I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but unify. Who doesn't see red states and blue states, only sees the United States. Biden says as president, he'll be a healer and uniter.
But it's not that easy. We can't fix what we don't understand. So here's what I know about division.
Political differences are good. They actually make our democracy stronger. But we've been getting more polarized for years. People talk about political tribalism.
That's when you feel connected to or protective of your group or your tribe. But we're past that now. Now we're in the realm of political sectarianism.
This is when you hate the other group even more than you love your own. That's what I know. For the rest of it, I had to call a political scientist who studies mass media and a neuroscientist who studies social identity. Okay, explain to me what are the ingredients of political sectarianism?
The first one is othering, so that we see people as different from us, as part of an outgroup. Inevitably, you develop a favoritism for the in-group. Another one is aversion, so this is like this distaste that we have for those people, this deep dislike or hatred.
It's not just cheap talk, it's real animus. And then the third one is moralization, that we see people as on the other side of a moral divide, that they have fundamentally different values from us. And so if they have power, it means people you don't like and potentially hate are doing things that are potentially going to challenge or overturn your core values.
And so in the moment of an election where you're facing some other group and the potential that they might actually take control and have power, that can be incredibly threatening to some people. When we feel threatened, our brain shifts to protect us. The part that deals with emotions sends out signals to release stress hormones and those hormones prepare our body to fight or run away and it can play out in really extreme ways.
Political polarization doesn't always look like that. It shows up in quieter forms too. I know Republicans who don't want to talk to Democrats because they feel like they're arrogant know-it-alls who want to take away their guns. And I know Democrats who don't want to talk to Republicans because they think they're backwards and racist. So I asked Shanto, how did we get so hostile?
Well, it's complicated. One is the altered information environment. In the old days, you had ABC, CBS, and NBC News, and that was it. And they were all carbon copies of each other.
So it was an information common. Today, you can go to Breitbart, you can go to Talking Point, and more and more Americans are indeed occupying these information silos in which the Republicans are simply tuning into Fox, and the Democrats are tuning into Rachel Maddow, and so on and so forth. Number two is the fact that the...
The party divide today coincides with a variety of other significant divides, so much so that you get the white versus non-white divide is also now the Democrat versus Republican divide. Democrats are the party of non-whites. The Republican Party is the party of whites. And then the third potential factor that I... I'd consider would be simply the rhetoric of political elites.
Shanta told me there's a lot of evidence that people follow higher-ups. Here's a good example. While Trump has used every possible platform to spread lies about election fraud, election workers around the country have been getting death threats.
A Trump campaign lawyer even insisted that the cybersecurity chief who disputed Trump's claims of fraud should be killed. Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs, who used to be the head of cyber security... Oh, the guy that was on 60 Minutes last night.
That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot. Okay, good news.
Most Americans are not sending death threats or getting into street fights because of political differences. Yet social media can make it seem that way. And it's because the emotional content is what goes viral.
So the average person who's using social media is scrolling through 300 feet of messages each day. That means if you have a six-inch smartphone and you scroll down to look at what's on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, every time you swipe your thumb down, it's six inches. So imagine you do that 600 times a day.
Now, what we found is that when people use moral or emotional language, it pops out to you and it captures your attention. The next step is Do you click on it? Do you share it? Do you write a nasty response?
And that's when it's connected often to your identity that it drives you to do that. So how does the loss of common facts and a common reality contribute to this? This is something that keeps me up at night. It's that once you have the capacity to erode a shared sense of reality, it is something that authoritarian leaders have used as a tool to confuse people and make them rely on them. Cult leaders do this all the time.
They get suppressive people out of your life so they can feed you a version of reality. And as people have lost trust in traditional institutions, and now they're able to go down a rabbit hole and watch a series of YouTube videos or go to a hyper-partisan website for their news. Will this change? It could.
In the last election, people over 65 We're about seven times more likely to share fake news on Facebook than young people under 25. And so we think of like young people as these hyper-partisan, you know, protesters on campuses. But the reality is old people are much more polarized and they're the ones who are susceptible to all of a lot of this misinformation and sharing it. We need to hold social media companies accountable so that they don't can't just profit off conflict and division and violence. I think most people who are partisans don't realize it's subconscious. And if people were made more self-aware, I believe they would moderate.
There's a lot of evidence in the field of racial prejudice that when people are made conscious of their racial biases, they actively try to minimize them. So we can help each other become more aware. And Protip, it doesn't help.
when you try to shame somebody for their political preferences. Instead, try de-escalating the conflict by talking about values that they care about. So if you're a liberal trying to convince a conservative to support, say, environmental regulation, you might talk in terms of purity, or you might get them to think of it in terms of tradition, the tradition of the country and previous presidents preserving national parks.
If you're a conservative trying to get through to a liberal, instead of talking about loyalty... Um... or patriotism, you might be able to get through by talking about fairness and justice and harm and saying you might want to support the military because they take great risks for you. If we want someone to be open-minded, then we have to be open-minded too.
So if you're scrolling through Facebook and you're outraged by your dad's conservative diatribe or you're horrified by your aunt's liberal rant, take a minute and gut check. Are you looking at them as a caricature? Do you dislike them because you think they dislike you? Is the threat you're feeling real or perceived? Okay, it's time.
I'm working. Mom's working.