Tribal Psychology Explains the Rise of Election-Night Surprise

By Michael Morris, adapted from TRIBAL (2024, Penguin Press)

?On election night in 2016, I had been sure Hillary Clinton would win. Everyone I knew thought so, too. I was at her victory party at the glass-ceilinged Javitz Convention Center to watch the returns come in and felt shocked, like everyone else, when the outcome was revealed. I couldn’t help but suspect some kind of foul play, even though I had no evidence of it.?

?I headed out of the event, wending my way through crowds of dazed Democrats in the lobby and then outside on the street. I walked for blocks, unable to spot a cab or call a car. Finally, an Uber Pool arrived, and I hopped into the back. The other rider, a thirty-something blonde in a silk gown and pearls, waved hello with a relaxed smile. It was the first smile I’d seen in hours.?

“Coming from the event?” she asked.?

?“At the Javits Center?” I asked.?

?“No, the Midtown Hilton…”?

?The pieces fell abruptly into place. She was one of them—a Trump supporter! After an awkward silence, curiosity overcame me. “Were the folks at your event surprised at the outcome?” I asked.?

?“Not a bit,” she answered. “He’s been surging in the Midwest, and no one likes her!” She then reeled off some factoids about Trump’s campaign momentum, none of which I’d heard before.?

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I hadn’t expected to meet a Trump supporter that night. But even less had I expected to meet one so utterly unsurprised. All the evidence I had seen pointed to a Clinton landslide. But this apparently evidence-based Republican had been equally sure that her candidate would prevail. We shared a ride but didn’t share the same reality.?

How, I wondered, could this parallel reality possibly exist? And if half of the country lived in that reality, how could I have been so unaware of its existence? ?Could this be why half the country felt genuinely surprised by the outcome? ?

?In the eight years since, the rift between the “realities” of Republicans and Democrats has continued to grow—and, along with it, mutual mistrust. Red and blue voters have stopped socializing—even on dating sites. Cell phone location data reveals, sadly, that politically mixed families have cut short their Thanksgiving dinners in recent years.?

In the 2018 midterms, the Democratic defeat in Georgia was greeted with denial and lawsuits. Come 2020, after the “red wave” turned into a “blue shift,” the “Stop the Steal” movement filed lawsuits and pressured state officials, culminating in the January 6 march on the Capitol—to Democrats, an insurrection; to many Republicans, true patriotism.

The declining faith in elections and other political institutions is increasingly traced to tribalism, the evolved psychology of Us and Them. But what does this really mean at a psychological level? Some pundits posit that an innate drive to hate and fear outsiders has somehow reawakened. We don’t want to talk to the other party anymore. If we see them as mortal enemies rather than fellow citizens, we can’t afford to let them take power.

?But this conjecture about primal rage against outsiders is not a picture of tribal psychology that science would recognize: The distinctive social instincts of our species are adaptations for solidarity not hostility. They begin with the drive to mesh with those around us, the “peer instinct.” This urge for agreement helped our Stone Age forebears to learn from and coordinate with each other. Over the ages, it helped humans form likeminded tribes, kingdoms, and corporations. In recent decades it has driven us to move to homogenous red and blue regions and to consume our news from partisan channels, websites, and social networks. In these ideologically inbred environments (that it helped create), the peer instinct has become dangerous. Without realizing it we form political beliefs by conforming to those around us.

The Red and Blue parties have come to live in separate realities. In 2016 the two parties held different beliefs about Clinton’s emails and Trump’s ties to Russia. Today they differ in beliefs about abduction of pets in Ohio and J.D. Vance’s relationship with his couch. We are not conscious of this conformist learning, so we (naively) think our political beliefs are just direct reflections of reality.?

?The combination of party-filtered beliefs and “naive realism” gives rise to biased expectations about elections. Both Republican and Democrat partisans assume that Independents will share their take on the issues. (How could they not see it in this “reality-based” way?). Hence both sides genuinely expect to carry the center in a close election. The losing side feels surprised on election night, and the process of election denial begins.?

?This is also part of the reason for our warped perceptions of the opposing party. Because we are unaware that our own beliefs are politically filtered, the other side’s beliefs appear highly distorted; “they” must be blinded by ideology or self-interest. For instance, Republicans estimate that 50 percent of Democrats endorse the statement “Most police are bad people”; it’s really only 15 percent. Democrats estimate that only half of Republicans accept that “racism is still a problem in America”; in reality, 79 percent do.

Hostility toward out-groups is not the root cause. Because of our peer-instinct processing, we form beliefs that match those of our residential and media bubbles without realizing that these beliefs are based on filtered information. ?Because of this we find the other side’s beliefs baffling, hence we doubt their sincerity or sanity. To be sure, Democrats and Republicans avoid each other these days, but this arises from our innate affinity for in-groups, not from innate hostility for out-groups.

This account of political tribalism doesn’t make it disappear but it does suggest ways to ameliorate the problem. At a personal level, you can escape your partisan bubble by changing your usual vacation plans or by changing the channel when watching the news. Pete Buttigieg took a leave in 2014 from serving as mayor of his college town—South Bend, Indiana—to deploy with the Navy to Afghanistan. This change of setting and associates helped him formulate the talking points that played well in the 2020 purple-state primaries.???

People do learn from interacting with people from the other side, so long as they come across as peers, rather than as from the other side. Studies find that people react defensively to beliefs that differ from their own when political leanings are made salient but not otherwise. Perhaps this is why we haven’t seen dramatic progress from the red-blue dialogue programs that have rolled out in recent years, such as Bridge the Divide, Hi From The Other Side, and Urban Rural Action. By emphasizing to participants that they are confronting the enemy, programs like these may raise defenses. A different model is bringing bipartisan groups together to talk about nonpolitical interests like food, coffee, or faith (e.g., Make America Dinner Again, Coffee Party USA, Civic Spirit). These less loaded topics work better to launch conversations that change partisans’ views of each other and extend beyond the session.

The red/blue divide involves hostile feelings, to be sure. But hostility is not where the problem starts, and interventions on feelings thus don’t address the root problem. Instead, the well-researched peer-instinct helps us understand the rise of partisan blindness, election night surprise, and election denial over the past decades. It shows us which interventions can redress the problem. Tribal psychology has contributed to the problem, but tribal psychology can also be part of the solution.

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