People might identify with a particular political orientation for some reason, but once they go in that direction, they are affected by group-think.http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/06/13/How-Tribal-Politics-Undermining-Our-Democracy
Another factor is that the power elite is surely deliberately encouraging this, in order to keep the rest of us from working together for our common good.
BY ROB GARVER, The Fiscal Times
June 13, 2014
There’s a disturbing nugget buried deep in the remarkable study on political polarization in the U.S. released by the Pew Research Center on Thursday. For 20 years, Pew has been using a battery of ten questions to locate a respondent on the continuum between extreme liberalism and extreme conservatism. And it makes no sense.
Or at least, it shouldn’t.
The pollsters ask respondents to identify which of a pair of statements about a particular issue comes closest to their actual beliefs, even if the match isn’t perfect. In one example, people are asked to choose between the statements, “Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” and “Government often does a better job than people give it credit for.” - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/06/13/How-Tribal-Politics-Undermining-Our-Democracy#sthash.4TarViTy.dpuf
Okay, fine. That seems a pretty fair proxy for conservatism versus liberalism. Reading down the list, though, it becomes clear that on a totally objective basis, there’s no reason the various issues should have a conservative/liberal split.
Why on earth, for example, should there be any correlation whatsoever between your opinion on gay marriage and your opinion on whether environmental regulations are worth the costs they impose on businesses? The issues are utterly unrelated.
-----
The depressing answer is that, while these things shouldn’t correlate, they do. As the Pew researchers put it, “while there is no ex-ante reason for people’s views on diverse issues such as the social safety net, homosexuality and military strength to correlate, these views have a traditional ‘left/right’ association.”
According to people who study both politics and our brains, the reasons are real and largely intractable.
“It all kind of starts with a misunderstanding we have about how people come to have their opinions on issues,” said Vanderbilt University political science professor Marc Hetherington. “We tend to have this belief that people’s positions on the issues come first, and that they pick their party based on its positions on those issues.
“But what we’ve learned is that’s not how politics work,” he added. “Party comes first.”
As they come to their views on politically fraught questions, people are more concerned about how their conclusions will affect their status with the group they already belong to than they are with coming to factually accurate conclusions.
Most of us, at least, desperately want this to be untrue. We see ourselves as rational actors in the world, making decisions based on the facts as they present themselves. But sadly, people who study the way our brains work when we make decisions find that this isn’t the case. We want to be ruled by rationality, but emotion and the desire to remain a member in good standing of our social group are the real drivers of our behavior.
-----
Kahan found, “The costs of being out of line with my cultural group on an issue that becomes kind of a symbol of whether I’m really ‘part of the team’ or not is high.
-----
Of course, attachment to a social group isn’t exactly a new phenomenon in human history, but the Pew study indicates that within the U.S., at least, the division between conservatives and liberals is deepening.
Joshua Greene, a psychology professor at Harvard and the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, says modern technology, rather than helping things, is making them worse.
-----
“People not only have different values,” said Greene, “they are operating with a different set of facts.”
No comments:
Post a Comment