During the presidential campaign, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden referred to the 2020 election as a fight for the “soul” of America. If this week has showed anything, it’s that the country is still painfully divided on what America is and what it should become.
Now voters on either side of the political aisle must do what for some feels impossible: co-exist. Live and work together, sometimes sit down for dinners together, send their children to schools together. All while feeling confounded about how the other voted as they did.
“Moral convictions and moral outrage are so central to our identity,” said David Pizarro, a professor of psychology at Cornell University who studies moral reasoning, judgment and emotion.
“Unlike any of our other beliefs, it’s a non-starter to ask people to change that, to say, ‘Oh, this thing that you deeply, firmly believe as right and true, just look past that when you’re dealing with people who are opposed to you.’ That just seems wrong. It seems like it’s contrary to what it means to have a moral view.”
The 2016 election was a shock, laying bare a starkly polarized nation. The 2020 election is affirmation – that Americans are divided in ways that can feel irreparable, even if historians argue there have been worse times. Experts in psychology, political science and morality say political polarization isn’t just divisive, it’s toxic, impacting people socially, emotionally and physically. Healing, if that’s what the nation desires, will take patience and attention to wounds both personal and societal.
“Part of this is how do we deal with it in our own functioning, in our own bodies in our own minds and souls,” said Saul Levine, professor emeritus in psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, whose research focused on intense belief systems and the capacity for compassion. “Part B, which is equally or more important, is how do we deal with it as a society?”
A psychological toll
Research shows the political environment can have a profound psychological impact on individuals and can negatively affect people’s social and emotional lives. Kevin Smith, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who studies the biology and psychology of political attitudes and behavior, said he conducted research after the 2016 election that found voters were sick over politics:
- Nearly 40% of Americans surveyed said politics was stressing them out
- One in five said they were losing sleep
- 11.5% said politics adversely affected their physical health
- Nearly 30% said they lost their temper as a result of politics
- 1 in 5 said political differences damaged friendships
Smith is looking at how the 2020 election impacted voters, and while he’s waiting on concrete data, his hypothesis is things haven’t gotten much better.
On social media Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, voters expressed despair as the election unfolded, expressions psychologists say reflect more than just personal vulnerabilities.
“They highlight the psychological manifestations of the political polarization that we see in the United States, where people are firmly entrenched, and I think this is the important part, in good “us” versus bad “them” mentality along party lines,” said Afton Kapuscinski, director of the Psychological Services Center at Syracuse University.
The black and white thinking expressed when people say, “I can’t tolerate this, a part of me is going to die” or “I don’t want to live anymore,” can lead to more distress, Kapuscinski said.
Part of what Americans are grappling with is the tension between embracing civility and refusing to tolerate what they view as injustice. Holding fast to moral values while seeking national unity is a difficult cognitive task. Experts say it’s important to pause and reflect, to feel the frustration, fear and anger, but to weigh how best to express it. For individual mental health and for the collective health of society, it may be more useful to channel emotion into action.
“If I want the world to change, the first thing I’ve got to figure out is what I can’t control and what I can,” Smith said. “People say, ‘Well, oh my gosh, what can I do?’ Well you can write a check. You can support a cause. You can volunteer. There’s a number of ways where you … can affect the world and nudge it in the direction that you want. Now is one person going to change the world? Probably not, but you get a million of them doing the same thing, well the probability is increased quite a bit.”
An old problem with new challenges
America is a country deeply divided, but historians say claims the nation has never been more polarized are inaccurate.
“People say things like that all the time, which ruffles the feathers of historians and political scientists,” said Barbara Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “We had the Civil War. You can’t get any more partisan and polarized than that, where the country literally breaks apart, 11 states leave the union, form their own country. … Some people will say, ‘How about 1968?’ Yes. That was a horrible, horrible year as well. That was like this only with assassinations.”
In 1968, the Kerner Commission report shattered the illusion of a unified society, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were killed by assassins. Young white students protested the Vietnam War and Black people protested racism and poverty at home.
But the discord today is different in several ways. A half century ago, millions of eyes were still turned toward identifiable leaders – the presidency had not yet been shaken by Watergate, newsman Walter Cronkite was the voice of truth, and 62% of Americans said they trusted the government all or most of the time.
Media revolutions have changed the way people consume and share information. Experts say social media has given people new mechanisms for sharing moral outrage and polarization among media sources has continued to widen. According to the Pew Research Center, “Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments.”
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The United States is becoming increasingly diverse and party identification among a number of groups has shifted. White non-Hispanic voters identify as Republican by a sizable margin, while 4-in-10 Democratic registered voters are now nonwhite. There is also a significant gender gap in party identification, with 56% of women aligning with the Democratic Party.
“It’s not just disagreement over a table,” Levine said. “Our prisms, our lenses through which we look at the world are totally different.”
Seeing beyond extremes
Political scientists say despite the divide, research on polarization shows most people agree on more than they think. Americans misunderstand each other fundamentally. The organization More in Common, a group that works to address underlying drivers of polarization to build more inclusive societies, calls it America’s “Perception Gap.” While Americans believe more than half of the country holds extreme views, the group says that number is closer to 30%.
“Extremes of both the right and the left take up all of the media and all of the social media,” Pizarro said. “And then you have people, regular people, who if you ask them about what they believe morally, there will probably be more agreement than anybody would expect or that they would know beforehand.”
Kirk Schneider, a licensed psychologist and author of “The Depolarizing of America: A Guidebook for Social Healing,” says survey research shows there’s a significant percentage of people who are interested in working with those on the other side. The problem is they often don’t know where to start.
Finding common ground
Schneider said bridging divides requires patience, concrete tools and sometimes professionals who can guide difficult conversations.
Without certain skills, Schneider says encounters between people in different ideological camps seem to devolve into three scenarios: verbal flame-throwing; violence; helplessness and despair.
He says there are several groups, including Braver Angels, that facilitate these conversations in meaningful ways, bringing together self-identified liberals and conservatives for dialogues.
“These groups and these dialogue formats, I believe, are very hopeful,” he said. “They’re increasingly urgent as we see more and more clearly how divided people are, especially when they’re holed up in their echo chambers. … If you can reach enough of the critical masses, then you marginalize the extremes who just are unreachable at this point.”
Smith said his research shows people who seem to be suffering the most psychologically are those who tend to have low opinions of people who disagree with them politically. It’s why Schneider says recognizing one another’s humanity is the first step.
In the dialogues he facilitates, participants talk about what it was like to grow up, they discuss stereotypes they feel have been imposed on them and look for common ground.
He does not, however, minimize the enormity of the task ahead.
“The biggest driver of the polarized mind is fear … the fear of insignificance, of feeling put down and not counted to the point where it almost feels like one is going to die, as a kind of death anxiety, fear of being wiped away,” he said. “People will do everything they can, including becoming extreme and destructive themselves, to avoid that.”
In a racially, ethnically and culturally diverse nation, the country cannot effectively operate without unifying values. Among some communities, however, the sense of betrayal is so profound that dialogue seems fruitless.
Pearl Dowe, a professor of political science and African American Studies at Emory University, said this political moment requires deep reflection, though she takes issue with the idea of collective “healing,” which she says often falls on the shoulders of the groups suffering most.
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“Until others feel that they can have these conversations and really question who they are, what they believe, what they value we’re going to see ourselves in this situation every election cycle,” she said.
Cornell psychology professor Pizarro said the path forward will likely require a utilitarian approach to unity, ramping up talk of peace and common ground.
“I don’t want my daughter to live in a world in which we sacrifice our morals,” Pizarro said. “But we’re going to have to be able to look at our neighbors in the eyes and say, ‘what can we work on?’ You set aside sometimes some really central differences for the sake of unity. But look, if we decide that we don’t want unity then that’s fair. It’s just, we need to know the consequences.” (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/11/06/2020-election-american-divided-polarized-and-unsure-how-cope/6179404002/)
