Listen: We’re not really as divided as we think we are

In the wake of the 2020 election, the one thing everybody seems to agree on is that American society is terribly divided:

• “President-elect Joe Biden spoke to a deeply divided nation tonight…” – CNN
• “Exhausted and Anxious, Voters Find the Country More Divided Than Ever” – NY Times
• “A deeply divided nation watched anxiously for ballots to be counted” – Fox News

The trouble is, it’s not true. America is not as polarized and angry as we all think it is.

Don’t get me wrong, we do disagree on many things. But the extreme anger and demonization of the other side are a product of a small percentage of Americans on the right and left who dominate discussions online and in the press. Social media and news media amplify the voices of these extremists, creating the stereotype that we’re far more divided and unwilling to compromise than we actually are. We’re all trapped in a funhouse, staring at the crazy mirrors 24/7, believing they’re real.

To escape from the funhouse, we need to start listening to the voices of average Americans instead of the extremists. To get you started, here’s a three minute video in which twelve random Americans share their messages for the country. The only screening we did on them was to choose equal numbers of Republicans, Democrats, and independents. I bet you’ll have trouble telling the difference between them:

Those are the voices of the real America. We don’t agree on everything, but most of us are far more reasonable and willing to compromise than we realize. Those voices give me a lot of hope for the country.

If you want learn more about their views, and how we can get out of the funhouse, keep reading…

There’s a lot of information I want to share, so I divided this into sections:

• How I met the real Americans. (This part summarizes the evidence that we’re misunderstanding each other.)
• How did we get so out of touch with each other? (Explains the toxic feedback loop between social media and the news media.)
• How do we change the dialog? (I’ll tell you about the Human Empathy Project (link), an initiative we’re launching to help you hear from regular people.)

How I met the real Americans

My employer helps companies get super-fast public feedback on their products and messages: websites, apps, features, advertisements, etc. You specify what you want to test, and within a couple of hours you get video of regular people reacting to it. We process more than 130,000 of these feedback videos every month.

Lately we’ve been using that system to also get public feedback on national issues, starting with the pandemic and branching out to include the election and racial justice.

The stories we heard from regular people surprised us. The people we heard from were far less polarized, more thoughtful, and more willing to compromise than the voices we all hear online and in the press. It was like we’d slipped into a parallel universe in which Americans were still willing to listen to one another and work together to help the country. (That doesn’t apply to everyone, of course, but the deeply polarized people are a small percentage, maybe at most one person in ten.)

We couldn’t understand why we were getting results so different from the things we see online. We dug into it further, and it turns out there was nothing wrong with our methodology — we were hearing from the true mainstream of the country, one that is vastly under-represented online and in the press.

We also found that we’re not the first people to notice this disconnect:

A nonpartisan research organization called More in Common did a very extensive survey of Americans in 2019 and concluded:

“Today, millions of Americans are going about their lives with absurdly inaccurate perceptions of each other. Partisan media consistently elevates the most extreme representations of ‘them’…. This creates a false impression that outliers are somehow representative of the majority….Despite America’s profound polarization, the middle is far larger than conventional wisdom suggests, and the strident wings of progressivism and conservatism are far smaller…. Yet both sides have absorbed a caricature of the other.” (link)

A separate study by a nonprofit called Beyond Conflict found:

“The country is not as divided as it seems … Americans are ideologically closer to one another than they believe.” (link)

An upcoming book by Yanna Krupnikov (link) and John Barry Ryan (link) finds that less than 20% of Americans are deeply polarized about political issues, but they dominate the national discussion:

“Hard, loud partisans … define what it means to engage in politics….For partisans, politics is a morality play, a struggle of good versus evil. But most Americans just see two angry groups of people bickering over issues that may not always seem pressing or important.” (link)

How did we get so out of touch with each other?

There’s a toxic feedback loop between social media and the news media. It works like this:

Any online discussion is driven by something called the 1% rule: The vast majority of the content posted to an online forum is created by about 1% of its users (link). That’s just a basic fact of human behavior, and anyone who runs a discussion board or social media website knows about it.

What many people don’t understand is that those 1% are not a representative sample of everyone else. Something unusual has made them far more motivated than the average visitor. Often they’re more passionate about the subject, or they may be trying to become influencers, or they may have other personal issues that make them want to talk. Whatever the cause, they’re not average.

In most online forums, this self-selection bias doesn’t have a big negative effect. For example, it means the reviews on a travel or restaurant review site will be written by people who are especially passionate about traveling or eating out, but usually that’s OK. However, in a mass social network like Twitter or Facebook, it has a profound effect on discussions about social issues and politics. The people who post heavily on those subjects tend to be extremists, the angriest and most polarized members of society.

For example, just 2% of the US population writes 97% of the Twitter posts on national politics, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center (link). Those 2% “political tweeters” are not representative of the country as a whole. Pew found they’re more extreme in their politics and are more likely to be hostile toward members of the opposing party.

This is not a conspiracy theory. I’m not saying 2% of the population got together and decided to hijack the country. It’s just a natural outcome of the way people behave online. Similar biases happen in every social media platform. Add them together, and the voices we hear on social media are systematically far more polarized, shrill, and confrontational than the country as a whole.

But I don’t think social media alone could create the divisions we see in society. Huge chunks of the population don’t pay attention to social media. About 78% of Americans don’t have Twitter accounts, and only 4% of Americans say social media is their main source of political news (link)

The larger problem is that the mainstream press, which far more people do rely on, too often treats social media as an opinion poll and source of stories. The things that reporters see online often shape news stories and drive the selection of what gets covered. We’re bombarded with reports about the issues that are trending on social media, or quotes from someone who posted something offensive online.

Again, I am not the first person to notice this. This is from a study by Shannon McGregor, a professor at the University of North Carolina (link):

“Despite social media users not reflecting the electorate, the press reported online sentiments and trends as a form of public opinion…. These practices are woven into professional routines – journalists looked to social media to reflect public opinion.” (link)

Let me give you a couple of examples of how pervasive this problem is:

Here’s a screen capture of the top story on the Fox News website on the day after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died:

If you read the story, it tells you that several people online threatened to protest violently, and a Canadian lawyer and a Fox news host both said that’s a bad thing. I agree, it is a bad thing. But how did it become the top national news story? Given who writes most online posts, the real news would have been if no one said anything offensive (link).

Before you decide I’m picking on the right wing, check out the New York Times’s coverage of the Pence-Harris vice presidential debate. On the home page, above the fold, there was an article analyzing online comments about the debate. Before quoting from a bunch of Twitter posts, the reporter described the Internet as “that insular, blue-check-verified version of the proverbial diner in a steel town” (link).

The trouble with that statement is that the Internet actually is nothing like a diner in a steel town. If you went to a diner in a steel town you’d get a random sample of working class people in middle America. When you go to Twitter you get a self-promoted sample of angry people and celebrities, all looking to get noticed by saying something snarky. It’s not a survey, it’s performance art.

That’s not to say the press is evil. Most reporters are trying to be professional and are under huge stress from the changing economics of the news. But social media is seductively convenient to a reporter. You feel like you’re in touch with the mainstream of society when actually you’re soaking in a hot tub with a bunch of fanatics. I think many reporters are spending way too much time in the tub.

When we make the things that people say online into news, we’re missing what’s really happening in the country. We amplify the voices of the extremes, and play them back as if they represented the center of society.

Our constant diet of anger and division are breaking down the dialog that makes a society livable. More in Common found that about 77% of Americans are in an “exhausted majority” caught between the extremes. They are willing to work together and compromise to solve the country’s problems, but feel intimidated and shouted down by people with extreme views. More in Common wrote:

“We don’t seem to disagree anymore without perceiving another person’s views as stupid, wrong or even evil. We’re being played off each other; and told to see each other as threats and enemies, not Americans just like us but with separate experiences and views. The loudest and most extreme voices get heard, and others just feel like tuning out altogether.”

How do we change the dialog?

If the problem is built into social media and the press, how do we solve it? We can start by getting more exposure to regular people. Just listen to each other. If we heard from typical Americans more often, the extremist caricatures wouldn’t stick.

My coworkers and I are launching a project to help regular Americans get to know one another. Called the Human Empathy Project, it’s a website where we share the voices of regular people discussing their views and problems (link). Through videos in which they get to do the talking, you’ll understand where we actually agree and disagree, and the reasons why. Sometimes we’ll dig into the reality behind an issue that’s generating controversy. Sometimes we’ll just feature people talking about their lives and challenges, so you can get a better understanding of other Americans.

There are already several sets of videos on the site:

• The views and concerns of the undecideds who helped to determine the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election (they're far more thoughtful and nuanced than the stereotype). (link)
• An exploration of why some people choose not to vote (one of the biggest barriers isn’t apathy, it’s their difficulty finding unbiased information on the issues). (link)
• A look at the hardships being caused by the pandemic (they vary tremendously from person to person). (link)
• Plus an article about the messages that regular Americans want to send to the country (this is the source for the video you saw at the top of this post) (link)

In the weeks to come we’ll post additional videos on other important issues. I think you’ll find that your real neighbors are far more reasonable and thoughtful than you realized. We sometimes disagree deeply, but there are usually understandable reasons for those disagreements, the sort of things you could work through over a cup of coffee. And I promise we won’t take sides against anyone — except maybe the people who tell you that the other side is evil and that you have to destroy them.

Please join us, listen to each other, and get to know the real America. You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook if you want to be notified of new posts.

Note: We use the UserTesting platform to collect these videos, but the opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent the company.