Bridging Political Divisions
We have on our hands a nation that agrees on many things, yet is too bitterly divided to discuss commonalities.
My family is split along political lines. As my siblings and I came of age, I was always the one who wanted to press on in political conversations with my relatives. I knew that calm, focused discussions could create areas of learning and we could at least leave the table understanding the other side a little better. Unfortunately, my loud, opinionated family usually failed to keep it together. As it turns out, so did the rest of the country.
A June 2018 study that analyzed location information from more than 10 million phones found that 2016 Thanksgiving celebrations with residents from opposing-party districts were 30 to 50 minutes shorter than those with residents from same-party districts. This added up to 34 million hours of lost cross-partisan discourse. 72% of people said they now find it “harder than ever” to discuss politics with people holding different views. The crack of partisan division has spread beyond politics, dividing us into groups that live in different places, watch different TV shows, eat different foods, and marry those within their same group.
The good (and the bad) news is that, while a lot of ink has been spilled discussing polarization and fierce political divisions, this polarization may be less grounded in policy opinions than many of us realize. Lilliana Mason and other scholars have found that bias, activism, and anger have increased more than policy issue differences. The result: We have on our hands a nation that agrees on many things, yet is too bitterly divided to discuss commonalities. Surveys and studies have shown again and again that negative stereotypes, dislike toward opposing political parties, and partisan attachments are at record highs in the United States.
The Pew Research Center reports that large shares of both Democrats and Republicans remark that thinking about the other party brings about not only frustration, but also fear and anger. Researchers even found that while positive feelings for the preferred party used to be the main motive for political participation, this pattern seems to have reversed between 1980 and 2016. In 1980, people who felt negatively toward the out‐party were actually less likely to vote than those who felt otherwise. Today, those with more negativity toward the opposition have a higher probability of political participation, including attending a rally, donating money, and working for a candidate or party. This change only furthers the negativity dividing us.
In fact, James Campbell recently found that polarization infiltrates every aspect of political life, including formal and informal discussions, elections, and even interactions among the highest level of elected officials regarding public policies. Clearly, it is essential to a healthy democracy, especially in a two party system, for opposing parties to lead productive discussions and find common ground in order to move forward.
The research that I conducted in my senior year at Brown University has shed light on ways to improve political conversation by bettering our view of and facilitating our ability to relate to the other side. This research builds on previous work conducted by Lauren Min and Phil Fernbach at the University of Colorado, Boulder as well as Steven Sloman, my professor at Brown, and his lab members. Min, Fernbach, and Sloman’s research explored the difference between thinking about sacred values (values for which people are unwilling to make tradeoffs), and thinking about the consequences of a policy.
Min and Fernbach investigated the effects of thinking about sacred values on political divisions. They had participants rate their attitudes on issues, and the reasons for their attitudes on scales ranging from value-based to consequence-based. Participants also rated dependent variables including resolution tractability (or manageability), perceived understanding of the issue, and position extremity. The results indicated that when people thought about policies in terms of sacred values, they were more extreme and more confident in their opinions, saw the issue as less solvable and more important, and believed that they understood the issues better. This does not bode well for finding middle ground and discussing civilly with the other side.
My experiment analyzed opinions of 101 Brown students from a variety of years and concentrations (majors). They first rated their initial attitude on policies, For example, they might see:
Then they were given sets of “for” and “against” opinions to read. The opinions about the policies varied along two dimensions: (a) sacred values versus consequential thinking, and (b) shared versus contrasting thinking. Pairs of “for” and “against” opinions had four permutations: shared sacred values, shared consequences, contrasting sacred values, or contrasting consequences. One of the policies examined was school bussing — whether children should take school buses to other districts in order to diversify public schools. In this example, the shared value was education, whereas the contrasting values were diversity and freedom. The shared consequence was an improved education, and the contrasting consequences were better versus worse education. This is an example of what the participant would see in the sacred values condition:
After reading these sets of opinions, later in the survey, participants re-rated their attitudes on the issues.
The change in their attitude was calculated, measured as a positive change in extremity if they moved toward the strongly disagree or strongly agree end of the scale, and a negative change if they moved towards neither disagree nor agree.
For those that saw opinions with either contrasting sacred values or contrasting consequences, their attitudes became 3.5% more extreme, while the average attitude for those that saw shared sacred values or shared consequences became 5.3% less extreme:
Then, they answered further questions, which included:
Those in the shared condition rated their viewpoint as 21.6% more similar to the other side than those in the contrasting condition, and they rated the issue as 9.6% more tractable than those in the contrasting condition, as can be seen in the second and third graphs.
Framing issues in terms of shared values or consequences (especially consequences) can reduce attitude extremity and increase perceptions of common ground. Publicizing these results, the fact that a simple statement can actually reduce the extremity of people’s self-rated attitudes, has significant implications for public discourse. If one emphasizes the shared value in a discussion, a conversation that was headed for disaster could be saved; people may even recognize similarities to the other side that they had not previously considered. While there are many other factors behind the current polarization (polarization has been shown to increase with inequality), this simple conversational tool, if taken up by our teachers, peers, leaders, the media, and other public faces, can begin to heal rifts that have opened in our homes and houses of congress. Maybe there is hope for political conversation without anger at my next holiday dinner.
