We can fix politics from within

This article was written for the TBD Conference, taking place on December 6th at Here/East in London.

We can all play a part in reversing the political and social polarisation that is making compromise, consensus and collaboration impossible. But we need to take a look at ourselves in the mirror.

It’s easy to spot the signs of radicalisation in others:

They get their news from an increasingly narrow range of sources, they won’t let facts challenge their views and they hold worryingly strident views, falling out with friends who demur. They are dupes. They’ve been tricked by the Russians, or Cambridge Analytica. They are hateful. Their views can be ignored because they are acting in bad faith.

It is harder to recognise these behaviours in ourselves:

We’re the smart ones. The virtuous. We see through the propaganda. We stand for what is right. We root our arguments in data. Good people agree with us and trustworthy sources support our views.

The truth is we all suffer from irrational biases that cause us to seek out news and views that reinforce our values and preconceptions. We use motivated reasoning to justify our instinctive preferences — and the better educated we are, the better we are at constructing arguments to excuse our prejudices.

In The Networked Age, social media platforms and search have turbocharged these primal instincts and made life a matter of playing to the crowd.

Digital technology has produced clusters of like-minded people because we all like to be right — we surround ourselves with people who agree with us. And it has turned us all into PR people, crafting our own image in the public eye. We share and say the things that gain approval from others because we all like to be popular.

As a consequence, a hierarchical world has been replaced by tribes of mostly good people, mostly doing what they believe is right, but who often believe other tribes are mad or bad.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt demonstrates in his seminal work “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion” that these political tribes find it very difficult to understand the other side because their moral frameworks are fundamentally different.

Haidt argues that there are six foundations that make up human morality: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity and Liberty. Broadly speaking, he finds that ‘conservative’ people tend to have a mix of all six, whereas ‘liberal progressives’ over-index on care and fairness, almost to the exclusion of the other four. This makes it particularly difficult for liberals to understand conservatives. He writes:

“When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” [moral] foundations — Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity — I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.

“In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal”.

“When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or “Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the [conservative] narrative, what else could you think?”

This tendency to write opponents off as morally flawed helps to explain why the ‘Brexit-and-Trump’ votes of 2016 did not prompt a period of real introspection. We should have spent the last two years asking why the liberal consensus was rejected by so many people. Instead, liberals have retreated to conspiracy theories to explain this changing world.

Thousands more media hours have been spent discussing the validity of the numbers on the side of the Brexit bus than examining why the public rejected the collective advice of the PM, the Chancellor, the Governor of the Bank of England, the President of the United States, the head of the IMF and dozens of FTSE CEOs. Researchers found that during the Republican primaries, the more the media criticised Trump, the more his approval ratings rose but rarely did the media ask why that might be.

As national populism expert Professor Matthew Goodwin argues:

“The left has always struggled to make sense of national populism, which seeks to prioritise the culture and interests of the nation, and promises to give voice to a people who feel that they have been neglected, even held in contempt, by distant and sometimes corrupt or self-serving elites. And today’s thinkers, writers and groups on the left have subscribed to a number of theories, all of which is incorrect.”

As a result of this failure to understand others, western civilisation has undergone a political nervous breakdown. Hysteria and suspicion now reign. We can’t even agree what reliable information looks like: The 2018 Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report finds hugely divergent levels of public trust in different media brands between people on the left and right of the spectrum.

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So what can we do in the next two years to reverse this worrying trend?

Firstly, we need to understand the issue properly and pay attention to what psychologists are telling us. The work of Haidt, Steven Pinker and MHP’s partner Dr Tali Sharot is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand modern politics. Once you recognise the biases that drive our behaviour, you can recognise that the problems we face are innate, rather than a conspiracy.

Secondly, we need to try hard to understand the other side of an argument, rather than undermine our opponents’ motives. If our starting assumption is that ‘maybe the other side has a valid point’ we can have better conversations. We need to shame and decry a little less and listen a little more.

Thirdly, we need to guard against these biases by surrounding ourselves with people whose values differ from our own. Viewpoint diversity is the best defence against group think and the bad decisions this often produces. But there is evidence that in many companies, viewpoint diversity is declining. For example, a study of the university sector by Haidt’s Heterodox Academy campaign found that:

“In the 15 years between 1995 and 2010, the American academy went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. Similar trends and problems are occurring in the UK and Canada, and to a lesser extent in Australia.”

The tech sector, which tends to cluster in major international cities and recruits from small talent pools is particularly vulnerable to cultural homogeneity, as the reaction to the infamous James Damore Google memo showed and as Jack Dorsey has admitted of Twitter’s corporate culture. Ironically, Apple’s former diversity chief Denise Young Smith argued for the primacy of viewpoint diversity (compared with other forms of diversity) within the company and was ousted for going against the prevailing orthodoxy.

Organisations need to build viewpoint diversity into their cultures as a matter of urgency before internal debates become as fractious as public ones are. That means encouraging alternative views to be heard and operating zero tolerance policies towards shaming and bullying of employees.

Companies must also be careful that as they become more reliant on enterprise networking technologies like Slack and WhatsApp, they don’t start to reproduce the angry dynamics that social networks have encouraged in the public sphere. Already, leaders in the media industry (an early adopter of these platforms) have begun to worry whether they have produced more divisive workplaces due to the gossipy and censorious cliques that often form.

The collision of innate psychology and digital networks has changed the way we behave towards each other. Paradoxically, digital technology gives us access to an infinite range of viewpoints but has encouraged us to sort ourselves into tribes, diminishing diversity and creating a more volatile political environment.

Over the next two years, if we start challenging our own biases — as individuals and enterprises — and breaking out of our own social bubbles, we can begin to repair a polarised world.

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Download MHP’s Guide to The Networked Age, co-authored with Dr Tali Sharot and her team at UCL’s Affective Brain Lab, at www.mhpc.com/about/