Polarization Part 1 with Dr. Dominic J. Packer, Dr. Jay J. Van Bavel, Dr. Hahrie Han, Alison Taylor, Uriel Epshein and Joshua Fryday
32:02 Share

Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, Tavia Gilbert, and along with journalist Richard Sergei, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing.

We're at a global inflection point in which many of us experience division, disconnection, isolation, loneliness, and anger over politics. And it can feel as though we are politically at odds everywhere we go. Whether it's the holiday dinner table, in the corporate boardroom, or on the factory floor. Whether we're at worship, at school, in a doctor's office, even playing sports. We're polarized.

We hear the word increasingly often to explain our extreme political divides. But what is polarization? What is preventing us from finding common ground with our fellow citizens? What is the impact of polarization on our country and our democracy?

Researchers Dr. J.J. van Bevel and Dr. Dominic J. Packer are co-authors of The Power of Us, harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. And they recently convened a multidisciplinary group of researchers, scholars, and writers with New York University and Lehigh University to focus on the issue of global polarization.

This is the first of a special three-part series where we define what polarization is, explore its causes and effects, consider what we can learn from the history of polarization in other countries, share the antidotes to polarization that research has uncovered, and finally, explain why it's important to make a long-term investment in polarization research. Let's start by defining polarization.

Dr. Dominic Packer, social psychologist and professor of psychology at Lehigh University, thinks about polarization in this way. One of my favorite definitions or ways of thinking about it is that polarization occurs in a society when all the richness and multiplicity of people's identities, which are often quite various, start collapsing into a single dimension.

So if you think about who is a person and what are their set of identities, it could include their religious identity, their political beliefs, their occupational identities, their hobbies, their ethnicity, gender. It could include many, many things. As things polarize, it's like all those identities begin to collapse into a single dimension where the most important thing is where you fall politically. And you begin to be able to predict where does someone live? What kind of occupation do they have?

What kind of church, if any, do they go to? And so on, simply by knowing their political affiliation. And all that richness begins to be lost. Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at New York University, Dr. J.J. Van Bavel, affirms a truth that many of us already sense. Polarization is at its highest point in the United States in over 40 years, which is as long as we've been measuring it.

But what's different about the polarization we're facing now is it's not driven by in-group love. It's not as if people have greater pride in their political party than they did 40 years ago. What's new is that they really despise the other party. So it's driven more by out-group hate than in-group love. And what that means is that people are willing to vote for political candidates that they might not like simply because they despise or fear the other party.

Uriel Epstein is the executive director of the Renew Democracy Initiative, organized to defend American democracy and restore its place as a beacon of global freedom. He defines polarization in these simple terms. Polarization is the organization

inability or unwillingness to listen to the other side with an open mind and to be willing to engage with them in good faith and compromise on important issues for the country.

Dr. Hari Han offers her perspective. She's a professor of political science and the director of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which aims to strengthen global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed inclusive dialogue.

She says polarization is not any one thing. So at one level, polarization is just the distance between the political parties, you know, and we can see that in Congress, that the views of the average Republican, the views of the average Democrat have become increasingly further apart.

I think in the mass public, though, where you have a lot of people for whom politics is, quote unquote, a mere sideshow in the circus of life, polarization isn't necessarily about how far apart they are on particular policy decisions, but instead how people perceive those who are different from them. And I think one of the things that has become more of greater concern in recent years is that people tend to think of people who are not like them in increasingly negative, in some cases, dehumanized terms.

Research shows that what Dr. Van Bavel referred to as "out-group hate" is, in fact, more prevalent and more extreme than it has been in past decades. Here's Dr. Packer. I think what's really become a much stronger force is what's called emotional or affective polarization, which is how much do we dislike each other? So there's data that's attracted people's feelings about their own political party and the other political party since, certainly since the 1980s, early '80s.

What you found in the 80s, essentially, was people felt pretty positively about their own party and neutral about the other side. And this is a pattern of social psychologists called in-group love but not out-group hate. And it's actually pretty common in inter-group relations. So people tend to like their own group better than other groups, but they don't dislike other groups. Like, we're great, they're all fine.

What's shifted politically over time is that people are not more positive now than they were then about their own group. If anything, maybe they're slightly more negative. But they've become much more negative about the other side and it's shifted this pattern of in-group kind of like them and out-group strong dislike or even in some cases hate. And you hear this rhetorically when people say, you know, I'm not really voting for a candidate but I'm definitely voting against that candidate.

They are awful. We can't have them. And so that's my decision. I'm not as excited about this person, but at least bad option.

Dr. Van Bavel explains the implications of this way of thinking for U.S. citizens. This has a lot of negative consequences for our willingness to compromise, to pass legislation that would help all Americans, and for us to actually support and promote political leaders who are good for the country, as opposed to just good for their party. The way that any country needs to work is that people should care about their country

even if they have a political party preference. And so this allows us to find compromises and work together for the betterment of all citizens. What you have now in the United States that's really become the problem is that people are no longer willing to put their country first.

over and above their political party. And so they'll allow or support corruption or engage in harmful behaviors that might even harm their electorate if they think it benefits their favorite political leader or political party. In fact, right now, citizens in the U.S. don't even agree who the real Americans are. We're seeing a moment of pretty stark difference and disagreement between people based on politics. What's changing and what's really ramped up is the level of animosity

and the willingness to potentially jeopardize democratic institutions in order to win. You do hear this rhetoric on both sides, both trying to claim that national identity for themselves and say that the other side has no part in it, right? So you could say, well, you know, the real Americans are Republicans and Democrats by default or definition are traitors to that, right, are the enemies of the state.

If that's the way you start thinking, then that becomes no recourse. You can't then use those identities to help bridge divides because you've defined the identity as essentially your particular more parochial partisan one. I think at least rhetorically we're seeing quite a bit of that.

And I think the strength of the national identity to unite at this point in time has been weakened. The greater good is in trouble, if that's the way people think about it. If we solely view the world through these strictly partisan lines, then the greater good doesn't exist beyond your more parochial interest. When you think about the greater good, you end up inevitably thinking about what's the good of my people, in this case my political tribe, rather than the broader good that would encompass the other tribe.

And I think that national broader identity is absolutely essential, especially for the preservation of these institutions, right? If you don't believe that, you know, American democracy matters and you just think it only matters to the degree that my party wins, then you're willing to throw all that out, right, simply for power. And, you know, that seems like a devastating outcome.

If polarization has exponentially increased over the last five decades, what has happened to deepen divides enough to potentially destabilize American democracy? Dr. Van Bevel says. There's a lot of things driving polarization. There's everything from structural problems like gerrymandering to economic problems like inequality to social problems.

like the language and behavior of political leaders, the role of the mainstream media and social media. And all of these things seem to be amplifying it. So we're really in kind of a negative vortex or what some would consider like a vicious spiral. Each thing amplifies and causes and reinforces more polarization.

Part of human nature is that we evolved in groups. Our brain is designed to look for what identities and what communities we're part of, and that's really important to us. It makes us feel good and a sense of value. And what's happened is our society has constantly reinforced that your political party is the main identity that matters. But people have the potential to see themselves fitting in larger, more inclusive identities. We used to find connection and identity outside of politics in community groups,

But we're losing community, says Dr. Hahn. Churches, community groups, civil society organizations, you know, all the spaces where people gather, the proverbial bowling league, so to speak, you know, what we see is that there are fewer of those. The polarization think tank experts widely agree. The loss of community groups has contributed to the widespread disconnection and isolation that fuel polarization.

Uriel Epstein also highlights what he sees as the causes of polarization. We are as polarized or more polarized than at any time since the Civil War.

What's driving our polarization today, I think it's a whole host of different issues. I think number one, it's social media and its filter bubbles. We are only receiving the information that we already agree with, which further amplifies our views and makes us more extreme. And then the conversation that's happening in social media becomes sort of a self-reinforcing cycle and a vicious cycle that makes people more and more extreme.

So that's one piece. The next piece, I think, is a sense of insecurity. I think people, regardless of sort of where they come from, have this sense of feeling under attack.

So whether they self-identify as being on the left, they feel like their values are under attack by this alien entity almost. And on the right, they feel the same way. They feel like their values are under attack. And when you feel like you're on the defensive, you are less willing to compromise, you're less willing to listen to the other side, and you become more aggressive.

And the last piece of this is there's this tribal component to it. Humans are meaning-making creatures. We need meaning to feel good about ourselves, to feel comfortable.

And, you know, historically there were any number of places we could find that. We could find that in our synagogue, our mosque, our church. We could find that in our PTA group. We could find that in various civic organizations. And what we're seeing is all of those places are one by one becoming less prominent, becoming less prevalent. They're disappearing.

And as a result, politics are becoming that tribal identity. They are taking the place of religion, civic societies, friendships even, right? I mean, there's so many studies now about how loneliness is this paralyzing problem in the general public. And I think people are turning to more and more radical political solutions to try to fill that hole. We have already fallen into that trap and lost much of our person-to-person connection

So what does Dr. Hahn believe has been the impact on American democracy? She says, already.

We are in a moment of crisis. It's not the only crisis that we face, and I tend to be an optimist, and so I'd like to think that we're going to be able to find our way out of it, but I don't think we're going to find our way out of it without everyone putting in the work and doing the work that needs to be done. In fact, even in our work lives, once a place regarded as a non-political space, we cannot escape division and tribalism.

While small and large businesses were once unwilling to represent any particular political point of view, that is no longer the case today. Business settings are as polarized as any other sphere of society.

Alison Taylor, executive director at Ethical Systems, a research collaborative affiliated with NYU that explores the best ideas from behavioral science and social psychology to help to drive more ethical, effective organizational business cultures, says that businesses today are under tremendous pressure from their stakeholders to represent public positions on a myriad of potentially polarizing issues.

There are also now these new pressures to do something about these issues. Many of them are coming from inside the company. So they are pressure from key constituents like employees, like customers, where we are with all these business pressures that I'm describing as a

consequence of polarization and a consequence more broadly of political fragmentation and failure and dysfunction. Back as recently as a decade ago, the status quo was for business to say, we are politically neutral. We don't get involved in politics. We don't take a stand on controversial issues. Businesses have become more

There's very, very interesting data showing that C-suites have become either more Republican or more Democrat quite dramatically in the last decade. You have a lot more businesses moving

really trying to stoke the culture wars and stoke polarization for brand advantage, I think that business is becoming a vehicle for our political frustrations. That pressure is not going away, and we have started to look to our employers to represent our values, to provide us even with a democratic voice on what they're standing up on.

and to really be a source of meaning and identity in our lives in a way that was not the case even a decade ago. What does Taylor name as the source of this pressure on businesses?

A lot of this goes back to the rise of social media on the one hand, so more use of kind of a bottom-up voice, bottom-up political participation. That has made companies subject to a lot of the forces of popular interest and social media in a way that they weren't before. Social media certainly isn't all bad. It has huge positive potential to democratize and open lines of communication.

Social media can give citizens tools that encourage emerging democracies to take root. But hopes for social media to strengthen healthy civic discourse in the mature democracy of the U.S. have never been realized, says Dr. Van Bavel.

I had great hope for social media and the internet. And when these things took off, there was an enormous amount of promise that we were going to be able to communicate, that we were going to be able to challenge oppressive systems and regimes. And there's some evidence that that happened. In places that don't have healthy democracies, it seems like social media is giving people a voice who deserve it and need it to mobilize against autocracies. But what also seems to be happening at the same time is healthy democracies, like the United States, seem to be paying a price with

with social media. So social media is amplifying extreme voices, divisive language, and fostering greater conflict. And so there was one study that found, for example, if you just get people to log off Facebook for a month, it reduces their polarization. And so it seems like the impacts of social media might be helpful in some places in the world, but can be amplifying the existing polarization that's here in the United States.

Dr. Van Bevel explains that despite so many means of digital communication, loneliness, disconnection, and isolation are more prevalent today than ever, and the repercussions are serious. I think the internet has created a paradox.

We expected it to connect us to people and find commonalities with people and communities that we couldn't otherwise find. And I think for some people it's done that. But what all the data suggests is that we're lonelier than ever. We feel less connected with other people. And this was even before the pandemic. The Surgeon General of the United States said that we're in a loneliness epidemic.

And what that means is catastrophic for our mental health and our physical health. Some research has found that the effect of loneliness on our physical health is the same as smoking. Loneliness damages us in all kinds of ways. And it doesn't seem like social media is filling that need. It feels more like junk food, where it's filling our immediate sense of hunger, but it's making us less healthy. Dr. Packer believes the same.

Social media, there was this sense of promise, right? It was enabling people to connect with a broader network of people than they otherwise could. And lots of good can come from that, right? It created communities. There's tremendous value in that. But it also allowed other sorts of group identities to form that were less positive. One way we think about social media is that it's not like it created polarization, but maybe it put it on steroids, right? It was a sort of accelerant to some of the dynamics we're seeing.

The more communication there is, the more things change. And now we're communicating more than ever. The information exchange is just unparalleled in human history. And so it speeds things up. It could speed up the change of words and their meanings, but it could also speed up, in this case, the animosity between political groups. The problem is that social media is not value neutral, but in fact designed to amplify certain kinds of communication.

We increasingly know that certain kinds of content on social media is rewarded. If you think of getting retweeted or your information being shared as a kind of reward, it tends to be provocative things, angry things, expressions of moral outrage.

That's what captures attention and then what gets shared. And so it incentivizes people who want that attention, which of course includes our leaders, right, pundits and politicians. Social media has created an incentive structure that's not good for our leaders and it's not good for us as consumers and citizens either because it's drawing our attention, especially to particularly sort of nasty interpretations of things. Dr. Hahn also notes that not only does social media amplify the speed and the impact of divisive communication,

It also undermines the very nature of truth and fact.

Social media and digital technologies in general and the intersection of digital technology and politics has accelerated polarization and it has amplified a lot of the divisiveness that exists. It obviously accelerated the spread of things like misinformation and disinformation as well. And so, you know, I think it absolutely is culpable. I don't think it's the sole cause of the problems that we have. I think a lot of that is

Merely it's an amplifier. It's like a megaphone for some of these problems. Joshua Friday is the chief service officer for the state of California with California Volunteers, a cabinet-level position in the governor's office responsible for service and civic engagement. He shares his colleagues' concerns about social media, as well as the leaders who weaponize social media's worst aspects.

Social media absolutely has a role to play for contributing to the sense of isolation and the sense of polarization. But we can't only blame social media. It's too easy to just do that. We live in a society right now that is changing rapidly, and people are looking for explanations of why it's changing and why they may feel like they're being left behind.

And it's often, and we see political leaders exploit this. The easiest explanation is often the most divisive explanation that political leaders point to. So I think it's certainly a leadership issue. But it's also, we live in a very disconnected society. People feel isolated from each other.

They don't know their neighbors. They're not involved in social organizations anymore to the extent that they were decades or generations ago. And because we are literally physically isolated from each other and politically isolated from each other, it makes it easy to prey on people with these, I think, simple and often divisive explanations that our leaders are given.

Dr. Packer agrees that leadership has been influenced in an era of social media and polarization. Leadership is what helps people understand, first of all, what's happening in the world, right? It interprets events for us. And leaders help us understand who we are. You know, ordinary people have influence as well. But leaders get a larger voice, right? And they shape people's understandings of what it means to be a leader.

And in leadership, in the case of politics, I think certainly politicians are leaders, but we should think about opinion leaders, right? Pundits.

television personalities, people on social media. The media landscape generally, cable news in particular, rewards provocateurs, rewards people who are willing to say outlandish or outspoken kinds of things that rile people up. It's what rewards the networks with attention, it's what rewards people on social media with eyeballs. And so there's an incentive for pundits and politicians to increasingly ramp up their rhetoric.

And Dr. Van Bavel says that more and more, ordinary citizens' attention is being captured by leaders who are exerting influence through social media. There's over 4 billion people on social media now, and the average social media user is online for about three hours a day. And so they're scrolling through about 300 feet of newsfeed a day. That's the height of the Statue of Liberty on their phone or their computer.

And what that means is the things that grab their attention are going to tend to be the most extreme, provocative, emotional content. And so in that attention economy, what's winning is often the content that is loaded with emotion and connects to our identities. And that content often includes misinformation. That content is things that are potentially divisive and amplify polarization. To have a healthy, pluralistic democracy with a diverse group of people, different religions, ethnicities,

nationalities, socioeconomic statuses and income brackets. We need to have something that binds us together because it's a dangerous recipe if there's nothing that connects us with one another. What we're doing right now is we've created systems and platforms where we're now logged in for multiple hours a day that are amplifying the divisions between us rather than highlighting potential commonalities.

And these are the commonalities that we see when we talk to another human being. We have a conversation. We develop empathy for them. We understand where they're coming from, even if we might disagree with them. And maybe we update our beliefs when they tell us some experience or piece of information. Right now, what we seem to have is the opposite, which is like essentially information warfare online, where people are constantly at odds with one another and amplifying divisive content.

Dr. Packer and Dr. Van Bavel expound on how the media, the attention economy, and suspicion about traditional institutions in American society all contribute to polarization and how that threatens to undermine our democracy. We have to rely on others always, in almost every domain, for information about what is true and what is false. And the people we rely on for that are the people we trust.

And this is where groups come in because we trust the people in the groups we belong to much more than people in other groups. And so if, you know, the culture you grew up in says the earth is round, you're quite likely to believe the earth is round. If we trust our own party and just trust the other party, we're willing to believe all kinds of misinformation if it's spread by the political leaders that we actually trust.

And so that becomes a vulnerability that we have as citizens, as a country, for the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. You've seen its impact in terms of the erosion of democracy, the number of Americans who don't believe that the 2020 election was actually won fairly. That led into the January 6th insurrection, which was arguably one of the biggest threats in history on American democracy. I think that

As citizens, we all have a responsibility to find a healthier way of getting factual information to people. Dr. Van Bavel shares what he sees as citizens' moral obligation in this situation.

Citizens have a responsibility to, first of all, value and support leaders who care about a healthy democracy. They have a responsibility to engage in that democracy, and that takes more than just voting. That takes doing things in your own community, being a leader and a volunteer and a role model to people you work with, to your families, to your community, that you're going to be someone who spreads accurate information. You're somebody who cares about citizens. You're somebody who's open-minded. You're someone who tolerates a diversity of perspectives and is open

to dissent. You're somebody who updates your thinking in basis of new evidence and facts. And so everybody has a responsibility for that. It can't just be something that's solved by a small number of people. It's going to require millions and millions of people doing it for a long period of time to have any real change. The final thing we could do is give status and responsibility to people who are good at those things.

We've always had political competition, and our political institutions and processes were created in order to safeguard American democracy despite that political rivalry. But they were not designed for a world in which out-group hate outweighs respect for our country, and where social media ramps up the spread of myths and disinformation that profoundly erode trust. Politics is an inherently competitive thing. And, I mean, America's

America didn't begin with political parties, but they rapidly emerged as they emerge in almost every country. And as soon as you have parties, those are groups that people would identify with.

and they're going to fight, right? They're going to compete for power and they're going to compete about policy and what we should be doing. So I don't think that's new. A political system without competition is a dictatorship, right? But as the sense of competition grows and grows and grows and the outgrip isn't just seen as someone competing over sensible policy solutions but is regarded instead as a some sort of a threat to the nation or a threat to who we fundamentally are,

Then the competition becomes particularly toxic. And I think that's the state where we're currently at, at least in a lot of domains politically, where it's not just competitive. We believe we're competing almost for the essence or soul of the nation. And that's a dangerous place to be. It's always a competition for power. But the stakes, if you come to believe that it's for the power to control the destiny of the nation, and if the other side was to gain power, it would destroy the nation.

That's at a whole different level of stakes, right, where you can't afford to lose and therefore you might be willing to do more or less anything to win, including overthrowing the very institutions that allow you to compete politically. If you believe they're a mortal threat, then you might do everything in your power to ever stop them having control. The framers and founders of the United States thought a great deal about how to create institutions that they thought would

create a division of power and prevent any particular person or group from becoming able to continually dictate the terms of the game. But the rules created in the 1700s aren't necessarily the rules that are going to work when we have social media where everyone's information is readily accessible at all times and they're bombarded with facts from different perspectives that seem completely contradictory and these tools are getting exploited.

Neither Dr. Packer nor Dr. Van Bavel believe that conflict or debate are unhealthy or unproductive. However, says Dr. Van Bavel, how we disagree and debate, as individual citizens or as leaders, can either build trust and strengthen democracy or destroy them.

One of the core linchpins of any healthy democracy is disagreement, debate, open-mindedness, and unwilling to hear other opinions, and then updating your beliefs if you were wrong about something. Leaders have a responsibility to role model all of these things in society. I would also say leaders have a responsibility to role model working together to find healthy solutions.

in their own lives because that's the primary reason that we put them in positions of power. It's not to advance their own individual interests and stay in power, but to help solve problems that face their citizens. And if they are obsessively and narrowly focused on their own interests or their own party's interests, they erode public trust in those institutions and in leadership. And so I think that that's also one of the fundamental problems here is that you have a lack of trust

You have a lack of trust in our leaders. You have a growing lack of trust in our institutions. And these are the things that have been critical throughout history of making America and other countries successful and healthy. One of the things you see when America is trying to help other democracies that are emerging build stable societies is to build their institutions.

Meanwhile, we're destroying and eroding trust in our own. And so I think that's something that is a deep, deep-rooted problem. I would argue that that's almost the biggest cancer in society is erosion of trust and attacks on our institutions. Rather than trying to fix and improve the institutions, it's fostering increasing distrust in them that's incredibly damaging. I think that that's one of the deepest and most sustained threats to democracy is this whole generation of leaders now who's trying to dismantle

institutions that were designed to protect and support democracy because they bought into a conspiracy theory from the last election. That is something that's a potentially legacy that could be with us for years or decades or even much longer if they continue to erode institutions

that protect and count people's votes. We return in two weeks for the second in our special three-part series, where we consider what the writers, researchers, and scholars we met today say what we can learn from the history of polarization in other countries, as well as what the research has uncovered about potential solutions.

This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with Richard Sergei and Tavia Gilbert, written, voiced, and produced by TalkBox Productions and Tavia Gilbert, with senior producer Katie Flood, music by Alexander Filipiak, mix and master by Kayla Elrod, executive producer Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation. Thanks for listening.