Finding Common Ground On Political Matters

Are you having any political disagreements lately? If that means uncomfortable conversations, or strife between you and family members or people you work with, or even just frustration at how members of the "opposing party" could possibly be so stupid, I've been doing something I'd like to share with you that creates a feeling of common ground rather than division.

It comes from an article in Scientific American Mind on the differences between liberals and conservatives, mostly about research by Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind. It seems counterintuitive that delving into the differences between liberals and conservatives would bring people together, but that's exactly what happens.

Several times now, when I've gotten into conversations with people about politics and when the conversation started feeling divisive, I brought up some of Haidt's findings, and it shifted the conversation because his discoveries point to an important fact: Conservatives and liberals have a lot of common ground, and often share values. The priority of those values may be different, but they often both recognize that those values are important.

For example, in one study, when they showed people collages of photographs, conservatives' eyes spent more time looking at the more disturbing or unpleasant images in the collage. Many studies have demonstrated, in one way or another, that conservatives are more alert to threats, but that doesn't mean liberals are necessarily cavalier about safety and security. They may differ on their thresholds — differ on how bad it has to be before they are alarmed enough to do something about it — but they still care about it.

Conservatives are more anxious than liberals, generally speaking. That's one of the reasons they resist change. They want things to stay stable because change can be scary, and sometimes things change for the worse, not the better. Again, this is a sliding scale, not a black-and-white (or should I say "blue-and-red") division. Liberals also feel anxiety, just not as strongly as conservatives. And the feeling of safety versus anxiety is not fixed in any given person. In the SciAmMind article, the author writes:

When people feel safe and secure, they become more liberal; when they feel threatened, they become more conservative. Research conducted by Nail and his colleague in the weeks after September 11, 2001, showed that people of all political persuasions became more conservative in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

Haidt's work suggests that we all share six basic, inborn moral values, which are then influenced by culture and experience. The six values are:

1. Care for others.
2. Fairness and justice.
3. Liberty and freedom from oppression.
4. Loyalty and freedom from betrayal.
5. Respect for legitimate authority.
6. Aversion to harmful, disgusting things, foods, or actions.

Liberals tend to care more about some of these than conservatives, and less about others. What I think you'll find when you look at the studies is that the point of view of both right and left are necessary, rather than one being right and one being wrong, and that is an insight that can help bring us together.

So that's my recommendation for improving your mood during trying political times. When the conversation starts to feel divisive — even if you're talking to someone you agree with, but it starts feeling like "us versus them" — bring up some of this research. Just say something like, "I was reading an interesting article," and share some of the research findings. I think you'll find it improves your mood and the person's mood you're talking to. Maybe we can build more bridges between us this way.

Read the Scientific American Mind article here: Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives.

Explore your own moral values here: Test Your Morals.

Watch a TEDtalk with Jonathan Haidt: The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives.

And here's another video, this one of Bill Moyers talking with Haidt: How Do Conservatives and Liberals See the World?

Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal Growth, Slotralogy, Antivirus For Your Mind, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Subscribe to his blog here. You can email him here.

The Pleasures of Partisanship

The above is quoted from an article entitled, Partisan Division, The Founders, and Moral Philosophy.

Feel free to post or distribute the memes above to help us all rise out of our partisan feelings for a moment and just be human.

How Worried Should You Be About the Dire Predictions of Experts?

I was going through some old notes, and came across this Wall Street Journal article from 2010 by Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide. It seemed so relevant to today, I had to share it:

It's an American tradition: In the final weeks before an election, the airwaves are saturated with pundits and their bold predictions. This time around, they might be forecasting a decade of tea-party dominance, or the imminent comeback of the Democrats or a return to recession in the face of political deadlock. And as these pundits rattle off their reasons, they sound as if they know what they're talking about.

But do they? Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has spent 25 years trying to find out. He first got interested in the subject during the run-up to the 1984 presidential election, when dovish experts said Ronald Reagan's tough talk to the Soviets was needlessly antagonizing them, while hawkish experts were convinced that the Soviets needed to be aggressively contained. Mr. Tetlock began to monitor their predictions, and a few years later, he came to a sobering conclusion: Everyone was wrong. Both hawks and doves failed to anticipate the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost, even if the pundits now claimed to have seen it coming all along.

The dismal performance of the experts inspired Mr. Tetlock to turn his case study into an epic experimental project. He picked 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends," including journalists, foreign policy specialists, economists and intelligence analysts, and began asking them to make predictions. Over the next two decades, he peppered them with questions: Would George Bush be re-elected? Would apartheid in South Africa end peacefully? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits rated the probability of several possible outcomes. By the end of the study, Mr. Tetlock had quantified 82,361 predictions.

How did the experts do? When it came to predicting the likelihood of an outcome, the vast majority performed worse than random chance. In other words, they would have done better picking their answers blindly out of a hat. Liberals, moderates and conservatives were all equally ineffective. Although 96% of the subjects had post-graduate training, Mr. Tetlock found, the fancy degrees were mostly useless when it came to forecasting.

The main reason for the inaccuracy has to do with overconfidence. Because the experts were convinced that they were right, they tended to ignore all the evidence suggesting they were wrong. This is known as confirmation bias, and it leads people to hold all sorts of erroneous opinions. Famous experts were especially prone to overconfidence, which is why they tended to do the worst. Unfortunately, we are blind to this blind spot: Most of the experts in the study claimed that they were dispassionately analyzing the evidence. In reality, they were indulging in selective ignorance, as they explained away dissonant facts and contradictory data. The end result, Mr. Tetlock says, is that the pundits became "prisoners of their preconceptions." And their preconceptions were mostly worthless.

What's most disturbing about Mr. Tetlock's study is that the failures of the pundit class don't seem to matter. We rely on talking heads more than ever, even though the vast majority of them aren't worth their paychecks. Our political discourse is driven in large part by people whose opinions are less accurate than a coin toss.

Mr. Tetlock proposes forming a nonpartisan center to track the performance of experts, just as we track the batting averages of baseball players. In the meantime, he suggests that we learn to ignore those famous pundits who are full of bombastic convictions. "I'm always drawn to the experts on television who stumble a little on their words," he adds. "For me, that's a sign that they're actually thinking about the question, and not just giving a canned answer. If an expert sounds too smooth, then you should probably change the channel."

As Mr. Tetlock points out, the future is impossible to predict. Even with modern polling, we can barely anticipate the outcome of an election that is just a few days away. If a pundit looks far beyond that time horizon, to situations with a thousand variables and very little real information to back up a prediction, we should stop listening and get out a quarter.

—Jonah Lehrer is the author of How We Decide. His column appears every other week in the WSJ.

Originally published in WSJ here: Beware Our Blind Seers.

What Could Stop Our Divisiveness

If anyone's work is needed right now, it is Jonathan Haidt's. He's a researcher and the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. He was interviewed on TED earlier this month about the intense division we are seeing between people of different political persuasions. His answers are insightful. And he may be the first person I've listened to who doesn't seem to have taken sides politically.

Haidt says in his book that he was very liberal before he started his research. He now considers himself more of a centrist. He learned that both left and right have legitimate points to make and that several factors in our biology make it difficult to see the other side once we have chosen our tribe. But he has some great suggestions about what to do to stop our divisiveness.



Read more about the interview on the TED blog: The other side isn’t your enemy: Jonathan Haidt speaks at TEDNYC.

Read more about Haidt's work: Finding Common Ground During Election Season. 

Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal Growth, Slotralogy, Antivirus For Your Mind, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

The Antidote to Politically-Oriented Distress

An interesting article from 2016 described the results of several experiments showing that feelings of awe might be an effective salve for the disturbing feelings we have when there is a lot of political division. Below are some excerpts from the article (read the whole thing here):

2016 was rough.

America's grueling presidential campaign was full of anger, searing accusations, and fear. In its wake, our country's darkest differences have been brought to light. Many families and friends have been pitted against one another. We are exhausted. We are divided. We are perhaps even a little bit depressed.

So allow me to offer you some good news.

I'm here to tell you, downtrodden countrymen (and women), that there is a remedy for our particular affliction. It can be found in the flutter of a hummingbird's wings, or the determined eyes of a crouching snow leopard. It's in the gallop of a giraffe as it's pursued across the tundra, and the heroic leap of a penguin from razor-sharp cliffs. Mix in a cinematic score by Hans Zimmer and the soothing sounds of David Attenborough's voice, and the formula is complete. Lift your eyes to the TV screen, my weary friends. What we need now, perhaps more than ever, is a hefty dose of Planet Earth.

I'm a nature nerd and an awe junkie. Regular injections of natural beauty help keep me afloat in a world that would otherwise drag me down. I need brushes with wonder to maintain my sanity. I need that swelling in my chest and goosebumps down my spine, that tear-jerking act of kindness, or brilliant full moon, or stirring speech. Awe and wonder just make me feel good.

And I'm not alone. Scientists believe awe might actually be good for our physical health. In one groundbreaking study, researchers measured participants' levels of something called interleukin-6, a molecule known to promote inflammation in the body. Elevated levels of this stuff have been linked to chronic ailments like depression and autoimmune diseases. The theory is that the lower your levels of IL-6, the better your overall health. In the study, awe was "the strongest predictor" of lower levels of IL-6, the authors write, even stronger than regular brushes with other positive emotions like love and joy.

"We know positive emotions are important for well-being, but our findings suggest they're also good for our body," says positive psychology researcher Jennifer Stellar, the study's lead author.

Read the whole article here: The Scientific Reason You Should Be Watching Planet Earth.

Partison Division

The following is an excerpt from an article in the Fresno Bee in 2016, and it's perhaps even more relevant today. It talks of partisan division, which was bad then, but is even worse now. It offers a helpful solution:

Our country is seriously divided. A recent Pew Center report indicates that we distrust and fear one another. Among committed partisans, “70 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans say they are afraid of the other party.”

And yet, partisan hatred leaves us unhappy. And it causes moderate people to disengage. That’s unfortunate, since partisan rancor is curbed by the common sense of the moderates.

One solution points beyond politics to friendship. The Pew Center report suggests that those who have a friend in the other party are less fearful of the other party.

But our polarization makes it difficult to be friendly. We do not socialize in mixed political company. Our preconceptions are reinforced by a closed loop of one-sided media choices and self-selected social networks. This allows self-love to grow – and with it, distrust and fear.

Here is a suggestion...Befriend someone from the other party. Search for common ground. Our disagreements are nothing to fear. We should accept them as part of human nature. And celebrate them as a sign of our freedom.

Read the whole article here.