How Our Psychology Polarizes Us (And How To Fix It)
We really need to understand how we got here…
Published in
8 min readMay 11, 2018
We are more polarized than ever before.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has given several talks discussing the trends in political polarization in contemporary Western democracies. It doesn’t matter where you look — the academy, our governmental institutions, and social networks — they all show the same thing… we’re separating at an alarming rate, and leaving a huge vacuum in the political center. Just take a look at some of the stats.
- Liberals outnumber conservatives among tenured professors by a rate of around 12:1 (though this rises to upwards of 50:1 in some humanities departments)
- People are just as likely to support a specific political party because of a dislike of the other side than because of a liking of that party’s policies
- We have a growing propensity to form online echo chambers in our social networks, only engaging with those of a like-mind (we also predominantly follow the most extreme public figures on each side of the political spectrum)
- We arbitrarily label media stories as “fake news” depending on whether it agrees with our worldview or not
