Why the Divide Doesn't Add Up: A Theory of Political Polarization
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The dust from the 2024 election has barely settled, yet the post-mortem analysis is already in full swing. Journalists, political scientists, and everyone with a social media handle are dissecting the returns, scrambling to make sense of what feels like a tectonic shift in American politics. But while the pundits pore over policy divides and party platforms, Keith Payne suggests we may be missing a larger, simpler truth.
It’s not just the issues. It's the tribes. And according to Keith, that sense of “us vs. them” may run deeper than any policy difference or election cycle.
Keith is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his research has earned accolades from the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the International Social Cognition Network. In his new book Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide , Keith explores why so many of us feel the rift but struggle to see a way out. And he does more than explain the divide—he offers insights that can help bridge it. Our curator Adam Grant describes the book as one that “illuminates one of the biggest problems of our time and lights the way toward some promising solutions.”
One of the key points in the book is that we're really not as ideological as we think we are. Though we might identify as “liberal” or “conservative,” most of us would be hard-pressed to define exactly what those terms mean. Researchers have found that people often give contradictory answers on surveys, supporting conservative stances on some issues and liberal ones on others. Political scientists estimate that only about 15 percent of Americans have a coherent ideology—usually journalists, academics, or political enthusiasts. The other 85 percent of us? Our passion for politics is largely about group identity rather than specific policies. While our positions may be sincere, Keith suggests that in many cases those positions are just the “smoke” of a deeper fire—the desire to belong.
Hear Keith's big ideas on politics and identity:
We also heard a lot of other big ideas on the podcast this week, like:
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