racist, it's that, you know, we had redlining so
Speaker 1: that black families were not allowed into neighborhoods, and we
Speaker 1: had neighborhood organizations that didn't allow black families to buy
Speaker 1: houses in those neighborhoods. And those neighborhoods were the ones
Speaker 1: with the good schools. And this was happening not even
Speaker 1: you know, fifty years ago. So this is happening to
Speaker 1: my my dad's generation. And so this is you know,
Speaker 1: I think that the idea is not that we're pointing
Speaker 1: fingers at people and saying you're a racist. If that
Speaker 1: racism has existed in American society since the very beginning,
Speaker 1: and we've been on this sort of constant journey to
Speaker 1: try to eliminate it in the system, not even just
Speaker 1: an individual people's minds, but just to change the you know,
Speaker 1: redlining became illegal in the sixties, so there, you know,
Speaker 1: racial discriminations technically illegal starting in nineteen sixty four, but
Speaker 1: that was nineteen sixty four, that was not very long ago.
Speaker 1: And then there are plenty of people in charge who
Speaker 1: are still upholding that old system of systemic racism. So
Speaker 1: it's you know, I think it's a really important it's
Speaker 1: a really important thing for people to separate the idea
Speaker 1: of like being called racist and understanding our society and
Speaker 1: the institutions upon which we live, right, and I do.
Speaker 1: I do think there is one one bit of hope
Speaker 1: is that we've also seen white Republicans becoming slightly more
Speaker 1: aware of systemic racism and also holding fewer negative stereotypes
Speaker 1: of black Americans. So it's so Republicans are also becoming
Speaker 1: more aware of this. It's just that the gap between
Speaker 1: white Democrats and white Republicans is still very large, but
Speaker 1: the but the changes are happening in both parties. So
Speaker 1: there is a general move toward understanding sort of the
Speaker 1: discrimination that black Americans face on a day to day basis,
Speaker 1: and and the idea that you know, we shouldn't hold
Speaker 1: these these negative stereotypes that you know, there are not
Speaker 1: There are not stereotype based differences between white and black Americans.
Speaker 1: So interesting, you see my point in how people really
Speaker 1: are not agreeing right now on even the extent of
Speaker 1: the various aspects of American cyrus are systemically racist. Even
Speaker 1: people might say that the racism does exist and acknowledge that,
Speaker 1: but there seems to be quite quite wild disagreement, you know,
Speaker 1: even within the Democratic Party. You know, I see lots
Speaker 1: of arguments on Twitter, even though within the Democrat you know,
Speaker 1: some people will say, how dare you even question that
Speaker 1: it's pervasive? You know, and they and then they immediately
Speaker 1: start hating each other without even discussing it. It's a
Speaker 1: very threatening thing to admit, right if you're a white
Speaker 1: person who's been living in a society that has been
Speaker 1: benefiting you and harming other people at your expert you know,
Speaker 1: you've been been benefited by at the expense of this
Speaker 1: other group of people. That's a hard that's a hard
Speaker 1: thing to take on as just well, John mcwater is black,
Speaker 1: the guy who wrote that. Yeah, I mean, but it
Speaker 1: is a whole philosophy and the difference. I think historians
Speaker 1: generally agree, right, like the historians of American history agree
Speaker 1: that that of American political history agree that that we
Speaker 1: have had a systemically racist system since the founding. The
Speaker 1: question is right, Obviously, it was systemically racist when people
Speaker 1: were enslaved, uh. And then and once they were no
Speaker 1: longer enslaved, we had eight years of reconstruction in which
Speaker 1: there were a lot of black community really successful in
Speaker 1: driving black communities that were built, and then they were
Speaker 1: literally murdered by white supremacists. Then we bombed them, you know,
Speaker 1: like the white society destroyed those communities as soon as
Speaker 1: they were successful. And then and then that led to
Speaker 1: an era of Jim Crow in which white people and
Speaker 1: black people weren't allowed to use the same water fountains,
Speaker 1: and that was only made illegal in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: and black people were really only allowed to vote in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five. So you know, think about the age
Speaker 1: of your parents in that year. We're not very far
Speaker 1: away from them. And it takes you know, if we
Speaker 1: have four hundred years of slavery, it's going to take
Speaker 1: a lot more time than fifty years to undo that
Speaker 1: much psychological training. Right, It's not a question of you know,
Speaker 1: do I think this is true? Do I do I?
Speaker 1: You know, like what is my experience of it? The
Speaker 1: question is actually just historically, what has happened, what have
Speaker 1: been the would have been the priorities of a government,
Speaker 1: would have been the priorities of our institutions, and like
Speaker 1: how people can treated and that brands are pretty clear
Speaker 1: on that. What I always try to do, I really
Speaker 1: appreciate your perspective. What I always try to do in
Speaker 1: the Psychology podcast is always constantly trying to think of alternative,
Speaker 1: like what would someone else say to what you're saying. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why I'm trying to push you a little bit,
Speaker 1: because I mean, some people, you know, make arguments that
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, you know, we've really come a long way
Speaker 1: even in thirty forty years and that we focus so
Speaker 1: much on how we haven't come that we very rarely
Speaker 1: talk about how far we have actually come. And some
Speaker 1: people might make that point. No, that's true, and we
Speaker 1: have come a remarkably far away, right, I mean, just
Speaker 1: just that, like we said that the demographics of the
Speaker 1: demonstrators that we've been seeing in all of these cities, right,
Speaker 1: we've clearly come a long way. But we also are
Speaker 1: still taking down Confederate monuments, so you know, and you know,
Speaker 1: know those weren't there right after the Civil War because
Speaker 1: the Confederacy was rebellion against the country. There were the enemy,
Speaker 1: and so you know, they were against the Union, so
Speaker 1: they were actually the bad guys. And those those those
Speaker 1: statues went up during Jim Crow to put black people
Speaker 1: in those communities back in their place and to remind
Speaker 1: them that the people who made the decisions about where
Speaker 1: statues went and what the statues were believe in the Confederacy.
Speaker 1: So the Confederate, the fact that we still have those statues,
Speaker 1: to me, suggests that there's still something very deep that
Speaker 1: is that is we've all just sort of you know,
Speaker 1: we look past it and we'll walk past the statues,
Speaker 1: and white people don't have to worry about it. We
Speaker 1: just walk past it and don't worry. But it means
Speaker 1: something really really different, and that's sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of this crazy thing. NASCAR has prohibited the Confederate
Speaker 1: flag at NASCAR events, and like the U, I think
Speaker 1: as US Marines just made it no longer allowed for
Speaker 1: Marines to have a Confederate flag like sticker on their
Speaker 1: you know whatever, our equipment, and the flag of the
Speaker 1: Confederacy was a flag of of treason. You know. The
Speaker 1: the idea that we have a military group that that
Speaker 1: had for a while allowed as soldiers to have this
Speaker 1: flag that was based on, you know, treason against America
Speaker 1: is really remarkable. So we've come a really long way.
Speaker 1: You're right, then, these these these protests and demonstrations I
Speaker 1: think are really great evidence of that. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, you know, if we still have if we're
Speaker 1: still flying the Confederate flag at sporting events, that's that's
Speaker 1: a really clear signal to a lot of people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, well, I think this is the last hopeful
Speaker 1: thing we can do change it. We talked about contact there,
Speaker 1: We talked about super ordinal U social norms. You say
Speaker 1: one way that outright partisan prejudice may be addressed is
Speaker 1: for the parties themselves to establish new norms for partisan behavior.
Speaker 1: Could you see a new leader coming to power, even
Speaker 1: our current leader somehow complete changing his whole style overnight.
Speaker 1: Definitely not the current leader. He's not well known for
Speaker 1: controlling the language that he uses. But certainly I think
Speaker 1: leadership does matter the you know, even you know, going
Speaker 1: back to like our parents generation, right, like the use
Speaker 1: of derogatory racial slurs and our parents generation was much
Speaker 1: more widespread than it is today. And now we just
Speaker 1: find it completely socially acceptable to say horrible things about
Speaker 1: political partisans. On the other side, it's completely socially acceptable
Speaker 1: for us to you know, call liberals or democrats you know,
Speaker 1: awful words, and the same thing for Republicans and conservatives. So,
Speaker 1: you know, that to me seems like a norm that
Speaker 1: could be challenged. It's it's certainly anti democratic, and the
Speaker 1: idea that we're just allowing people not allowing you know,
Speaker 1: you can't control people say. But but the way that
Speaker 1: we change the use of like derogatory racial slurs is
Speaker 1: that we needed a norm that it's not okay to
Speaker 1: do that, and and so it's possible that this actually
Speaker 1: the way that we talk about each other as Democrats
Speaker 1: and Republicans can could shift if we wanted it, to write,
Speaker 1: if we wanted to create new norms around the way
Speaker 1: that we talk about each other politically, that could potentially
Speaker 1: shift behavior. You know, have that type of language not
Speaker 1: be seen on you know, news or public media or
Speaker 1: any type of like popular popular media, because right now
Speaker 1: it's it's just it's so much more acceptable just to
Speaker 1: use these really awful words against Democrats and Republicans and
Speaker 1: it is about any other group at all, agreed, and
Speaker 1: people are it gets you more likes on Twitter among
Speaker 1: your fan base or your in group if you use
Speaker 1: such words well, and I mean so nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: New Gingrich wrote what's called the Gopak Memo, which which
Speaker 1: let which was a list of words that you should
Speaker 1: use to This was for Republicans refreshment Republicans in the
Speaker 1: new nineteen ninety five Congress where they first took over
Speaker 1: Congress and the Republicans took over Congress for the first
Speaker 1: time in forty years, and he gave them a list
Speaker 1: of words that they should be using to talk about
Speaker 1: Republicans and those were like patriotic, loyal family. And then
Speaker 1: words that should be used to talk about Democrats, and
Speaker 1: those were things like poison, cancer, evil, serpent, you know,
Speaker 1: just like really terrible, terrible language, and that that really Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think like in the Bible. Okay, Okay, I think
Speaker 1: serpents are cool. Okay, but yeah, point so that I
Speaker 1: think that sort of did usher in a new era
Speaker 1: of like, oh, we're supposed to talk about people this way, right,
Speaker 1: Newt Ginger showed us that we could do that, So
Speaker 1: we're allowed to do this, We're allowed to say these
Speaker 1: these terrible things. As I was looking the book, I
Speaker 1: was like, is there any good news at all? And
Speaker 1: I found one thing and maybe let's just leave them
Speaker 1: on this. You talked about the importance of self affirmation.
Speaker 1: People want to There's so much ego threat going on
Speaker 1: right now, and everyone wants to matter. I mean everyone.
Speaker 1: You see it. You see a desperate cry, you know,
Speaker 1: I saw you know this protest in England three people
Speaker 1: with white people Matter science, Like everyone wants to matter.
Speaker 1: You wrote, the good news is that cone it all
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven have found that simply reminding a
Speaker 1: person of their own self worth, a technique called self
Speaker 1: affirmation can significantly reduce extremism and ideological closed mindedness. Do
Speaker 1: you think perhaps there's some way that we could all
Speaker 1: listen more to each other and affirm each other's basic
Speaker 1: worth and dignity as a human being. So that requires
Speaker 1: us to do that for ourselves first, Right, So the
Speaker 1: nice thing about I mean, the easy thing about self
Speaker 1: affirmation is that you can you do it on your own, right.
Speaker 1: It's just like, sit down and write about a time
Speaker 1: when you felt proud of yourself for five minutes. Just
Speaker 1: do that, and you'll be a nicer person after you
Speaker 1: do that. The problem is that it's really hard for
Speaker 1: us to internalize these really positive ideas about it ourselves.
Speaker 1: And we're not going to be able to treat other
Speaker 1: people with kindness until we're you know, it's self affirmation,
Speaker 1: until we're treating ourselves with kindness and believing in our
Speaker 1: own self worth. And that's a lot that can be
Speaker 1: a challenge that that it could be something that leadership
Speaker 1: could address, right. There could be you know, a source
Speaker 1: of you know, creating a source of pride, creating a
Speaker 1: source of healthy pride. Yeah, outside of the bounds of partisanship.
Speaker 1: And that's so that is a possible that is a
Speaker 1: possible path forward. If there's something we do as Americans
Speaker 1: that that makes us feel good about ourselves, then then
Speaker 1: we may be able to get out of this. We
Speaker 1: need a really inspirational leader. I feel like I want
Speaker 1: to run for president in the United States. I know
Speaker 1: what my message would be of uniting that's all as
Speaker 1: a single species. Anyway, Look, you say quote, I maintained
Speaker 1: that an electorate that is emotionally engaged and politically activated
Speaker 1: on behalf of prejudice and misunderstanding is not electorate that
Speaker 1: produces positive outcomes. Look, thank you so much for coming
Speaker 1: on the podcast today and offering your wonderful research. It's
Speaker 1: so timely right now, more so than you probably ever
Speaker 1: would have imagined or even hoped for. You know, you
Speaker 1: probably wish your work wasn't so timely. It's like being
Speaker 1: being an epidemiologist. I'm sure that's right. That's that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us today on the
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast, and all the best with your or a
Speaker 1: new book as well. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: It was a lot of fun. Thanks for listening to
Speaker 1: this episode of the Psychology podcast. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
Speaker 1: you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast
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