Identity Politics

Identity Politics? Tribal Politics? Abandon all hope!

This is one of my favorite podcasts, You are Not So Smart, with David McCraney, interviewing Lilliana Mason, the author of the book: Uncivil Agreement. I have not read the book yet, but it is on my list. Here is a transcript of the podcast.  https://youarenotsosmart.com/2018/08/04/transcript-uncivil-agreement/

I have been reading a bit of psychological and neuroscience research, trying to figure out why on earth people hold on to what I consider to be crazy ideas, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. The political and religious realms are rife with this stuff, but it also creeps into science and economics, as well as other areas.

I commented on this problem when I wrote about Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind. You can find that blog entry here: https://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2017/08/jonathan-haidt-righteous-minds-update.html and here: https://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2016/02/why-are-those-idiots-from-other.html.
The point of those posts was that I tend to see people who hold these contrary ideas as simply crazy, irrational. And typically, they see me in the same way. I saw these irrational differences as based on one or more of the following:

1. Genetic predisposition, nurtured by culture, toward people being either progressive, or conservative. 
2. Tribal - the need to belong to a group that provides support and meaning. Any thing voice against the tribe is an attack on my meaning and purpose.
3. Identity - people identify with their beliefs, and any opinion that is contrary to that is seen as an attack on them. We call it identify politics these days.

We automatically belong to an "in" group, and identify with that group. Anything that seems to attack that group generates an automatic defensive mechanism - the same way a lion on the path would generate a defensive alert on the part of our body. This happens automatically, with no conscious thought or choice. My question is whether we can be observant enough to recognize this reaction and to choose to do otherwise. That would be my ultimate hope - that we can teach people to recognize this automatic response, and then choose to work around it. 

Here's a scary example:

"The example that I would give to be politically salient today is to think about child separation at the border. I would suspect that 99 percent of Americans would say children should not be separated from their parents. But when you get a partisan cue attached to it, you can actually get people to say the opposite thing that they would have said six months ago. Similarly, if you can convince people that their party holds a different position than it does, they will change their position immediately without even knowing that the party gave them the cue. They’ll think that it all was coming from their own logical reasoning process."

The author cites an experiment done by Geoffrey Cohen in 2003 where psychologists persuaded people that their own party's position on a topic was x, when it was actually y. They then asked them if they were taking that position simply because of their party. And they replied "no". "They were asked to write an essay about it, and they broke down a whole bunch of reasons about why they held that position. They came up with them out of whole cloth on the spot, not knowing that this was something that they were even doing."  

"For both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one."

The study has these insights:

• Social groups serve as a primary source of personal values. Most people cannot step outside of that group membership and think independently.
• People are generally blind to the influence of their group membership on their values and beliefs. 

You can download a PDF copy of this original study here. This piece is a bit of a summary of the study results. https://hackernoon.com/incentives-and-our-political-divide-d9907a5209a0

Or just search for "party over policy".

All of which tells me that we need to find a way to make political parties useless entities. There has to be a way to make that happen. Otherwise, we are all toast. I am not so sure that will work. If we disable the traditional idea of a political party, people will identify with something else. We really need them to stop being a social person, and start thinking for themselves. HOW!?

How do we fix this? That is the last question McCraney poses. And the answer is: "I'm working on that".  

Ideas from the transcript:

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2018/08/04/transcript-uncivil-agreement/

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One of the things that we know about intergroup prejudice is that we can combat it on an individual level by practicing at turning it around. Let's say I just made a snap judgment about this person based on their identity. I realize now that I did that. I’m going to be aware of it, and I’m going to think about it and try to try to change that snap judgment or stereotype around in my head and practice thinking about that person as the opposite of the stereotype I just thought of. Over time, you can get good at it. You can practice it so much that that it becomes a little easier, and it comes a little bit faster. The first immediate instinct is always going to be to go after that person with the stereotypes that are associated with them. But you can create, by practicing, a secondary response which can follow the first one relatively quickly that says wait don’t assume that. Hive this person a chance. They’re a human being. They have family. They care about people.

We need to find a way to step back and think, “OK, what’s the greater good?” Find a way to think about what is the best for the most people. Obviously, it’s not human instinct to do that. But we’ve done it before and we had crosscutting identities between the parties not that long ago. It is possible for us to have crosscutting identities again. That would link us to the other side in terms of thinking of them as human beings.

The last thing that I’ll say is that the one policy that I’ve thought of this since I wrote the book that could work would be service. One way to get people of varying backgrounds to work together is to put them work together doing some type of service. Working in a soup kitchen or building houses for Habitat or working in Peace Corps or doing something in the military. The military is a giant melting pot of all different kinds of political orientations. One thing that could be helpful is to work together. This is my like moonshot idea. Possibly connected to free tuition for people but on the condition that they do two years of service — not done with their neighbors. That service mixes them together with other people who are from different places and have different perspectives, and then you would a generation of Americans who sees other partisans as human beings. It provides service, which is great, and you get to go to college, which is also great. That’s my one optimistic outcome. If we can do that, then maybe we could have a little bit more understanding.
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A Year of Service

I like this last idea a lot. Guess which city in the US has the most foreign language speakers? And they have a very progressive policy for dealing with homeless.  Salt Lake City. And why is that? Hmmm?  Two years or service - most in a foreign land. They do tend to work only with their own members - it would be much better if they worked with many other people, and focused on something besides religious conversion. Just saying.